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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best Literature,
+Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: June 29, 2010 [EBook #33027]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE, VOL 15 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    [Illustration: _HOW KRIEMHILD IS LED TO ETZEL._
+
+    From the Hundeshagen Nibelungen manuscripts of the 10th
+    century, in the Royal Library at Berlin.
+
+        "Let the messenger ride and thus we make
+        Known to you how the queen rode the country."
+
+    Kriemhild is the legendary heroine of the "Nibelungenlied,"
+    and the rival of Brunhild. She was the wife of Siegfried
+    who was slain by her brothers. Later, as the wife of Etzel
+    (Attila) King of the Huns, she avenged the murder of
+    Siegfried by compassing the death of her brothers, but was
+    herself slain.]
+
+
+
+
+                            LIBRARY OF THE
+                       WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE
+                          ANCIENT AND MODERN
+
+
+                        CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
+
+                                EDITOR
+
+
+            HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE    LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE
+                         GEORGE HENRY WARNER
+
+                          ASSOCIATE EDITORS
+
+
+                         Connoisseur Edition
+
+                               VOL. XV.
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+                      THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+                         Connoisseur Edition
+
+            LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA
+
+                         _No_.    ..........
+
+
+                         Copyright, 1896, by
+                      R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL
+                        _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+                         THE ADVISORY COUNCIL
+
+
+  CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Professor of Hebrew,        HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.
+
+  THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D.,
+    Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of
+                                   YALE UNIVERSITY, New Haven, Conn.
+
+  WILLIAM M. SLOANE, PH. D., L. H. D.,
+    Professor of History and Political Science,
+                              PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Princeton, N. J.
+
+  BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B.,
+    Professor of Literature,     COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.
+
+  JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D.,
+    President of the        UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, Mich.
+
+  WILLARD FISKE, A. M., PH. D.,
+    Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages
+    and Literatures,               CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Ithaca, N. Y.
+
+  EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer,
+                            UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, Cal.
+
+  ALCÉE FORTIER, LIT. D.,
+    Professor of the Romance Languages,
+                                 TULANE UNIVERSITY, New Orleans, La.
+
+  WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A.,
+    Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of
+    English and History,     UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, Sewanee, Tenn.
+
+  PAUL SHOREY, PH. D.,
+    Professor of Greek and Latin Literature,
+                                UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Ill.
+
+  WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D.,
+    United States Commissioner of Education,
+                              BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D. C.
+
+  MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Professor of Literature in the
+                   CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Washington, D. C.
+
+
+
+
+                          TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+                               VOL. XV
+
+
+                                                    LIVED       PAGE
+  FOLK-SONG                                                     5853
+                           BY F. B. GUMMERE
+
+  SAMUEL FOOTE                                    1720-1777     5878
+    How to be a Lawyer ('The Lame Lover')
+    A Misfortune in Orthography (same)
+    From the 'Memoirs': A Cure for Bad Poetry; The Retort
+      Courteous; On Garrick's Stature; Cape Wine; The Graces; The
+      Debtor; Affectation; Arithmetical Criticism; The Dear Wife;
+      Garrick and the Guinea; Dr. Paul Hifferman; Foote and
+      Macklin; Baron Newman; Mrs. Abington; Garlic-Eaters; Mode of
+      Burying Attorneys in London; Dining Badly; Dibble Davis; An
+      Extraordinary Case; Mutability of the World; An Appropriate
+      Motto; Real Friendship; Anecdote of an Author; Dr. Blair;
+      Advice to a Dramatic Writer; The Grafton Ministry
+
+  JOHN FORD                                       1586-?        5889
+    From 'Perkin Warbeck'
+    Penthea's Dying Song ('The Broken Heart')
+    From 'The Lover's Melancholy': Amethus and Menaphon
+
+  FRIEDRICH, BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ             1777-1843     5895
+    The Marriage of Undine ('Undine')
+    The Last Appearance of Undine (same)
+    Song from 'Minstrel Lore'
+
+  ANATOLE FRANCE                                  1844-         5909
+    In the Gardens ('The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard')
+    Child-Life ('The Book of my Friend')
+    From the 'Garden of Epicurus'
+
+  ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI                            1182-1226     5919
+                       BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+    Order
+    The Canticle of the Sun
+
+  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN                               1706-1790     5925
+                           BY JOHN BIGELOW
+    Of Franklin's Family and Early Life ('Autobiography')
+    Franklin's Journey to Philadelphia: His Arrival There (same)
+    Franklin as a Printer (same)
+    Rules of Health ('Poor Richard's Almanack')
+    The Way to Wealth (same)
+    Speech in the Federal Convention, in Favor of Opening
+      Its Sessions with Prayer
+    On War
+    Revenge: Letter to Madame Helvétius
+    The Ephemera: an Emblem of Human Life
+    A Prophecy (Letter to Lord Kames)
+    Early Marriages (Letter to John Alleyne)
+    The Art of Virtue ('Autobiography')
+
+  LOUIS HONORÉ FRÉCHETTE                          1839-         5964
+                       BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+    Our History ('Le Légende d'un Peuple')
+    Caughnawaga
+    Louisiana ('Les Feuilles Volantes')
+    The Dream of Life (same)
+
+  HAROLD FREDERIC                                 1856-         5971
+    The Last Rite ('The Damnation of Theron Ware')
+
+  EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN                         1823-1892     5977
+                        BY JOHN BACH McMASTER
+    The Altered Aspects of Rome ('Historical Essays')
+    The Continuity of English History (same)
+    Race and Language (same)
+    The Norman Council and the Assembly of Lillebonne
+      ('The History of the Norman Conquest of England')
+
+  FERDINAND FREILIGRATH                           1810-1876     6002
+    The Emigrants
+    The Lion's Ride
+    Rest in the Beloved
+    Oh, Love so Long as Love Thou Canst
+
+  GUSTAV FREYTAG                                  1816-1895     6011
+    The German Professor ('The Lost Manuscript')
+
+  FRIEDRICH FROEBEL                               1782-1852     6022
+                       BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH
+    The Right of the Child ('Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel')
+    Evolution ('The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother Play')
+    The Laws of the Mind ('The Letters of Froebel')
+    For the Children (same)
+    Motives ('The Education of Man')
+    Aphorisms
+
+  FROISSART                                       1337-1410?    6035
+                       BY GEORGE McLEAN HARPER
+    From the 'Chronicles':
+    The Invasion of France by King Edward III., and the
+      Battle of Crécy
+    How the King of England Rode through Normandy
+    Of the Great Assembly that the French King Made to
+      Resist the King of England
+    Of the Battle of Caen, and How the Englishmen Took the Town
+    How the French King Followed the King of England
+      in Beauvoisinois
+    Of the Battle of Blanche-Taque
+    Of the Order of the Englishmen at Cressy
+    The Order of the Frenchmen at Cressy, and How They Beheld
+      the Demeanor of the Englishmen
+    Of the Battle of Cressy, August 26th, 1346
+
+  JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE                            1818-1894     6059
+                     BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON
+    The Growth of England's Navy ('English Seamen in the
+      Sixteenth Century')
+    The Death of Colonel Goring ('Two Chiefs of Dunboy')
+    Scientific Method Applied to History ('Short Studies on
+      Great Subjects')
+    The Death of Thomas Becket (same)
+    Character of Henry VIII. ('History of England')
+    On a Siding at a Railway Station ('Short Studies on
+      Great Subjects')
+
+  HENRY B. FULLER                                 1859-         6101
+    At the Head of the March ('With the Procession')
+
+  SARAH MARGARET FULLER (Marchioness Ossoli)      1810-1850     6119
+    George Sand ('Memoirs')
+    Americans Abroad in Europe ('At Home and Abroad')
+    A Character Sketch of Carlyle ('Memoirs')
+
+  THOMAS FULLER                                   1608-1661     6129
+    The King's Children ('The Worthies of England')
+    A Learned Lady (same)
+    Henry de Essex, Standard-Bearer to Henry II. (same)
+    The Good Schoolmaster ('The Holy and Profane State')
+    On Books (same)
+    London ('The Worthies of England')
+    Miscellaneous Sayings
+
+  ÉMILE GABORIAU                                  1835-1873     6137
+    The Impostor and the Banker's Wife: The Robbery ('File No. 113')
+    M. Lecoq's System (same)
+
+  BENITO PEREZ GALDÓS                             1845-         6153
+                       BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP
+    The First Night of a Famous Play ('The Court of Charles IV.')
+    Doña Perfecta's Daughter ('Doña Perfecta')
+    Above Stairs in a Royal Palace ('La de Bringas')
+
+  FRANCIS GALTON                                  1822-         6174
+    The Comparative Worth of Different Races ('Hereditary Genius')
+
+  ARNE GARBORG                                    1851-         6185
+    The Conflict of the Creeds ('A Freethinker')
+
+  HAMLIN GARLAND                                  1860-         6195
+    A Summer Mood ('Prairie Songs')
+    A Storm on Lake Michigan ('Rose of Butcher's Coolly')
+
+  ELIZABETH STEVENSON GASKELL                     1810-1865     6205
+    Our Society ('Cranford')
+    Visiting (same)
+
+  THÉOPHILE GAUTIER                               1811-1872     6221
+                         BY ROBERT SANDERSON
+    The Entry of Pharaoh into Thebes ('The Romance of a Mummy')
+    From 'The Marsh'
+    From 'The Dragon-Fly'
+    The Doves
+    The Pot of Flowers
+    Prayer
+    The Poet and the Crowd
+    The First Smile of Spring
+    The Veterans ('The Old Guard')
+
+  JOHN GAY                                        1685-1732     6237
+    The Hare and Many Friends ('Fables')
+    The Sick Man and the Angel (same)
+    The Juggler (same)
+    Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan
+    From 'What D'ye Call It?'
+
+  EMANUEL VON GEIBEL                              1815-1884     6248
+    See'st Thou the Sea?
+    As it will Happen
+    Gondoliera
+    The Woodland
+    Onward
+    At Last the Daylight Fadeth
+
+
+
+
+                       FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                              VOLUME XV
+
+
+                                                                PAGE
+  "How Kreimhild is Led to Etzel" (Colored Plate)       Frontispiece
+  Russian Writing (Fac-simile)                                  5876
+  Franklin (Portrait)                                           5925
+  "Music, Science, and Art" (Photogravure)                      5964
+  Freytag (Portrait)                                            6011
+  "The Menagerie" (Photogravure)                                6034
+  "The Wedding Dress" (Photogravure)                            6166
+  "The Juggler" (Photogravure)                                  6244
+
+
+                          VIGNETTE PORTRAITS
+
+
+          Foqué                              Froude
+          France                             Fuller (Margaret)
+          Frederic                           Fuller (Thomas)
+          Freeman                            Garland
+          Freiligrath                        Gaskell
+          Froebel                            Gautier
+          Froissart                          Gay
+                              Von Giebel
+
+
+
+
+FOLK-SONG
+
+BY F. B. GUMMERE
+
+
+As in the case of ballads, or narrative songs, it was important to
+sunder not only the popular from the artistic, but also the ballad of
+the people from the ballad for the people; precisely so in the article
+of communal lyric one must distinguish songs of the folk--songs made
+by the folk--from those verses of the street or the music hall which
+are often caught up and sung by the crowd until they pass as genuine
+folk-song. For true folk-song, as for the genuine ballad, the tests
+are simplicity, sincerity, mainly oral tradition, and origin in a
+homogeneous community. The style of such a poem is not only simple,
+but free from individual stamp; the metaphors, employed sparingly at
+the best, are like the phrases which constantly occur in narrative
+ballads, and belong to tradition. The metre is not so uniform as in
+ballads, but must betray its origin in song. An unsung folk-song is
+more than a contradiction,--it is an impossibility. Moreover, it is to
+be assumed that primitive folk-songs were an outcome of the dance, for
+which originally there was no music save the singing of the dancers. A
+German critic declares outright that for early times there was "no
+dance without singing, _and no song without a dance_; songs for the
+dance were the earliest of all songs, and melodies for the dance the
+oldest music of every race." Add to this the undoubted fact that
+dancing by pairs is a comparatively modern invention, and that
+primitive dances involved the whole able-bodied primitive community
+(Jeanroy's assertion that in the early Middle Ages only women danced,
+is a libel on human nature), and one begins to see what is meant by
+folk-song; primarily it was made by the singing and dancing throng, at
+a time when no distinction of lettered and unlettered classes divided
+the community. Few, if any, of these primitive folk-songs have come
+down to us; but they exist in survival, with more or less trace of
+individual and artistic influences. As we cannot apply directly the
+test of such a communal origin, we must cast about for other and more
+modern conditions.
+
+When Mr. George Saintsbury deplores "the lack, notorious to this day,
+of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty,"
+he leaves his readers to their own devices by way of defining this
+species of poetry. Probably, however, he means the communal lyric
+in survival, not the ballad, not what Germans would include under
+_volkslied_ and Frenchmen under _chanson populaire_. This distinction,
+so often forgotten by our critics, was laid down for English usage a
+century ago by no less a person than Joseph Ritson. "With us," he
+said, "songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are
+properly called Songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative
+compositions, which now denominate Ballads."
+
+Notwithstanding this lucid statement, we have failed to clear the
+field of all possible causes for error. The song of the folk is
+differentiated from the song of the individual poet; popular lyric is
+set over against the artistic, personal lyric. But lyric is commonly
+assumed to be the expression of individual emotion, and seems in its
+very essence to exclude all that is not single, personal, and
+conscious emotion. Professor Barrett Wendell, however, is fain to
+abandon this time-honored notion of lyric as the subjective element in
+poetry, the expression of individual emotion, and proposes a
+definition based upon the essentially musical character of these
+songs. If we adhere strictly to the older idea, communal lyric, or
+folk-song, is a contradiction in terms; but as a musical expression,
+direct and unreflective, of communal emotion, and as offspring of the
+enthusiasm felt by a festal, dancing multitude, the term is to be
+allowed. It means the lyric of a throng. Unless one feels this
+objective note in a lyric, it is certainly no folk-song, but merely an
+anonymous product of the schools. The artistic and individual lyric,
+however sincere it may be, is fairly sure to be blended with
+reflection; but such a subjective tone is foreign to communal
+verse--whether narrative or purely lyrical. In other words, to study
+the lyric of the people, one must banish that notion of individuality,
+of reflection and sentiment, which one is accustomed to associate with
+all lyrics. To illustrate the matter, it is evident that Shelley's 'O
+World, O Life, O Time,' and Wordsworth's 'My Heart Leaps Up,' however
+widely sundered may be the points of view, however varied the
+character of the emotion, are of the same individual and reflective
+class. Contrast now with these a third lyric, an English song of the
+thirteenth century, preserved by some happy chance from the oblivion
+which claimed most of its fellows; the casual reader would
+unhesitatingly put it into the same class with Wordsworth's verses as
+a lyric of "nature," of "joy," or what not,--an outburst of simple and
+natural emotion. But if this 'Cuckoo Song' be regarded critically, it
+will be seen that precisely those qualities of the individual and the
+subjective are wanting. The music of it is fairly clamorous; the
+refrain counts for as much as the verses; while the emotion seems to
+spring from the crowd and to represent a community. Written down--no
+one can say when it was actually composed--not later than the middle
+of the thirteenth century, along with the music and a Latin hymn
+interlined in red ink, this song is justly regarded by critics as
+communal rather than artistic in its character; and while it is set
+to music in what Chappell calls "the earliest secular composition, in
+parts, known to exist in any country," yet even this elaborate music
+was probably "a national song and tune, selected according to the
+custom of the times as a basis for harmony," and was "not entirely a
+scholastic composition." It runs in the original:--
+
+  Sumer is icumen in.
+    Lhude sing cuccu.
+      Groweth sed
+      And bloweth med
+  And springth the wde nu.
+        Sing cuccu.
+
+  Awe bleteth after lomb,
+    Lhouth after calve cu;
+      Bulluc sterteth,
+      Bucke verteth,
+      Murie sing cuccu.
+      Cuccu, cuccu.
+
+  Wel singes thu cuccu,
+  Ne swik thu naver nu.
+
+BURDEN
+
+  Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
+  Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu.[1]
+
+    [1] For facsimile of the MS., music, and valuable remarks,
+    see Chappell, 'Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the
+    Olden Time,' Vol. i., frontispiece, and pages 21 ff.
+    For pronunciation, see A. J. Ellis, 'Early English
+    Pronunciation,' ii., 419 ff. The translation given by Mr.
+    Ellis is:--
+
+    "Summer has come in; loudly sing, cuckoo! Grows seed and
+    blossoms mead and springs the wood now. Sing, cuckoo! Ewe
+    bleats after lamb, lows after (its) calf the cow; bullock
+    leaps, buck verts (seeks the green); merrily sing, cuckoo!
+    Cuckoo, cuckoo! Well singest thou, cuckoo; cease thou not
+    never now. _Burden_.--Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo! Sing,
+    cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now."--_Lhude_, _wde_ (=_wude_), _awe_,
+    _calve_, _bucke_, are dissyllabic. Mr. Ellis's translation of
+    _verteth_ is very doubtful.
+
+The monk, whose passion for music led him to rescue this charming
+song, probably regretted the rustic quality of the words, and did
+his best to hide the origin of the air; but behind the complicated
+music is a tune of the country-side, and if the refrain is here a
+burden, to be sung throughout the piece by certain voices while
+others sing the words of the song, we have every right to think of
+an earlier refrain which almost absorbed the poem and was sung by
+a dancing multitude. This is a most important consideration. In all
+parts of Europe, songs for the dance still abound in the shape of a
+welcome to spring; and a lyrical outburst in praise of the jocund
+season often occurs by way of prelude to the narrative ballad: witness
+the beautiful opening of 'Robin Hood and the Monk.' The
+troubadour of Provence, like the minnesinger of Germany, imitated
+these invocations to spring. A charming _balada_ of Provence probably
+takes us beyond the troubadour to the domain of actual folk-song.[2]
+"At the entrance of the bright season," it runs, "in order to
+begin joy and to tease the jealous, the queen will show that she is
+fain to love. As far as to the sea, no maid nor youth but must join
+the lusty dance which she devises. On the other hand comes the
+king to break up the dancing, fearful lest some one will rob him of
+his April queen. Little, however, cares she for the graybeard; a gay
+young 'bachelor' is there to pleasure her. Whoso might see her as
+she dances, swaying her fair body, he could say in sooth that nothing
+in all the world peers the joyous queen!" Then, as after each
+stanza, for conclusion the wild refrain--like a _procul este,
+profani!_--"Away, ye jealous ones, away! Let us dance together,
+together let us dance!" The interjectional refrain, "eya," a mere cry
+of joy, is common in French and German songs for the dance, and gives
+a very echo of the lusty singers. Repetition, refrain, the infectious
+pace and merriment of this old song, stamp it as a genuine product of
+the people.[3] The brief but emphatic praise of spring with which it
+opens is doubtless a survival of those older pagan hymns and songs
+which greeted the return of summer and were sung by the community in
+chorus to the dance, now as a religious rite, now merely as the
+expression of communal rejoicing. What the people once sang in chorus
+was repeated by the individual poet. Neidhart the German is famous on
+account of his rustic songs for the dance, which often begin with this
+lusty welcome to spring: while the dactyls of Walther von der
+Vogelweide not only echo the cadence of dancing feet, but so nearly
+exclude the reflective and artistic element that the "I" of the singer
+counts for little. "Winter," he sings,--
+
+  Winter has left us no pleasure at all;
+  Leafage and heather have fled with the fall,
+  Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall;
+  If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball,
+  I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds' call![4]
+
+    [2] The first stanza in the original will show the structure
+    of this true "ballad" in the primitive sense of a dance-song.
+    There are five of these stanzas, carrying the same rhymes
+    throughout:--
+
+      A l'entrada del temps clar,--eya,--
+      Per joja recomençar,--eya,--
+      E per jelos irritar,--eya,--
+      Vol la regina mostrar
+      Qu' el' est si amoroza.
+
+    REFRAIN
+
+        Alavi', alavia, jelos,
+        laissaz nos, laissaz nos
+        ballar entre nos, entre nos!
+
+    [3] Games and songs of children are still to be found which
+    preserve many of the features of these old dance-songs. The
+    dramatic traits met with in the games point back now to the
+    choral poetry of pagan times, when perhaps a bit of myth was
+    enacted, now to the communal dance where the stealing of a
+    bride may have been imitated.
+
+    [4] Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the
+    writer.
+
+That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the village
+dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance, but was
+often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit with the
+fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved for us by
+song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those intellectual
+tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a merry song of
+May and then turned it more or less freely into their barbarous but
+not unattractive Latin. For example:--
+
+  Now is time for holiday!
+  Let our singing greet the May:
+  Flowers in the breezes play,
+  Every holt and heath is gay.
+
+  Let us dance and let us spring
+    With merry song and crying!
+  Joy befits the lusty May:
+    Set the ball a-flying!
+  If I woo my lady-love,
+    Will she be denying?[5]
+
+    [5] From 'Carmina Burana,' a collection of these songs in
+    Latin and German preserved in a MS. of the thirteenth
+    century; edited by J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1883. This song
+    is page 181 ff., in German, 'Nu Suln Wir Alle Fröude Hân.'
+
+The steps of the dance are not remote; and the same echo haunts
+another song of the sort:--
+
+  Dance we now the measure,
+    Dance, lady mine!
+  May, the month of pleasure,
+    Comes with sweet sunshine.
+
+  Winter vexed the meadow
+    Many weary hours:
+  Fled his chill and shadow,--
+  Lo, the fields are laughing
+    Red with flowers.[6]
+
+    [6] Ibid., page 178: 'Springe wir den Reigen.'
+
+Or the song at the dance may set forth some of the preliminaries, as
+when a girl is supposed to sing:--
+
+  Care and sorrow, fly away!
+  On the green field let us play,
+  Playmates gentle, playmates mine,
+  Where we see the bright flowers shine,
+    I say to thee, I say to thee,
+    Playmate mine, O come with me!
+
+  Gracious Love, to me incline,
+  Make for me a garland fine,--
+  Garland for the man to wear
+  Who can please a maiden fair.
+    I say to thee, I say to thee,
+    Playmate mine, O come with me![7]
+
+    [7] Ibid., page 213: 'Ich wil Trûren Varen lân.'
+
+The greeting from youth to maiden, from maiden to youth, was doubtless
+a favorite bit of folk-song, whether at the dance or as independent
+lyric. Readers of the 'Library' will find such a greeting incorporated
+in 'Child Maurice'[8]; only there it is from the son to his mother,
+and with a somewhat eccentric list of comparisons by way of detail,
+instead of the terse form known to German tradition:--
+
+  Soar, Lady Nightingale, soar above!
+  A hundred thousand times greet my love!
+
+    [8] Article in 'Ballads,' Vol. iii., page 1340.
+
+The variations are endless; one of the earliest is found in a charming
+Latin tale of the eleventh century, 'Rudlieb,' "the oldest known
+romance in European literature." A few German words are mixed with the
+Latin; while after the good old ballad way the greeting is first given
+to the messenger, and repeated when the messenger performs his
+task:--"I wish thee as much joy as there are leaves on the trees,--and
+as much delight as birds have, so much love (_minna_),--and as much
+honor I wish thee as there are flowers and grass!" Competent critics
+regard this as a current folk-song of greeting inserted in the
+romance, and therefore as the oldest example of _minnesang_ in German
+literature. Of the less known variations of this theme, one may be
+given from the German of an old song where male singers are supposed
+to compete for a garland presented by the maidens; the rivals not only
+sing for the prize but even answer riddles. It is a combination of
+game and dance, and is evidently of communal origin. The honorable
+authorities of Freiburg, about 1556, put this practice of "dancing of
+evenings in the streets, and singing for a garland, and dancing in a
+throng" under strictest ban. The following is a stanza of greeting in
+such a song:--
+
+  Maiden, thee I fain would greet,
+  From thy head unto thy feet.
+  As many times I greet thee even
+  As there are stars in yonder heaven,
+  As there shall blossom flowers gay,
+  From Easter to St. Michael's day![9]
+
+    [9] Uhland, 'Volkslieder,' i. 12.
+
+These competitive verses for the dance and the garland were, as we
+shall presently see, spontaneous: composed in the throng by lad or
+lassie, they are certainly entitled to the name of communal lyric.
+Naturally, the greeting could ban as well as bless; and little Kirstin
+(Christina) in the Danish ballad sends a greeting of double charge:--
+
+  To Denmark's King wish as oft good-night
+  As stars are shining in heaven bright;
+  To Denmark's Queen as oft bad year
+  As the linden hath leaves or the hind hath hair![10]
+
+    [10] Grundtvig, 'Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser,' iii. 161.
+
+Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus. The
+invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is doubtless
+a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of summer and
+flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin 'Pervigilium
+Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of spring and
+love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic rhythm to some
+song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter Pater is not far
+from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the whole poem was
+suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of the young men,
+singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa,"
+during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines. This
+haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the festal throng,
+is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's
+translation:--
+
+  Let those love now who never loved before;
+  Let those who always loved now love the more!
+
+Contrast the original!--
+
+  _Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet!_
+
+This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the
+near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech
+from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a
+few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Cæsar,
+have come down to us.[11]
+
+    [11] We cannot widen our borders so as to include that
+    solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the
+    'Song of the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of
+    Rhodes as they went about asking gifts from house to house at
+    the coming of the earliest swallow. The metre is interesting
+    in comparison with the rhythm of later European folk-songs,
+    and there is evident dramatic action. Nor can we include the
+    fragments of communal drama found in the favorite Debates
+    Between Summer and Winter,--from the actual contest, to such
+    lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's
+    Labor's Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen
+    of this class in 'Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient
+    Songs and Ballads,' Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the
+    refrain:--
+
+      Nay, Ivy, nay,
+        Hyt shal not be, I wys;
+      Let Holy hafe the maystry,
+        As the maner ys.
+
+The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical poets
+like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these
+refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung
+in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry, even,
+the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folk-song, sung
+by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a refrain. Towards
+the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up the refrain,
+experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those highly
+artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade. The
+refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if
+not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or
+sorrow, like the _eya_ noted above, mere emotional utterances or
+imitations of various sounds, then growing in distinctness and
+compass, until the separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the
+increasing importance of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely
+ancillary function, and finally did away with it altogether. Many
+refrains are still used for the dance which are mere exclamations,
+with just enough coherence of words added to make them pass as poetry.
+Frequently, as in the French, these have a peculiar beauty. Victor
+Hugo has imitated them with success; but to render them into English
+is impossible.
+
+The refrain, moreover, is closely allied to those couplets or
+quatrains composed spontaneously at the dance or other merry-making of
+the people. In many parts of Germany, the dances of harvest were until
+recent days enlivened by the so-called _schnaderhüpfl_, a quatrain
+sung to a simple air, composed on the spot, and often inclining to the
+personal and the satiric. In earlier days this power to make a
+quatrain off-hand seems to have been universal among the peasants of
+Europe. In Scandinavia such quatrains are known as _stev_. They are
+related, so far as their spontaneity, their universal character, and
+their origin are concerned, to the _coplas_ of Spain, the _stornelli_
+of Italy, and the distichs of modern Greece. Of course, the specimens
+of this poetry which can be found now are rude enough; for the life
+has gone out of it, and to find it at its best one must go back to
+conditions which brought the undivided genius of the community into
+play. What one finds nowadays is such motley as this,--a so-called
+_rundâ_ from Vogtland, answering to the Bavarian _schnaderhüpfl_:--
+
+  I and my Hans,
+  We go to the dance;
+  And if no one will dance,
+  Dance I and my Hans!
+
+A _schnaderhüpfl_ taken down at Appenzell in 1754, and one of the
+oldest known, was sung by some lively girl as she danced at the
+reapers' festival:--
+
+  Mine, mine, mine,--O my love is fine,
+    And my favor shall he plainly see;
+  Till the clock strike eight, till the clock strike nine,
+    My door, my door shall open be.
+
+It is evident that the great mass of this poetry died with the
+occasion that brought it forth, or lingered in oral tradition, exposed
+to a thousand chances of oblivion. The Church made war upon these
+songs, partly because of their erotic character, but mainly, one may
+assume, because of the chain of tradition from heathen times which
+linked them with feasts in honor of abhorred gods, and with rustic
+dances at the old pagan harvest-home. A study of all this, however,
+with material at a minimum, and conjecture or philological combination
+as the only possible method of investigation, must be relegated to the
+treatise and the monograph;[12] for present purposes we must confine
+our exposition and search to songs that shall attract readers as well
+as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into our pages
+of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to the touch
+of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal and
+popular.
+
+    [12] Folk-lore, mythology, sociology even, must share in this
+    work. The reader may consult for indirect but valuable
+    material such books as Frazer's 'Golden Bough,' or that
+    admirable treatise, Tylor's 'Primitive Culture.'
+
+Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to ask
+what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting at once
+rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering clerk,
+have come down to us from the later Middle Ages. Having answered this
+question, it will remain to deal with the difficult material
+accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads are far easier to
+preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and this story in them
+has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral transmission. A
+good story travels far, and the path which it wanders from people to
+people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile contents of the
+popular lyric--we are not speaking of its tune, which is carried in
+every direction--are easily lost.[13] Such a lyric lives chiefly by
+its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We can however get
+some notion of this communal song by process of inference, for the
+earliest lays of the Provençal troubadour, and probably of the German
+minnesinger, were based upon the older song of the country-side.
+Again, in England there was little distinction made between the singer
+who entertained court and castle and the gleeman who sang in the
+villages and at rural festivals; the latter doubtless taking from the
+common stock more than he contributed from his own. A certain proof of
+more aristocratic and distinctly artistic, that is to say, individual
+origin, and a conclusive reason for refusing the name of folk-song to
+any one of these lyrics of love, is the fact that it happens to
+address a married woman. Every one knows that the troubadour and the
+minnesinger thus addressed their lays; and only the style and general
+character of their earliest poetry can be considered as borrowed from
+the popular muse. In other words, however vivacious, objective,
+vigorous, may be the early lays of the troubadour, however one is
+tempted to call them mere modifications of an older folk-song, they
+are excluded by this characteristic from the popular lyric and belong
+to poetry of the schools. Marriage, says Jeanroy, is always respected
+in the true folk-song. Moreover, this is only a negative test. In
+Portugal, many songs which must be referred to the individual and
+courtly poet are written in praise of the unmarried girl; while in
+England, whether it be set down to austere morals or to the practical
+turn of the native mind, one finds little or nothing to match this
+troubadour and minnesinger poetry in honor of the stately but
+capricious dame.[14] The folk-song that we seek found few to record
+it; it sounded at the dance, it was heard in the harvest-field; what
+seemed to be everywhere, growing spontaneously like violets in spring,
+called upon no one to preserve it and to give it that protection
+demanded by exotic poetry of the schools. What is preserved is due
+mainly to the clerks and gleemen of older times, or else to the
+curiosity of modern antiquarians, rescuing here and there a belated
+survival of the species. Where the clerk or the gleeman is in
+question, he is sure to add a personal element, and thus to remove the
+song from its true communal setting. Contrast the wonderful little
+song, admired by Alceste in Molière's 'Misanthrope,' and as
+impersonal, even in its first-personal guise as any communal lyric
+ever made,--with a reckless bit of verse sung by some minstrel about
+the famous Eleanor of Poitou, wife of Henry II. of England. The song
+so highly commended by Alceste[15] runs, in desperately inadequate
+translation:--
+
+  If the King had made it mine,
+    Paris, his city gay,
+  And I must the love resign
+    Of my bonnie may,[16]--
+
+  To King Henry I would say:
+  Take your Paris back, I pray;
+  Better far I love my may,--
+                      O joy!--
+    Love my bonnie may!
+
+Let us hear the reckless "clerk":--
+
+  If the whole wide world were mine,
+  From the ocean to the Rhine,
+    All I'd be denying
+  If the Queen of England once
+    In my arms were lying![17]
+
+    [13] For early times translation from language to language is
+    out of the question, certainly in the case of lyrics. It is
+    very important to remember that primitive man regarded song
+    as a momentary and spontaneous thing.
+
+    [14] Yet even rough Scandinavia took up this brilliant but
+    doubtful love poetry. To one of the Norse kings is attributed
+    a song in which the royal singer informs his "lady" by way of
+    credentials for his wooing,--"I have struck a blow in the
+    Saracen's land; _let thy husband do the same!_"
+
+    [15] 'Le Misanthrope,' i. 2; he calls it a _vielle chanson_.
+    M. Tiersot concedes it to the popular muse, but thinks it is
+    of the city, not of the country.
+
+    [16] _May_, a favorite ballad word for "maid," "sweetheart."
+
+    [17] 'Carm. Bur.,' page 185: "Wær diu werlt alliu mîn."
+
+The tone is not directly communal, but it smacks more of the village
+dance than of the troubadour's harp; for even Bernart of Ventadour did
+not dare to address Eleanor save in the conventional tone of despair.
+The clerks and gleemen, however, and even English peasants of modern
+times,[18] took another view of the matter. The "clerk," that
+delightful vagabond who made so nice a balance between church and
+tavern, between breviary and love songs, has probably done more for
+the preservation of folk-song than all other agents known to us. In
+the above verses he protests a trifle or so too much about himself;
+let us hear him again as mere reporter for the communal lyric, in
+verses that he may have brought from the dance to turn into his
+inevitable Latin:--
+
+  Come, my darling, come to me,
+  I am waiting long for thee,--
+  I am waiting long for thee,
+  Come, my darling, come to me!
+
+  Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain,
+  Come and make me well again;--
+  Come and make me well again,
+  Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain.[19]
+
+    [18] See Child's Ballads, vi. 257, and Grandfer Cantle's
+    ballad in Mr. Hardy's 'Return of the Native.' See next page.
+
+    [19] 'Carm. Bur.,' page 208: "Kume, Kume, geselle min."
+
+More graceful yet are the anonymous verses quoted in certain Latin
+love-letters of a manuscript at Munich; and while a few critics rebel
+at the notion of a folk-song, the pretty lines surely hint more of
+field and dance than of the study.
+
+      Thou art mine,
+      I am thine,
+  Of that may'st certain be;
+      Locked thou art
+      Within my heart,
+  And I have lost the key:
+  There must thou ever be!
+
+Now it happens that this notion of heart and key recurs in later
+German folk-song. A highly popular song of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries has these stanzas:[20]
+
+  For thy dear sake I'm hither come,
+    Sweetheart, O hear me woo!
+  My hope rests evermore on thee,
+    I love thee well and true.
+  Let me but be thy servant,
+    Thy dear love let me win;
+  Come, ope thy heart, my darling,
+    And lock me fast within!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Where my love's head is lying,
+    There rests a golden shrine;
+  And in it lies, locked hard and fast,
+    This fresh young heart of mine:
+  Oh would to God I had the key,--
+    I'd throw it in the Rhine;
+  What place on earth were more to me,
+    Than with my sweeting fine?
+
+  Where my love's feet are lying,
+    A fountain gushes cold,
+  And whoso tastes the fountain
+    Grows young and never old:
+  Full often at the fountain
+    I knelt and quenched my drouth,--
+  Yet tenfold rather would I kiss
+    My darling's rosy mouth!
+
+  And in my darling's garden[21]
+    Is many a precious flower;
+  Oh, in this budding season,
+    Would God 'twere now the hour
+  To go and pluck the roses
+    And nevermore to part:
+  I think full sure to win her
+    Who lies within my heart!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Now who this merry roundel
+    Hath sung with such renown?
+  That have two lusty woodsmen
+    At Freiberg in the town,--
+  Have sung it fresh and fairly,
+    And drunk the cool red wine:
+  And who hath sat and listened?--
+    Landlady's daughter fine!
+
+    [20] Translated from Böhme 'Altdeutsches Liederbuch,'
+    Leipzig, 1877, page 233. Lovers of folk-song will find this
+    book invaluable on account of the carefully edited musical
+    accompaniments. With it and Chappell, the musician has ample
+    material for English and German songs; for French, see
+    Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire en France.'
+
+    [21] The garden in these later songs is constantly a symbol
+    of love. To pluck the roses, etc., is conventional for making
+    love.
+
+What with the more modern tone, and the lusty woodsmen, one has
+deserted the actual dance, the actual communal origin of song; but one
+is still amid communal influences. Another little song about the heart
+and the key, this time from France, recalls one to the dance itself,
+and to the simpler tone:--
+
+  Shut fast within a rose
+  I ween my heart must be;
+  No locksmith lives in France
+  Who can set it free,--
+  Only my lover Pierre,
+  Who took away the key![22]
+
+    [22] Quoted by Tiersot, page 88, from 'Chansons à Danser en
+    Rond,' gathered before 1704.
+
+Coming back to England, and the search for her folk-song, it is in
+order to begin with the refrain. A "clerk," in a somewhat artificial
+lay to his sweetheart, has preserved as refrain what seems to be a bit
+of communal verse:--
+
+  Ever and aye for my love I am in sorrow sore;
+  I think of her I see so seldom any more,[23]--
+
+rather a helpless moan, it must be confessed.
+
+    [23] Böddeker's 'Old Poems from the Harleian MS. 2253,' with
+    notes, etc., in German; Berlin, 1878, page 179.
+
+Better by far is the song of another _clericus_, with a lusty little
+refrain as fresh as the wind it invokes, as certainly folk-song as
+anything left to us:--
+
+      Blow, northern wind,
+  Send thou me my sweeting!
+      Blow, northern wind,
+        Blow, blow, blow!
+
+The actual song, though overloaded with alliteration, has a good
+movement. A stanza may be quoted:--
+
+  I know a maid in bower so bright
+  That handsome is for any sight,
+  Noble, gracious maid of might,
+      Precious to discover.
+
+  In all this wealth of women fair,
+  Maid of beauty to compare
+  With my sweeting found I ne'er
+      All the country over!
+
+Old too is the lullaby used as a burden or refrain for a religious
+poem printed by Thomas Wright in his 'Songs and Carols':--
+
+  Lullay, myn lykyng, my dere sone, myn swetyng,
+  Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derlyng.[24]
+
+    [24] See also Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,' 3rd Ed.,
+    pages xlviii., 202 ff. The Percy folio MS. preserved a cradle
+    song, 'Balow, my Babe, ly Still and Sleepe,' which was
+    published as a broadside, and finally came to be known as
+    'Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament.' These "balow" lullabies are
+    said by Mr. Ebbsworth to be imitations of a pretty poem first
+    published in 1593, and now printed by Mr. Bullen in his
+    'Songs from Elizabethan Romances,' page 92.
+
+The same English manuscript which has kept the refrain 'Blow, Northern
+Wind,' offers another song which may be given in modern translation
+and entire. All these songs were written down about the year 1310, and
+probably in Herefordshire. As with the _carmina burana_, the lays of
+German "clerks," so these English lays represent something between
+actual communal verse and the poetry of the individual artist; they
+owe more to folk-song than to the traditions of literature and art.
+Some of the expressions in this song are taken, if we may trust the
+critical insight of Ten Brink, directly from the poetry of the people.
+
+  A maid as white as ivory bone,
+  A pearl in gold that golden shone,
+  A turtle-dove, a love whereon
+        My heart must cling:
+  Her blitheness nevermore be gone
+        While I can sing!
+
+  When she is gay,
+  In all the world no more I pray
+  Than this: alone with her to stay
+        Withouten strife.
+  Could she but know the ills that slay
+        Her lover's life!
+
+  Was never woman nobler wrought;
+  And when she blithe to sleep is brought,
+  Well for him who guessed her thought,
+        Proud maid! Yet O,
+  Full well I know she will me nought.
+        My heart is woe.
+
+  And how shall I then sweetly sing
+  That thus am marréd with mourning?
+  To death, alas, she will me bring
+        Long ere my day.
+  _Greet her well, the sweetë thing,
+        With eyen gray!_
+
+  Her eyes have wounded me, i-wis.
+  Her arching brows that bring the bliss;
+  Her comely mouth whoso might kiss,
+        In mirth he were;
+  And I would change all mine for his
+        That is her fere.[25]
+
+  Her fere, so worthy might I be,
+  Her fere, so noble, stout and free,
+  For this one thing I would give three,
+        Nor haggle aught.
+  From hell to heaven, if one could see,
+        So fine is naught,
+        [Nor half so free;[26]
+  All lovers true, now listen unto me.]
+
+  Now hearken to me while I tell,
+  In such a fume I boil and well;
+  There is no fire so hot in hell
+        As his, I trow,
+  Who loves unknown and dares not tell
+        His hidden woe.
+
+  _I will her well, she wills me woe;
+  I am her friend, and she my foe;_
+  Methinks my heart will break in two
+        For sorrow's might;
+  _In God's own greeting may she go,
+        That maiden white!_
+
+  _I would I were a throstlecock,
+  A bunting, or a laverock,[27]
+        Sweet maid!
+  Between her kirtle and her smock
+        I'd then be hid!_
+
+    [25] _Fere_, companion, lover. "I would give all I have to
+    be her lover."
+
+    [26] Superfluous verses; but the MS. makes no distinction.
+    _Free_ means noble, gracious. "If one could see everything
+    between hell and heaven, one would find nothing so fair and
+    noble."
+
+    [27] Lark. The poem is translated from Böddeker, page 161
+    ff.
+
+The reader will easily note the struggle between our poet's
+conventional and quite literary despair and the fresh communal tone in
+such passages as we have ventured, despite Leigh Hunt's direful
+example, to put in italics. This poet was a clerk, or perhaps not even
+that,--a gleeman; and he dwells, after the manner of his kind, upon a
+despair which springs from difference of station. But it is England,
+not France; it is a maiden, not countess or queen, whom he loves; and
+the tone of his verse is sound and communal at heart. True, the metre,
+afterwards a favorite with Burns, is one used by the oldest known
+troubadour of Provence, Count William, as well as by the poets of
+miracle plays and of such romances as the English 'Octavian'; but like
+Count William himself, who built on a popular basis, our clerk or
+gleeman is nearer to the people than to the schools. Indeed, Uhland
+reminds us that Breton _kloer_ ("clerks") to this day play a leading
+part as lovers and singers of love in folk-song; and the English
+clerks in question were not regular priests, consecrated and in
+responsible positions, but students or unattached followers of
+theology. They sang with the people; they felt and suffered with the
+people--as in the case of a far nobler member of the guild, William
+Langland; and hence sundry political poems which deal with wrongs and
+suffering endured by the commons of that day. In the struggle of
+barons and people against Henry III., indignation made verses; and
+these, too, we owe to the clerks. Such a burst of indignation is the
+song against Richard of Cornwall, with a turbulent refrain which
+sounds like a direct loan from the people. One stanza, with this
+refrain, will suffice. It opens with the traditional "lithe and
+listen" of the ballad-singer:--
+
+  Sit all now still and list to me:
+  The German King, by my loyalty!
+  Thirty thousand pound asked he
+  To make a peace in this country,--
+            And so he did and more!
+
+REFRAIN
+
+  Richard, though thou be ever trichard,[28]
+  Trichen[29] shalt thou nevermore!
+
+This, however, like many a scrap of battle-song, ribaldry exchanged
+between two armies, and the like, has interest rather for the
+antiquarian than for the reader. We shall leave such fragments, and
+turn in conclusion to the folk-song of later times.
+
+    [28] Traitor.
+
+    [29] Betray.
+
+The England of Elizabeth was devoted to lyric poetry, and folk-song
+must have flourished along with its rival of the schools. Few of these
+songs, however, have been preserved; and indeed there is no final test
+for the communal quality in such survivals. Certainly some of the
+songs in the drama of that time are of popular origin; but the
+majority, as a glance at Mr. Bullen's several collections will prove,
+are artistic and individual, like the music to which they were sung.
+Occasionally we get a tantalizing glimpse of another lyrical England,
+the folk dancing and singing their own lays; but no Autolycus brings
+these to us in his basket. Even the miracle plays had not despised
+folk-song; unfortunately the writers are content to mention the songs,
+like our Acts of Congress, only by title. In the "comedy" called 'The
+Longer Thou Livest the More Foole Thou Art,' there are snatches of
+such songs; and a famous list, known to all scholars, is given by
+Laneham in a letter from Kenilworth in 1575, where he tells of certain
+songs, "all ancient," owned by one Captain Cox. Again, nobody ever
+praised songs of the people more sincerely than Shakespeare has
+praised them; and we may be certain that he used them for the stage.
+Such is the 'Willow Song' that Desdemona sings,--an "old thing," she
+calls it; and such perhaps the song in 'As You Like It,'--'It Was a
+Lover and His Lass.' Nash is credited with the use of folk-songs in
+his 'Summer's Last Will and Testament'; but while the pretty verses
+about spring and the tripping lines, 'A-Maying,' have such a note,
+nothing could be further from the quality of folk-song than the solemn
+and beautiful 'Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss.' In Beaumont and
+Fletcher's 'Knight of the Burning Pestle,' however, Merrythought sings
+some undoubted snatches of popular lyric, just as he sings stanzas
+from the traditional ballad; for example, his--
+
+  Go from my window, love, go;
+    Go from my window, my dear;
+  The wind and the rain
+  Will drive you back again,
+    You cannot be lodged here,--
+
+is quoted with variations in other plays, and was a favorite of the
+time,[30] and like many a ballad appears in religious parody. A modern
+variant, due to tradition, comes from Norwich; the third and fourth
+lines ran:--
+
+  For the wind is in the west,
+  And the cuckoo's in his nest.
+
+    [30] The music in Chappell, page 141.
+
+From the time of Henry VIII. a pretty song is preserved of this same
+class:--
+
+  Westron wynde, when wyll thou blow!
+    The smalle rain downe doth rayne;
+  Oh if my love were in my armys,
+    Or I in my bed agayne!
+
+This sort of song between the lovers, one without and one within,
+occurs in French and German at a very early date, and is probably much
+older than any records of it; as serenade, it found great favor with
+poets of the city and the court, and is represented in English by
+Sidney's beautiful lines, admirable for purposes of comparison with
+the folk-song:--
+
+    "Who is it that this dark night
+  Underneath my window plaineth?"
+    "It is one who, from thy sight
+  Being, ah, exiled! disdaineth
+    Every other vulgar light."
+
+The zeal of modern collectors has brought together a mass of material
+which passes for folk-song. None of it is absolutely communal, for
+the conditions of primitive lyric have long since been swept away;
+nevertheless, where isolated communities have retained something of
+the old homogeneous and simple character, the spirit of folk-song
+lingers in survival. From Great Britain, from France, and particularly
+from Germany, where circumstances have favored this survival, a few
+folk-songs may now be given in inadequate translation. To go further
+afield, to collect specimens of Italian, Russian, Servian, modern
+Greek, and so on, would need a book. The songs which follow are
+sufficiently representative for the purpose.
+
+A pretty little song, popular in Germany to this day, needs no pompous
+support of literary allusion to explain its simple pathos; still, it
+is possible that one meets here a distant echo of the tragedy of
+obstacles told in romance of Hero and Leander. When one hears this
+song, one understands where Heine found the charm of his best
+lyrics:--
+
+  Over a waste of water
+    The bonnie lover crossed,
+  A-wooing the King's daughter:
+    But all his love was lost.
+
+  Ah, Elsie, darling Elsie,
+    Fain were I now with thee;
+  But waters twain are flowing,
+    Dear love, twixt thee and me![31]
+
+    [31] Böhme, with music, page 94.
+
+Even more of a favorite is the song which represents two girls in the
+harvest-field, one happy in her love, the other deserted; the noise of
+the sickle makes a sort of chorus. Uhland placed with the two stanzas
+of the song a third stanza which really belongs to another tune; the
+latter, however, may serve to introduce the situation:--
+
+  I heard a sickle rustling,
+    Ay, rustling through the corn:
+  I heard a maiden sobbing
+    Because her love was lorn.
+
+  "Oh let the sickle rustle!
+    I care not how it go;
+  For I have found a lover,
+                   A lover,
+    Where clover and violets blow."
+
+  "And hast thou found a lover
+    Where clover and violets blow?
+  I stand here, ah, so lonely,
+                    So lonely,
+    And all my heart is woe!"
+
+Two songs may follow, one from France, one from Scotland, bewailing
+the death of lover or husband. 'The Lowlands of Holland' was published
+by Herd in his 'Scottish Songs.'[32] A clumsy attempt was made to fix
+the authorship upon a certain young widow; but the song belies any
+such origin. It has the marks of tradition:--
+
+  My love has built a bonny ship, and set her on the sea,
+  With sevenscore good mariners to bear her company;
+  There's threescore is sunk, and threescore dead at sea,
+  And the Lowlands of Holland has twin'd[33] my love and me.
+
+  My love he built another ship, and set her on the main,
+  And nane but twenty mariners for to bring her hame,
+  But the weary wind began to rise, and the sea began to rout;
+  My love then and his bonny ship turned withershins[34] about.
+
+  There shall neither coif come on my head nor comb come in my hair;
+  There shall neither coal nor candle-light come in my bower mair;
+  Nor will I love another one until the day I die,
+  For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.
+
+  "O haud your tongue, my daughter dear, be still and be content;
+  There are mair lads in Galloway, ye neen nae sair lament."
+  O there is none in Gallow, there's none at a' for me;
+  For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.
+
+    [32] Quoted by Child, 'Ballads,' iv. 318.
+
+    [33] Separated, divided.
+
+    [34] An equivalent to upside down, "in the wrong direction."
+
+The French song[35] has a more tender note:--
+
+  Low, low he lies who holds my heart,
+    The sea is rolling fair above;
+  Go, little bird, and tell him this,--
+    Go, little bird, and fear no harm,--
+  Say I am still his faithful love,
+    Say that to him I stretch my arms.
+
+    [35] See Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire,' p. 103, with the
+    music. The final verses, simple as they are, are not rendered
+    even remotely well. They run:--
+
+      Que je suis sa fidèle amie,
+      Et que vers lui je tends les bras.
+
+Another song, widely scattered in varying versions throughout France,
+is of the forsaken and too trustful maid,--'En revenant des Noces.'
+The narrative in this, as in the Scottish song, makes it approach the
+ballad.
+
+  Back from the wedding-feast,
+  All weary by the way,
+
+  I rested by a fount
+  And watched the waters' play;
+
+  And at the fount I bathed,
+  So clear the waters' play;
+
+  And with a leaf of oak
+  I wiped the drops away.
+
+  Upon the highest branch
+  Loud sang the nightingale.
+
+  Sing, nightingale, oh sing,
+  Thou hast a heart so gay!
+
+  Not gay, this heart of mine:
+  My love has gone away,
+
+  Because I gave my rose
+  Too soon, too soon away.
+
+  Ah, would to God that rose
+  Yet on the rosebush lay,--
+
+  Would that the rosebush, even,
+  Unplanted yet might stay,--
+
+  Would that my lover Pierre
+  My favor had to pray![36]
+
+    [36] Tiersot, p. 90. In many versions there is further
+    complication with king and queen and the lover. This song
+    is extremely popular in Canada.
+
+The corresponding Scottish song, beautiful enough for any land or age,
+is the well-known 'Waly, Waly':--
+
+  Oh waly, waly, up the bank,
+    And waly, waly, down the brae,
+  And waly, waly, yon burn-side,
+    Where I and my love wont to gae.
+
+  I lean'd my back unto an aik,
+    I thought it was a trusty tree;
+  But first it bowed and syne it brak,
+    Sae my true-love did lightly[37] me.
+
+  Oh waly, waly, but love be bonny
+    A little time, while it is new;
+  But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld,
+    And fades away like morning dew.
+
+  Oh wherefore should I busk my head?
+    Or wherefore should I kame my hair?
+  For my true-love has me forsook,
+    And says he'll never love me mair.
+
+  Now Arthur's Seat shall be my bed,
+    The sheets shall ne'er be fyled by me;
+  Saint Anton's well shall be my drink,
+    Since my true-love has forsaken me.
+
+  Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw
+    And shake the green leaves off the tree?
+  O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?
+    For of my life I am weary.
+
+  'Tis not the frost that freezes fell,
+    Nor blawing snaw's inclemency;
+  'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,
+    But my love's heart grown cauld to me.
+
+  When we came in by Glasgow town,
+    We were a comely sight to see;
+  My love was clad in the black velvet,
+    And I myself in cramasie.
+
+  But had I wist, before I kissed,
+    That love had been sae ill to win,
+  I'd locked my heart in a case of gold.
+    And pinned it with a silver pin.
+
+  Oh, oh, if my young babe were born,
+    And set upon the nurse's knee,
+  And I myself were dead and gone,
+    [And the green grass growing over me!]
+
+    [37] Lightly (a verb) is to treat with contempt, to
+    undervalue. Compare the burden quoted by Chappell, p. 458,
+    and very old:--
+
+      The bonny broome, the well-favored broome,
+        The broome blooms faire on hill;
+      What ailed my love to lightly me,
+        And I working her will?
+
+The same ballad touch overweighs even the lyric quality of the
+verses about Yarrow:--
+
+  "Willy's rare, and Willy's fair,
+    And Willy's wondrous bonny,
+  And Willy heght[38] to marry me
+    Gin e'er he married ony.
+
+  "Oh came you by yon water-side?
+    Pu'd you the rose or lily?
+  Or came you by yon meadow green?
+    Or saw you my sweet Willy?"
+
+  She sought him east, she sought him west,
+    She sought him brade and narrow;
+  Syne, in the clifting of a craig,
+    She found him drowned in Yarrow.[39]
+
+    [38] Promised.
+
+    [39] Child's _Ballads_, vii. 179.
+
+Returning to Germany and to pure lyric, we have a pretty bit which is
+attached to many different songs.
+
+  High up on yonder mountain
+    A mill-wheel clatters round,
+  And, night or day, naught else but love
+    Within the mill is ground.
+
+  The mill has gone to ruin,
+    And love has had its day;
+  God bless thee now, my bonnie lass,
+    I wander far away.[40]
+
+    [40] Böhme, p. 271.
+
+But there is a more cheerful vein in this sort of song; and the
+mountain offers pleasanter views:--
+
+  Oh yonder on the mountain,
+    There stands a lofty house,
+  Where morning after morning,
+                      Yes, morning,
+    Three maids go in and out.[41]
+
+  The first she is my sister,
+    The second well is known,
+  The third, I will not name her,
+                      No, name her,
+    And she shall be my own!
+
+    [41] The rhyme in German leaves even more to be desired.
+
+Finally, that pearl of German folk-song, 'Innsprück.' The wanderer
+must leave the town and his sweetheart; but he swears to be true, and
+prays that his love be kept safe till his return:--
+
+  Innsprück, I must forsake thee,
+  My weary way betake me
+    Unto a foreign shore,
+  And all my joy hath vanished,
+  And ne'er while I am banished
+    Shall I behold it more.
+
+  I bear a load of sorrow,
+  And comfort can I borrow,
+    Dear love, from thee alone.
+  Ah, let thy pity hover
+  About thy weary lover
+    When he is far from home.
+
+  My one true love! Forever
+  Thine will I bide, and never
+    Shall our dear vow be vain.
+  Now must our Lord God ward thee,
+  In peace and honor guard thee,
+    Until I come again.
+
+In leaving the subject of folk-song, it is necessary for the reader
+not only to consider anew the loose and unscientific way in which this
+term has been employed, but also to bear in mind that few of the above
+specimens can lay claim to the title in any rigid classification. Long
+ago, a German critic reminded zealous collectors of his day that when
+one has dipped a pailful of water from the brook, one has captured no
+brook; and that when one has written down a folk-song, it has ceased
+to be that eternally changing, momentary, spontaneous, dance-begotten
+thing which once flourished everywhere as communal poetry. Always in
+flux, if it stopped it ceased to be itself. Modern lyric is
+deliberately composed by some one, mainly to be sung by some one else;
+the old communal lyric was sung by the throng and was made in the
+singing. When festal excitement at some great communal rejoicing in
+the life of clan or tribe "fought its battles o'er again," the result
+was narrative communal song. A disguised and baffled survival of this
+most ancient narrative is the popular ballad. Still more disguised,
+still more baffled, is the purely lyrical survival of that old
+communal and festal song; and the best one can do is to present those
+few specimens found under conditions which preserve certain qualities
+of a vanished world of poetry.
+
+    [Illustration: _RUSSIAN CURSIVE WRITING._
+    A public document of Kamtschatka, written on birch bark.]
+
+It may be asked why the contemporary songs found among Indian tribes
+of our continent, or among remote islanders in low stages of culture,
+should not reproduce for us the old type of communal verse. The answer
+is simple. Tribes which have remained in low stages of culture do not
+necessarily retain all the characteristics of primitive life among
+races which had the germs of rapidly developing culture. That communal
+poetry which gave life to the later epic of Hellenic or of Germanic
+song must have differed materially, no matter in what stage of
+development, from the uninteresting and monotonous chants of the
+savage. Moreover, the specimens of savage verse which we know
+retain the characteristics of communal verse, while they lack its
+nobler and vital quality. The dance, the spontaneous production,
+repetition,--these are all marked characteristics of savage verse.
+But savage verse cannot serve as model for our ideas of primitive
+folk-song.
+
+                                        [Signature: F. B. Gummere]
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL FOOTE
+
+(1720-1777)
+
+
+The name of Samuel Foote suggests a whimsical, plump little man, with
+a round face, twinkling eyes, and one of the readiest wits of the
+eighteenth century. This contemporary of the elder Colman, Cumberland,
+Mrs. Cowley, and the great Garrick, knew many famous men and women,
+and they admired as well as feared his talents.
+
+Samuel Foote was born at Truro in 1720. He was a young boy when he
+first exhibited his powers of mimicry at his father's dinner-table. At
+that time he did not expect to earn his living by them, for he came of
+well-to-do people, and his mother, who was of aristocratic birth,
+inherited a comfortable fortune.
+
+Throughout his school days at Worcester and his college days at
+Worcester College, Oxford, where he did not remain long enough to take
+a degree, and the idle days when he was supposed to be studying law at
+the Temple and was in reality frequenting coffee-houses and
+drawing-rooms as a young man of fashion, he was establishing a
+reputation for repartee, _bons mots_, and satiric imitation. So, when
+the wasteful youth had squandered all his money, he naturally turned
+to the stage as offering him the best opportunity. Like many another
+amateur addicted to a mistaken ambition, Foote first tried tragedy,
+and made his début as Othello. But in this and in other tragedies he
+was a failure; so he soon took to writing comic plays with parts
+especially adapted to himself. 'The Diversions of the Morning' was the
+first of a long series, of which 'The Mayor of Garratt,' 'The Lame
+Lover,' 'The Nabob,' and 'The Minor,' are among the best known. As
+these were written from the actor's rather than from the dramatist's
+point of view, they often seem faulty in construction and crude in
+literary quality. They are farces rather than true comedies. But they
+abound in witty dialogue, and in a satire which illuminates
+contemporary vices and follies.
+
+Foote seems to have been curiously lacking in conscience. He lived his
+life with a gayety which no poverty, misfortune, or physical suffering
+could long dampen. When he had money he spent it lavishly, and when
+the supply ran short he racked his clever brains to make a new hit. To
+accomplish this he was utterly unscrupulous, and never spared his
+friends or those to whom he was indebted, if he saw good material in
+their foibles. His victims smarted, but his ready tongue and personal
+geniality usually extricated him from consequent unpleasantness.
+Garrick, who aided him repeatedly, and who dreaded ridicule above all
+things, was his favorite butt, yet remained his friend. The irate
+members of the East India Company, who called upon him armed with
+stout cudgels to administer a castigation for an offensive libel in
+'The Nabob,' were so speedily mollified that they laid their cudgels
+aside with their hats, and accepted his invitation to dinner.
+
+To us, much of his charm has evaporated, for it lay in these very
+personalities which held well-known people up to ridicule with a
+precision which made it impossible for the originals to escape
+recognition. Even irascible Dr. Johnson, who wished to disapprove of
+him, admitted that there was no one like "that fellow Foote." So this
+"Aristophanes of the English stage" was mourned when he died at the
+age of fifty-seven, and a company of his friends and fellow-actors
+buried him one evening by the dim light of torches in a cloister of
+Westminster Abbey.
+
+There is often a boisterous unreserve in the plays of Foote, as in
+other eighteenth-century drama, which revolts modern taste. As they
+consist of character study rather than incident, mere extracts are apt
+to appear incomplete and meaningless. Therefore it seems fairer to
+represent the famous wit not alone by formal citation, but also by
+some of his _bons mots_ extracted from the collection of William Cooke
+in his 'Memoirs of Samuel Foote' (2 vols. 1806).
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO BE A LAWYER
+
+From 'The Lame Lover'
+
+
+    _Enter_ Jack
+
+_Serjeant_--So, Jack, anybody at chambers to-day?
+
+_Jack_--Fieri Facias from Fetter Lane, about the bill to be filed by
+Kit Crape against Will Vizard this term.
+
+_Serjeant_--Praying for an equal partition of plunder?
+
+_Jack_--Yes, sir.
+
+_Serjeant_--Strange world we live in, that even highwaymen can't be
+true to each other! [_Half aside to himself._] But we shall make
+Vizard refund; we'll show him what long hands the law has.
+
+_Jack_--Facias says that in all the books he can't hit a precedent.
+
+_Serjeant_--Then I'll make one myself; _Aut inveniam, aut faciam_, has
+been always my motto. The charge must be made for partnership profit,
+by bartering lead and gunpowder against money, watches, and rings, on
+Epping Forest, Hounslow Heath, and other parts of the kingdom.
+
+_Jack_--He says if the court should get scent of the scheme, the
+parties would all stand committed.
+
+_Serjeant_--Cowardly rascal! but however, the caution mayn't prove
+amiss. [_Aside._] I'll not put my own name to the bill.
+
+_Jack_--The declaration, too, is delivered in the cause of Roger
+Rapp'em against Sir Solomon Simple.
+
+_Serjeant_--What, the affair of the note?
+
+_Jack_--Yes.
+
+_Serjeant_--Why, he is clear that his client never gave such a note.
+
+_Jack_--Defendant never saw plaintiff since the hour he was born; but
+notwithstanding, they have three witnesses to prove a consideration
+and signing the note.
+
+_Serjeant_--They have!
+
+_Jack_--He is puzzled what plea to put in.
+
+_Serjeant_--_Three_ witnesses ready, you say?
+
+_Jack_--Yes.
+
+_Serjeant_--Tell him Simple must acknowledge the note [_Jack starts_];
+and bid him against the trial comes on, to procure _four_ persons at
+least to prove the payment at the Crown and Anchor, the 10th of
+December.
+
+_Jack_--But then how comes the note to remain in plaintiff's
+possession?
+
+_Serjeant_--Well put, Jack: but we have a _salvo_ for that; plaintiff
+happened not to have the note in his pocket, but promised to deliver
+it up when called thereunto by defendant.
+
+_Jack_--That will do rarely.
+
+_Serjeant_--Let the defense be a secret; for I see we have able people
+to deal with. But come, child, not to lose time, have you carefully
+conned those instructions I gave you?
+
+_Jack_--Yes, sir.
+
+_Serjeant_--Well, that we shall see. How many points are the great
+object of practice?
+
+_Jack_--Two.
+
+_Serjeant_--Which are they?
+
+_Jack_--The first is to put a man into possession of what is his
+right.
+
+_Serjeant_--The second?
+
+_Jack_--Either to deprive a man of what is _really_ his right, or to
+keep him as long as possible _out_ of possession.
+
+_Serjeant_--Good boy! To gain the last end, what are the best means to
+be used?
+
+_Jack_--Various and many are the legal modes of delay.
+
+_Serjeant_--Name them.
+
+_Jack_--Injunctions, demurrers, sham pleas, writs of error,
+rejoinders, sur-rejoinders, rebutters, sur-rebutters, re-plications,
+exceptions, essoigns, and imparlance.
+
+_Serjeant_ [_to himself_]--Fine instruments in the hands of a man who
+knows how to use them. But now, Jack, we come to the point: if an able
+advocate has his choice in a cause, which if he is in reputation he
+may readily have, which side should he choose, the right or the wrong?
+
+_Jack_--A great lawyer's business is always to make choice of the
+wrong.
+
+_Serjeant_--And prithee, why so?
+
+_Jack_--Because a good cause can speak for itself, whilst a bad one
+demands an able counselor to give it a color.
+
+_Serjeant_--Very well. But in what respects will this answer to the
+lawyer himself?
+
+_Jack_--In a twofold way. Firstly, his fees will be large in
+proportion to the dirty work he is to do.
+
+_Serjeant_--Secondly?
+
+_Jack_--His reputation will rise, by obtaining the victory in a
+desperate cause.
+
+_Serjeant_--Right, boy. Are you ready in the case of the cow?
+
+_Jack_--Pretty well, I believe.
+
+_Serjeant_--Give it, then.
+
+_Jack_--First of April, anno seventeen hundred and blank, John a-Nokes
+was indicted by blank, before blank, in the county of blank, for
+stealing a cow, _contra pacem_, etc., and against the statute in that
+case provided and made, to prevent stealing of cattle.
+
+_Serjeant_--Go on.
+
+_Jack_--Said Nokes was convicted upon the said statute.
+
+_Serjeant_--What followed upon?
+
+_Jack_--Motion in arrest of judgment, made by Counselor Puzzle. First,
+because the field from whence the cow was conveyed is laid in the
+indictment _as round_, but turned out upon proof to be _square_.
+
+_Serjeant_--That's well. A valid objection.
+
+_Jack_--Secondly, because in said indictment the color of the cow is
+called red; there being no such things _in rerum natura_ as red cows,
+no more than black lions, spread eagles, flying griffins, or blue
+boars.
+
+_Serjeant_--Well put.
+
+_Jack_--Thirdly, said Nokes has not offended against form of the
+statute; because stealing of _cattle_ is there provided against:
+whereas we are only convicted of stealing a _cow_. Now, though cattle
+may be cows, yet it does by no means follow that cows must be cattle.
+
+_Serjeant_--Bravo, bravo! buss me, you rogue; you are your father's
+own son! go on and prosper. I am sorry, dear Jack, I must leave thee.
+If Providence but sends thee life and health, I prophesy thou wilt
+wrest as much land from the owners, and save as many thieves from the
+gallows, as any practitioner since the days of King Alfred.
+
+_Jack_--I'll do my endeavor. [_Exit Serjeant._]
+
+
+
+
+A MISFORTUNE IN ORTHOGRAPHY
+
+From 'The Lame Lover'
+
+
+SIR LUKE--A pox o' your law; you make me lose sight of my story. One
+morning a Welsh coach-maker came with his bill to my lord, whose name
+was unluckily Lloyd. My lord had the man up: "You are called, I think,
+Mr. Lloyd?"--"At your Lordship's service, my lord."--"What, Lloyd with
+an L?"--"It was with an L indeed, my lord."--"Because in your part of
+the world I have heard that Lloyd and Floyd were synonymous, the very
+same names."--"Very often indeed, my Lord."--"But you always spell
+yours with an L?"--"Always."--"That, Mr. Lloyd, is a little unlucky;
+for you must know I am now paying my debts alphabetically, and in four
+or five years you might have come in with an F; but I am afraid I can
+give you no hopes for your L. Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE 'MEMOIRS'
+
+
+A CURE FOR BAD POETRY
+
+A physician of Bath told him that he had a mind to publish his own
+poems; but he had so many irons in the fire he did not well know what
+to do.
+
+"Then take my advice, doctor," said Foote, "and put your poems where
+your irons are."
+
+
+THE RETORT COURTEOUS
+
+Following a man in the street, who did not bear the best of
+characters, Foote slapped him familiarly on the shoulder, thinking he
+was an intimate friend. On discovering his mistake he cried out, "Oh,
+sir, I beg your pardon! I really took you for a gentleman who--"
+
+"Well, sir," said the other, "and am I not a gentleman?"
+
+"Nay, sir," said Foote, "if you take it in that way, I must only beg
+your pardon a second time."
+
+
+ON GARRICK'S STATURE
+
+Previously to Foote's bringing out his 'Primitive Puppet Show' at the
+Haymarket Theatre, a lady of fashion asked him, "Pray, sir, are your
+puppets to be as large as life?"
+
+"Oh dear, madam, no. Not much above the size of Garrick!"
+
+
+CAPE WINE
+
+Being at the dinner-table one day when the Cape was going round in
+remarkably small glasses, his host was very profuse on the excellence
+of the wine, its age, etc. "But you don't seem to relish it, Foote, by
+keeping your glass so long before you."
+
+"Oh, yes, my lord, perfectly well. I am only admiring how little it
+is, considering its great age."
+
+
+THE GRACES
+
+Of an actress who was remarkably awkward with her arms, Foote said
+that "she kept the Graces at arm's-length."
+
+
+THE DEBTOR
+
+Of a young gentleman who was rather backward in paying his debts, he
+said he was "a very promising young gentleman."
+
+
+AFFECTATION
+
+An assuming, pedantic lady, boasting of the many books which she had
+read, often quoted 'Locke Upon Understanding,' a work she said she
+admired above all things, yet there was one word in it which, though
+often repeated, she could not distinctly make out; and that was the
+word ide-a (pronouncing it very long): "but I suppose it comes from a
+Greek derivation."
+
+"You are perfectly right, madam," said Foote, "it comes from the word
+ideaousky."
+
+"And pray, sir, what does that mean?"
+
+"The feminine of idiot, madam."
+
+
+ARITHMETICAL CRITICISM
+
+A mercantile man of his acquaintance, who would read a poem of his to
+him one day after dinner, pompously began:--
+
+  "Hear me, O Phoebus! and ye Muses nine!
+  Pray be attentive."
+
+"I am," said Foote. "Nine and one are ten: go on."
+
+
+THE DEAR WIFE
+
+A gentleman just married, telling Foote that he had that morning laid
+out three thousand pounds in jewels for his "dear wife": "Well," said
+the other, "you have but done her justice, as by your own reckoning
+she must be a very valuable woman."
+
+
+GARRICK AND THE GUINEA
+
+Foote and Garrick, supping together at the Bedford, the former in
+pulling out his purse to pay the reckoning dropped a guinea, which
+rolled in such a direction that they could not readily find it.
+
+"Where the deuce," says Foote, "can it be gone to?"
+
+"Gone to the Devil, I suppose," said Garrick.
+
+"Well said, David; you are always what I took you for, ever contriving
+to make a guinea go farther than any other man."
+
+
+DR. PAUL HIFFERMAN
+
+Paul was fond of laying, or rather offering, wagers. One day in the
+heat of argument he cried out, "I'll lay my head you are wrong upon
+that point."
+
+"Well," said Foote, "I accept the wager. Any trifle, among friends,
+has a value."
+
+
+FOOTE AND MACKLIN
+
+One night, when Macklin was formally preparing to begin a lecture,
+hearing Foote rattling away at the lower end of the room, and thinking
+to silence him at once, he called out in his sarcastic manner, "Pray,
+young gentleman, do you know what I am going to say?"
+
+"No, sir," said Foote quickly: "do you?"
+
+
+BARON NEWMAN
+
+This celebrated gambler (well known about town thirty years ago by the
+title of the left-handed Baron), being detected in the rooms at Bath
+in the act of secreting a card, the company in the warmth of their
+resentment threw him out of the window of a one-pair-of-stairs room,
+where they were playing. The Baron, meeting Foote some time afterward,
+loudly complained of this usage, and asked him what he should do to
+repair his injured honor.
+
+"Do?" said the wit; "why, 'tis a plain case: never play so high again
+as long as you live."
+
+
+MRS. ABINGTON
+
+When Mrs. Abington returned from her very first successful trip to
+Ireland, Foote wished to engage her for his summer theatre; but in the
+mean time Garrick secured her for Drury Lane. Foote, on hearing this,
+asked her why she gave Garrick the preference.
+
+"I don't know how it was," said she: "he talked me over by telling me
+that he would make me immortal, so that I did not know how to refuse
+him."
+
+"Oh! did he so? Then I'll soon outbid him that way; for come to me and
+I will give you two pounds a week more, and charge you nothing for
+immortality."
+
+
+GARLIC-EATERS
+
+Laughing at the imbecilities of a common friend one day, somebody
+observed, "It was very surprising; and Tom D---- knew him very well,
+and thought him far from being a fool."
+
+"Ah, poor Tom!" said Foote, "he is like one of those people who eat
+garlic themselves, and therefore can't smell it in a companion."
+
+
+MODE OF BURYING ATTORNEYS IN LONDON
+
+A gentleman in the country, who had just buried a rich relation who
+was an attorney, was complaining to Foote, who happened to be on a
+visit with him, of the very great expense of a country funeral in
+respect to carriages, hat-bands, scarves, etc.
+
+"Why, do you bury your attorneys here?" asked Foote gravely.
+
+"Yes, to be sure we do; how else?"
+
+"Oh, we never do that in London."
+
+"No?" said the other much surprised, "how do you manage?"
+
+"Why, when the patient happens to die, we lay him out in a room over
+night by himself, lock the door, throw open the sash, and in the
+morning he is entirely off."
+
+"Indeed!" said the other in amazement; "what becomes of him?"
+
+"Why, that we cannot exactly tell, not being acquainted with
+supernatural causes. All that we know of the matter is, that there's a
+strong smell of brimstone in the room the next morning."
+
+
+DINING BADLY
+
+Foote, returning from dinner with a lord of the admiralty, was met by
+a friend, who asked him what sort of a day he had had. "Very
+indifferent indeed; bad company and a worse dinner."
+
+"I wonder at that," said the other, "as I thought the admiral a good
+jolly fellow."
+
+"Why, as to that, he may be a good sea lord, but take it from me, he
+is a very bad landlord."
+
+
+DIBBLE DAVIS
+
+Dibble Davis, one of Foote's butts-in-ordinary, dining with him one
+day at North-end, observed that "well as he loved porter, he could
+never drink it without a head."
+
+"That must be a mistake, Dibble," returned his host, "as you have done
+so to my knowledge alone these twenty years."
+
+
+AN EXTRAORDINARY CASE
+
+Being at the levee of Lord Townsend, when that nobleman was Lord
+Lieutenant of Ireland, he thought he saw a person in his Excellency's
+suite whom he had known to have lived many years a life of expediency
+in London. To convince himself of the fact, he asked his Excellency
+who it was.
+
+"That is Mr. T----, one of my gentlemen at large," was the answer. "Do
+you know him?"
+
+"Oh, yes! perfectly well," said Foote, "and what your Excellency tells
+me is doubly extraordinary: first, that he is a gentleman; and next,
+that he is at large."
+
+
+MUTABILITY OF THE WORLD
+
+Being at dinner in a mixed company soon after the bankruptcy of one
+friend and the death of another, the conversation naturally turned on
+the mutability of the world. "Can you account for this?" said S----, a
+master builder, who happened to sit next to Foote. "Why, not very
+clearly," said the other; "except we could suppose the world was built
+by contract."
+
+
+AN APPROPRIATE MOTTO
+
+During one of Foote's trips to Dublin, he was much solicited by a
+silly young man of fashion to assist him in a miscellany of poems and
+essays which he was about to publish; but when he asked to see the
+manuscript, the other told him "that at present he had only conceived
+the different subjects, but had put none of them to paper."
+
+"Oh! if that be the state of the case," replied Foote, "I will give
+you a motto from Milton for the work in its present state:
+
+    'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.'"
+
+
+REAL FRIENDSHIP
+
+A young gentleman, making an apology to his father for coming late to
+dinner, said "that he had been visiting a poor friend of his in St.
+George's Fields." "Ah! a pretty kind of friend indeed," says the
+father, "to keep us waiting for dinner in this manner."
+
+"Aye, and for the best kind, too," said Foote: "as you know, my dear
+sir, a friend in need is a friend indeed."
+
+
+ANECDOTE OF AN AUTHOR
+
+An author was boasting that as a reviewer he had the power of
+distributing literary reputations as he liked. "Take care," said
+Foote, "you are not too prodigal of that, or you may leave none for
+yourself."
+
+
+DR. BLAIR
+
+When Foote first heard of Dr. Blair's writing 'Notes on Ossian' (a
+work the reality of which has always been much doubted), he observed,
+"The publishers ought to allow a great discount to the purchaser, as
+the notes required such a stretch of credit."
+
+
+ADVICE TO A DRAMATIC WRITER
+
+A dull dramatic writer, who had often felt the severity of the public,
+was complaining one day to Foote of the injustice done him by the
+critics; but added, "I have, however, one way of being even with them,
+by constantly laughing at all they say."
+
+"You do perfectly right, my friend," said Foote; "for by this method
+you will not only disappoint your enemies, but lead the merriest life
+of any man in England."
+
+
+THE GRAFTON MINISTRY
+
+A gentleman coming into the Cocoa-Tree one morning during the Duke of
+Grafton's administration, was observing "that he was afraid the poor
+ministry were at their wits' end."
+
+"Well, if it should be so," said Foote, "what reason have they to
+complain of so short a journey?"
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FORD
+
+(1586-?)
+
+
+The dramatic genius of the English Renaissance had well-nigh spent
+itself when the sombre creations of John Ford appeared upon a stage
+over which the clouds of the Civil War were fast gathering. Little is
+known of this dramatist, who represents the decadent period which
+followed the age of Shakespeare. He was born in 1586; entered the
+Middle Temple in 1602; after 1641 he is swallowed up in the turmoil of
+the time. The few scattered records of his life add nothing to, nor do
+they take anything from, the John Ford of 'The Broken Heart' and
+'Perkin Warbeck.'
+
+His plays are infected with a spirit alien to the poise and beauty of
+the best Elizabethan drama. His creations tell of oblique vision; of a
+disillusioned genius, predisposed to abnormal or exaggerated forms of
+human experience. He breaks through the moral order, in his love for
+the eccentricities of passion. He weaves the spell of his genius
+around strange sins.
+
+The problems of despair which Ford propounds but never solves, form
+the plot of 'The Broken Heart'; Calantha, Ithocles, Penthea, Orgilus,
+are wan types of the passive suffering which numbs the soul to death.
+Charles Lamb has eulogized the final scene of this drama. To many
+critics, the self-possession of Calantha savors of the theatrical. The
+scene between Penthea and her brother Ithocles, who had forced her to
+marry Bassanes though she loved Orgilus, is replete with the
+tenderness, the sense of subdued anguish, of which Ford was a master.
+He is the dramatist of broken hearts, whose waste places are
+unrelieved by a touch of sunlight. His love of "passion at war with
+circumstance" again finds expression in 'Love's Sacrifice,' a drama of
+moral confusions. In 'The Lover's Melancholy' sorrow has grown
+pensive. A quiet beauty rests upon the famous scene in which
+Parthenophil strives with the nightingale for the prize of music.
+
+'The Lady's Trial,' 'The Fancies Chaste and Noble,' 'The Sun's
+Darling' (written in conjunction with Dekker), are worthy only of
+passing notice. They leave but a pale impression upon the mind. In
+'Perkin Warbeck,' the one historical play of Ford, he exhibits his
+mastery over straightforward, sinewy verse. 'The Witch of Edmonton,'
+of which he wrote the first act, gives a signal example of his modern
+style and spirit.
+
+With the exception of 'Perkin Warbeck,' his dramas are destitute of
+outlook. This moral contraction heightens the intensity of passion,
+which in his conception of it has always its ancient significance of
+suffering. His comic scenes are contemptible. He is at his greatest
+when dealing with the subtleties of the human heart. Through him we
+enter into the darker zones of the soul; we apprehend its remoter
+sufferings. Confusion of spiritual vision, blended with the tyranny of
+passion, produce his greatest scenes. His are the tragedies of
+"unfulfilled desire."
+
+The verse of Ford is measured, passionless, polished. There is a
+subtle music in his lines which haunts the memory.
+
+  "Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;
+  For he is like to something I remember,
+  A great while since, a long, long time ago."
+
+With Ford the sun-born radiance of the noblest Elizabethan drama fades
+from the stage. An artificial light, thereafter, replaced it.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'PERKIN WARBECK'
+
+
+    [Perkin Warbeck and his followers are presented to King Henry
+    VII. by Lord Dawbeny as prisoners.]
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+  Life to the King, and safety fix his throne.
+  I here present you, royal sir, a shadow
+  Of Majesty, but in effect a substance
+  Of pity; a young man, in nothing grown
+  To ripeness, but th' ambition of your mercy;
+  Perkin, the Christian world's strange wonder!
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                              Dawbeny,
+  We observe no wonder; I behold ('tis true)
+  An ornament of nature, fine and polished,
+  A handsome youth, indeed, but not admire him.
+  How come he to thy hands?
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                                    From sanctuary.
+  At Bewley, near Southampton; registered,
+  With these few followers, for persons privileged.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  I must not thank you, sir! you were to blame
+  To infringe the liberty of houses sacred;
+  Dare we be irreligious?
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                              Gracious lord!
+  They voluntarily resigned themselves,
+  Without compulsion.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                      So? 'twas very well
+  'Twas very well. Turn now thine eyes,
+  Young man! upon thyself and thy past actions:
+  What revels in combustion through our kingdom
+  A frenzy of aspiring youth has danced;
+  Till wanting breath, thy feet of pride have slipt
+  To break thy neck.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                      But not my heart; my heart
+  Will mount till every drop of blood be frozen
+  By death's perpetual winter. If the sun
+  Of Majesty be darkened, let the sun
+  Of life be hid from me, in an eclipse
+  Lasting and universal. Sir, remember
+  There was a shooting in of light when Richmond
+  (Not aiming at the crown) retired, and gladly,
+  For comfort to the Duke of Bretagne's court.
+  Richard, who swayed the sceptre, was reputed
+  A tyrant then; yet then, a dawning glimmer'd
+  To some few wand'ring remnants, promising day
+  When first they ventur'd on a frightful shore
+  At Milford Haven.
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                      Whither speeds his boldness?
+  Check his rude tongue, great sir.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                          Oh, let him range:
+  The player's on the stage still; 'tis his part:
+  He does but act.--What followed?
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                                      Bosworth Field:
+  Where at an instant, to the world's amazement,
+  A morn to Richmond and a night to Richard
+  Appear'd at once. The tale is soon applied:
+  Fate which crowned these attempts, when least assured,
+  Might have befriended others, like resolved.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  A pretty gallant! thus your aunt of Burgundy,
+  Your duchess aunt, informed her nephew: so
+  The lesson, prompted, and well conned, was molded
+  Into familiar dialogue, oft rehearsed,
+  Till, learnt by heart, 'tis now received for truth.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+  Truth in her pure simplicity wants art
+  To put a feigned blush on; scorn wears only
+  Such fashion as commends to gazers' eyes
+  Sad ulcerated novelty, far beneath; in such a court
+  Wisdom and gravity are proper robes
+  By which the sovereign is best distinguished
+  From zanies to his greatness.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                Sirrah, shift
+  Your antic pageantry, and now appear
+  In your own nature; or you'll taste the danger
+  Of fooling out of season.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                            I expect
+  No less than what severity calls justice,
+  And politicians safety; let such beg
+  As feed on alms: but if there can be mercy
+  In a protested enemy, then may it
+  Descend to these poor creatures whose engagements
+  To the bettering of their fortunes have incurred
+  A loss of all to them, if any charity
+  Flow from some noble orator; in death
+  I owe the fee of thankfulness.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                  So brave?
+  What a bold knave is this!
+  We trifle time with follies.
+  Urswick, command the Dukeling and these fellows
+  To Digby, the Lieutenant of the Tower.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                                          Noble thoughts
+  Meet freedom in captivity: the Tower,
+  Our childhood's dreadful nursery!
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  Was ever so much impudence in forgery?
+  The custom, sure, of being styled a king
+  Hath fastened in his thought that he is such.
+
+
+
+
+PENTHEA'S DYING SONG
+
+From 'The Broken Heart'
+
+
+    Oh, no more, no more,--too late;
+    Sighs are spent; the burning tapers
+      Of a life as chaste as fate,
+      Pure as are unwritten papers,
+    Are burnt out; no heat, no light
+    Now remains; 'tis ever night.
+    Love is dead; let lovers' eyes
+      Locked in endless dreams,
+      Th' extremes of all extremes,
+    Ope no more, for now Love dies;
+        Now Love dies--implying
+  Love's martyrs must be ever, ever dying.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE LOVER'S MELANCHOLY'
+
+AMETHUS AND MENAPHON
+
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+  Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales
+  Which poets of an elder time have feigned
+  To glorify their Temple, bred in me
+  Desire of visiting that paradise.
+  To Thessaly I came; and living private
+  Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
+  Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
+  I day by day frequented silent groves
+  And solitary walks. One morning early
+  This accident encountered me: I heard
+  The sweetest and most ravishing contention
+  That art and nature ever were at strife in.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  I cannot yet conceive what you infer
+  By art and nature.
+
+_Menaphon_--
+
+                      I shall soon resolve ye.
+  A sound of music touched my ears, or rather
+  Indeed entranced my soul. As I stole nearer,
+  Invited by the melody, I saw
+  This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
+  With strains of strange variety and harmony,
+  Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge
+  To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds,
+  That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,
+  Wondering at what they heard: I wondered too.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  And so do I: good, on!
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                          A nightingale,
+  Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes
+  The challenge, and for every several strain
+  The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own;
+  He could not run division with more art
+  Upon his quaking instrument than she,
+  The nightingale, did with her various notes
+  Reply to: for a voice and for a sound,
+  Amethus, 'tis much easier to believe
+  That such they were than hope to hear again.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  How did the rivals part?
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                            You term them rightly;
+  For they were rivals, and their mistress harmony.
+  Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
+  Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
+  Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes,
+  Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
+  Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
+  To end the controversy, in a rapture
+  Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly
+  So many voluntaries and so quick,
+  That there was curiosity and cunning,
+  Concord in discord, lines of differing method
+  Meeting in one full centre of delight.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  Now for the bird.
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                     The bird, ordained to be
+  Music's first martyr, strove to imitate
+  These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
+  Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute,
+  And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness,
+  To see the conqueror upon her hearse
+  To weep a funeral elegy of tears;
+  That trust me, my Amethus, I could chide
+  Mine own unmanly weakness that made me
+  A fellow mourner with him.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+                              I believe thee.
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+  He looked upon the trophies of his art,
+  Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried:--
+  "Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge
+  This cruelty upon the author of it;
+  Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
+  Shall never more betray a harmless peace
+  To an untimely end:" and in that sorrow,
+  As he was pushing it against a tree,
+  I suddenly stept in.
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH, BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ
+
+(1777-1843)
+
+[Illustration: FOUQUÉ]
+
+
+The romantic school had many false and erratic tendencies, but it
+produced some of the most fanciful and poetic creations of literature.
+Fouqué was called the Don Quixote of the Romanticists, and his early
+romances of chivalry were devoured by the public as quickly as they
+appeared. But his fame proved to be a passing fancy; and his later
+works scarcely found a publisher. This was owing partly to a change in
+public taste, and partly to his mannerisms. His descriptions often
+deteriorate into tediousness, and the narrative is broken by
+far-fetched digressions. He was so imbued with the spirit of chivalry
+that he became one-sided, and his scenes were always laid in "the
+chapel or the tilt-yard." Critics of his time speak of his mediæval
+romances as "full of sweet strength and lovely virtue." Others say
+"the heroes are almost absurd, and do not arouse enthusiasm." Heine
+asserts that Fouqué's laurel is genuine; Coleridge places him above
+Walter Scott; Thomas Carlyle compares him to Southey, and describes
+him as a man of genius, with little more than an ordinary share of
+talent. Fouqué was introduced to romanticism by Wilhelm von Schlegel,
+and drew his first inspiration from Cervantes. Whatever his
+shortcomings, it cannot be denied that he succeeded in catching the
+spirit of chivalry. His knights may be unreal and quixotic, but he
+delineates his characters with the irresistible touch of a poet, and
+his work displays noble thoughts and depth of feeling.
+
+Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqué, was descended from a French
+family that had emigrated to Prussia, and his grandfather was a
+general under Frederick the Great. Fouqué was born at Brandenburg,
+February 12th, 1777, and was a thorough German at heart. He received a
+military education, and at the age of nineteen proved himself a brave
+soldier in the campaign of the Rhine. He served under the Duke of
+Weimar, and his friend, and comrade in arms was the wonderfully gifted
+but unfortunate Heinrich von Kleist. He was obliged to resign on
+account of ill health, and withdrawing to his estates he devoted
+himself to literary pursuits. Once again, however, in the exciting
+times of the war against Napoleon, his sword defended his country. He
+enlisted as a volunteer, and was afterwards honorably retired with the
+rank of major and decorated with the Order of St. John. One of his
+patriotic poems, 'Frisch auf zum Fröhlichen Jagen' (Come, rouse ye for
+the merry hunt), with reference to the rising against Napoleon, is
+still a popular song. In Halle, Fouqué delivered lectures on history
+and poetry which attracted much attention and admiration. In 1842 he
+was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV., but his literary
+efforts were at an end. He died in Berlin, January 23d, 1843.
+
+At the beginning of this century, Fouqué was one of the most
+celebrated authors. At the present day, with a few brilliant
+exceptions, all of his plays, romances, and poems have been relegated
+to oblivion. There is one work, however, a gem in German literature,
+that has won for its author an enduring place in the memory of
+readers; and that is the charming and graceful narrative of 'Undine.'
+It affords an example of the writer's best style of production; it
+breathes the fresh fragrance of the woods, and is animated by the
+beautiful thought that peoples the sea and air with nymphs and
+spirits. With exquisite tenderness Fouqué portrays the beautiful
+character of Undine. At first her nature reflects all the
+capriciousness of the elements, then, gradually growing more human
+through her love, her soul expands and she becomes an ideal of womanly
+love, devotion, and unselfishness.
+
+The real and unreal are so perfectly blended in this story, that the
+suffering of Undine excites deep sympathy. Undine, the foster-daughter
+of a good old fisherman and his wife, is a water nymph, and as such is
+born without a soul. The knight Huldbrand von Ringstetten is sent by
+Bertalda in quest of adventure, and riding through an enchanted forest
+he reaches the fisherman's hut, where he is detained by a storm. He
+falls in love with the laughing, wayward Undine, and marries her. At
+once the bewitching maiden gives up her wild pranks, grows gentle, and
+is devoted to the knight with all her heart; for through her marriage
+to a human being she receives a soul. Her uncle Kühleborn, a forest
+brook, tries to entice her back to her native element the sea.
+
+The bridal couple go to their castle, where Bertalda joins them, doing
+much to disturb their happiness. Huldbrand, though he still loves his
+beautiful wife, cannot at times suppress an instinctive shudder, and
+he is attracted to Bertalda, whose nature is more akin to his own.
+
+One day, while they are sailing on the Danube, Kühleborn manages to
+steal away a necklace with which Bertalda is playing in the water.
+Undine richly compensates Bertalda for her loss by a much rarer gift,
+but Huldbrand angrily upbraids her for continuing to hold intercourse
+with her uncanny relatives. In tears she parts from him, and vanishes
+in the waves. The knight marries Bertalda, but on the wedding-day,
+Undine, deeply veiled, rises from the sea to claim her husband, and
+with a kiss she takes away his life.
+
+Heine says of 'Undine':--
+
+    "A wondrous lovely poem. The genius of Poetry kissed
+    slumbering Spring, and smiling he opened his eyes, and all
+    the roses and the nightingales sang; and what the fragrant
+    roses said and what the nightingales sang, our worthy Fouqué
+    put into words and called it 'Undine.'"
+
+
+
+
+THE MARRIAGE OF UNDINE
+
+From 'Undine'
+
+
+Before the nuptial ceremony, and during its performance, Undine had
+shown a modest gentleness and maidenly reserve; but it now seemed as
+if all the wayward freaks that effervesced within her burst forth with
+an extravagance only the more bold and unrestrained. She teased her
+bridegroom, her foster-parents, and even the priest, whom she had just
+now revered so highly, with all sorts of childish tricks; but when the
+ancient dame was about to reprove her too frolicsome spirit, the
+knight in a few words imposed silence upon her by speaking of Undine
+as his wife.
+
+The knight was himself indeed just as little pleased with Undine's
+childish behavior as the rest; but all his looks and half-reproachful
+words were to no purpose. It is true, whenever the bride observed the
+dissatisfaction of her husband--and this occasionally happened--she
+became more quiet, and placed herself beside him, stroked his face
+with caressing fondness, whispered something smilingly in his ear, and
+in this manner smoothed the wrinkles that were gathering on his brow.
+But the moment after, some wild whim would make her resume her antic
+movements; and all went worse than before.
+
+The priest then spoke in a kind although serious tone:--
+
+"My fair young maiden, surely no one can look on you without pleasure;
+but remember betimes so to attune your soul, that it may produce a
+harmony ever in accordance with the soul of your wedded bridegroom."
+
+"Soul!" cried Undine, with a laugh. "What you say has a remarkably
+pretty sound; and for most people, too, it may be a very instructive
+and profitable caution. But when a person has no soul at all, how, I
+pray you, can such attuning be then possible? And this in truth is
+just my condition."
+
+The priest was much hurt, but continued silent in holy displeasure,
+and turned away his face from the maiden in sorrow. She went up to
+him, however, with the most winning sweetness, and said:--
+
+"Nay, I entreat you, first listen to me, before you are angry with me;
+for your anger is painful to me, and you ought not to give pain to a
+creature that has not hurt you. Only have patience with me, and I will
+explain to you every word of what I meant."
+
+It was evident that she had come to say something important; when she
+suddenly faltered as if seized with inward shuddering, and burst into
+a passion of tears. They were none of them able to understand the
+intenseness of her feelings; and with mingled emotions of fear and
+anxiety, they gazed on her in silence. Then wiping away her tears and
+looking earnestly at the priest, she at last said:--
+
+"There must be something lovely, but at the same time something most
+awful, about a soul. In the name of God, holy man, were it not better
+that we never shared a gift so mysterious?"
+
+Again she paused, and restrained her tears, as if waiting for an
+answer. All in the cottage had risen from their seats, and stepped
+back from her with horror. She, however, seemed to have eyes for no
+one but the holy man; an awful curiosity was painted on her features,
+which appeared terrible to the others.
+
+"Heavily must the soul weigh down its possessor," she pursued, when no
+one returned her any answer--"very heavily! for already its
+approaching image overshadows me with anguish and mourning. And alas,
+I have till now been so merry and light-hearted!" and she burst into
+another flood of tears and covered her face with her veil.
+
+The priest, going up to her with a solemn look, now addressed himself
+to her, and conjured her, by the name of God most holy, if any spirit
+of evil possessed her, to remove the light covering from her face. But
+she sank before him on her knees, and repeated after him every sacred
+expression he uttered, giving praise to God, and protesting that she
+"wished well to the whole world."
+
+The priest then spoke to the knight: "Sir bridegroom, I leave you
+alone with her whom I have united to you in marriage. So far as I can
+discover there is nothing of evil in her, but assuredly much that is
+wonderful. What I recommend to you is prudence, love, and fidelity."
+
+Thus speaking, he left the apartment; and the fisherman with his wife
+followed him, crossing themselves.
+
+Undine had sunk upon her knees. She uncovered her face, and exclaimed,
+while she looked fearfully round upon Huldbrand, "Alas, you will now
+refuse to look upon me as your own; and I still have done nothing
+evil, poor unhappy child that I am!" She spoke these words with a look
+so infinitely sweet and touching, that her bridegroom forgot both the
+confession that had shocked and the mystery that had perplexed him;
+and hastening to her, he raised her in his arms. She smiled through
+her tears; and that smile was like the morning light playing upon a
+small stream. "You cannot desert me!" she whispered confidingly, and
+stroked the knight's cheeks with her little soft hands. He turned away
+from the frightful thoughts that still lurked in the recesses of his
+soul, and were persuading him that he had been married to a fairy, or
+some spiteful and mischievous being of the spirit world. Only the
+single question, and that almost unawares, escaped from his lips:--
+
+"Dearest Undine, tell me this one thing: what was it you meant by
+'spirits of earth' and 'Kühleborn,' when the priest stood knocking at
+the door?"
+
+"Tales! mere tales of children!" answered Undine laughing, now quite
+restored to her wonted gayety. "I first frightened you with them, and
+you frightened me. This is the end of my story, and of our nuptial
+evening."
+
+"Nay, not so," replied the enamored knight, extinguishing the tapers,
+and a thousand times kissing his beautiful and beloved bride; while,
+lighted by the moon that shone brightly through the windows, he bore
+her into their bridal apartment.
+
+The fresh light of morning woke the young married pair: but Huldbrand
+lay lost in silent reflection. Whenever, during the night, he had
+fallen asleep, strange and horrible dreams of spectres had disturbed
+him; and these shapes, grinning at him by stealth, strove to disguise
+themselves as beautiful females; and from beautiful females they all
+at once assumed the appearance of dragons. And when he started up,
+aroused by the intrusion of these hideous forms, the moonlight shone
+pale and cold before the windows without. He looked affrighted at
+Undine, in whose arms he had fallen asleep: and she was reposing in
+unaltered beauty and sweetness beside him. Then pressing her rosy lips
+with a light kiss, he again fell into a slumber, only to be awakened
+by new terrors.
+
+When fully awake he had thought over this connection. He reproached
+himself for any doubt that could lead him into error in regard to his
+lovely wife. He also confessed to her his injustice; but she only gave
+him her fair hand, sighed deeply, and remained silent. Yet a glance of
+fervent tenderness, an expression of the soul beaming in her eyes,
+such as he had never witnessed there before, left him in undoubted
+assurance that Undine bore him no ill-will.
+
+He then rose joyfully, and leaving her, went to the common apartment,
+where the inmates of the house had already met. The three were sitting
+round the hearth with an air of anxiety about them, as if they feared
+trusting themselves to raise their voice above a low, apprehensive
+undertone. The priest appeared to be praying in his inmost spirit,
+with a view to avert some fatal calamity. But when they observed the
+young husband come forth so cheerful, they dispelled the cloud that
+remained upon their brows: the old fisherman even began to laugh with
+the knight, till his aged wife herself could not help smiling with
+great good-humor.
+
+Undine had in the mean time got ready, and now entered the room: all
+rose to meet her, but remained fixed in perfect admiration--she was so
+changed, and yet the same. The priest, with paternal affection beaming
+from his countenance, first went up to her; and as he raised his hand
+to pronounce a blessing, the beautiful bride sank on her knees before
+him with religious awe; she begged his pardon in terms both respectful
+and submissive for any foolish things she might have uttered the
+evening before, and entreated him with emotion to pray for the welfare
+of her soul. She then rose, kissed her foster-parents, and after
+thanking them for all the kindness they had shown her, said:
+
+"Oh, I now feel in my inmost heart how much, how infinitely much, you
+have done for me, you dear, dear friends of my childhood!"
+
+At first she was wholly unable to tear herself away from their
+affectionate caresses; but the moment she saw the good old mother
+busy in getting breakfast, she went to the hearth, applied herself to
+cooking the food and putting it on the table, and would not suffer her
+to take the least share in the work.
+
+She continued in this frame of spirit the whole day: calm, kind,
+attentive--half matronly and half girlish. The three who had been
+longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her
+capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive
+vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as
+mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to
+remove his eyes from her; and he often said to the bridegroom:--
+
+"The bounty of Heaven, sir, through me its unworthy instrument,
+intrusted to you yesterday an invaluable treasure: cherish it as you
+ought, and it will promote your temporal and eternal welfare."
+
+Toward evening Undine was hanging upon the knight's arm with lowly
+tenderness, while she drew him gently out before the door, where the
+setting sun shone richly over the fresh grass and upon the high
+slender boles of the trees. Her emotion was visible; the dew of
+sadness and love swam in her eyes, while a tender and fearful secret
+seemed to hover upon her lips, but was only made known by hardly
+breathed sighs. She led her husband farther and farther onward without
+speaking. When he asked her questions, she replied only with looks, in
+which, it is true, there appeared to be no immediate answer to his
+inquiries, but a whole heaven of love and timid devotion. Thus they
+reached the margin of the swollen forest stream, and the knight was
+astonished to see it gliding away with so gentle a murmuring of its
+waves, that no vestige of its former swell and wildness was now
+discernible.
+
+"By morning it will be wholly drained off," said the beautiful wife,
+almost weeping, "and you will then be able to travel, without anything
+to hinder you, whithersoever you will."
+
+"Not without you, dear Undine," replied the knight, laughing: "think
+only, were I disposed to leave you, both the Church and the spiritual
+powers, the emperor and the laws of the realm, would require the
+fugitive to be seized and restored to you."
+
+"All this depends on you--all depends on you," whispered his little
+companion, half weeping and half smiling. "But I still feel sure that
+you will not leave me; I love you too deeply to fear that misery. Now
+bear me over to that little island which lies before us. There shall
+the decision be made. I could easily, indeed, glide through that mere
+rippling of the water without your aid, but it is so sweet to lie in
+your arms; and should you determine to put me away, I shall have
+rested in them once more, ... for the last time."
+
+Huldbrand was so full of strange anxiety and emotion, that he knew not
+what answer to make her. He took her in his arms and carried her over,
+now first realizing the fact that this was the same little island from
+which he had borne her back to the old fisherman, the first night of
+his arrival. On the farther side he placed her upon the soft grass,
+and was throwing himself lovingly near his beautiful burden; but she
+said to him:--"Not here, but opposite me. I shall read my doom in your
+eyes, even before your lips pronounce it; now listen attentively to
+what I shall relate to you." And she began:--
+
+"You must know, my own love, that there are beings in the elements
+which bear the strongest resemblance to the human race, and which at
+the same time but seldom become visible to you. The wonderful
+salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the
+meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest spirits
+belong to the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers,
+and streams live the widespread race of water spirits. These last,
+beneath resounding domes of crystal, through which the sky can shine
+with its sun and stars, inhabit a region of light and beauty; lofty
+coral-trees glow with blue and crimson fruits in their gardens; they
+walk over the pure sand of the sea, among exquisitely variegated
+shells, and amid whatever of beauty the old world possessed, such as
+the present is no more worthy to enjoy,--creations which the floods
+covered with their secret veils of silver; and now these noble
+monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the water,
+which loves them, and calls forth from their crevices delicate
+moss-flowers and enwreathing tufts of sedge.
+
+"Now, the nation that dwell there are very fair and lovely to behold,
+for the most part more beautiful than human beings. Many a fisherman
+has been so fortunate as to catch a view of a delicate maiden of the
+waters, while she was floating and singing upon the deep. He would
+then spread far the fame of her beauty; and to such wonderful females
+men are wont to give the name of Undines.--But what need of saying
+more? You, my dear husband, now actually behold an Undine before
+you."
+
+The knight would have persuaded himself that his lovely wife was under
+the influence of one of her odd whims, and that she was only amusing
+herself and him with her extravagant inventions. He wished it might be
+so. But with whatever emphasis he said this to himself, he still could
+not credit the hope for a moment: a strange shivering shot through his
+soul; unable to utter a word, he gazed upon the sweet speaker with a
+fixed eye. She shook her head in distress, sighed from her full heart,
+and then proceeded in the following manner:--
+
+"We should be far superior to you, who are another race of the human
+family,--for we also call ourselves human beings, as we resemble them
+in form and features,--had we not one evil peculiar to ourselves. Both
+we and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other elements
+vanish into air at death and go out of existence, spirit and body, so
+that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake to a purer
+state of being, we shall remain where sand and sparks and wind and
+waves remain. Thus, we have no souls; the element moves us, and again
+is obedient to our will while we live, though it scatters us like dust
+when we die; and as we have nothing to trouble us, we are as merry as
+nightingales, little gold-fishes, and other pretty children of nature.
+
+"But all beings aspire to rise in the scale of existence higher than
+they are. It was therefore the wish of my father, who is a powerful
+water prince in the Mediterranean Sea, that his only daughter should
+become possessed of a soul, although she should have to endure many of
+the sufferings of those who share that gift.
+
+"Now, the race to which I belong have no other means of obtaining a
+soul than by forming with an individual of your own the most intimate
+union of love. I am now possessed of a soul, and my soul thanks you,
+my best beloved, and never shall cease to thank you, if you do not
+render my whole future life miserable. For what will become of me, if
+you avoid and reject me? Still, I would not keep you as my own by
+artifice. And should you decide to cast me off, then do it now, and
+return alone to the shore. I will plunge into this brook, where my
+uncle will receive me; my uncle, who here in the forest, far removed
+from his other friends, passes his strange and solitary existence. But
+he is powerful, as well as revered and beloved by many great rivers;
+and as he brought me hither to the fisherman a light-hearted and
+laughing child, he will take me home to my parents a woman, gifted
+with a soul, with power to love and to suffer."
+
+She was about to add something more, when Huldbrand with the most
+heartfelt tenderness and love clasped her in his arms, and again bore
+her back to the shore. There amid tears and kisses he first swore
+never to forsake his affectionate wife, and esteemed himself even more
+happy than Pygmalion, for whom Venus gave life to this beautiful
+statue, and thus changed it into a beloved wife. Supported by his arm,
+and in the confidence of affection, Undine returned to the cottage;
+and now she first realized with her whole heart how little cause she
+had for regretting what she had left--the crystal palaces of her
+mysterious father.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST APPEARANCE OF UNDINE
+
+From 'Undine'
+
+
+Should I relate to you how passed the marriage feast at Castle
+Ringstetten, it would be as if you saw a heap of bright and pleasant
+things, but all overspread with a black mourning crape, through whose
+darkening veil their brilliancy would appear but a mockery of the
+nothingness of all earthly joys.
+
+It was not that any spectral delusion disturbed the scene of
+festivity; for the castle, as we well know, had been secured against
+the mischief of the water spirits. But the knight, the fisherman, and
+all the guests were unable to banish the feeling that the chief
+personage of the feast was still wanting, and that this chief
+personage could be no other than the gentle and beloved Undine.
+
+Whenever a door was heard to open, all eyes were involuntarily turned
+in that direction; and if it was nothing but the steward with new
+dishes, or the cup-bearer with a supply of wine of higher flavor than
+the last, they again looked down in sadness and disappointment, while
+the flashes of wit and merriment which had been passing at times from
+one to another were extinguished by tears of mournful remembrance.
+
+The bride was the least thoughtful of the company, and therefore the
+most happy; but even to her it sometimes seemed strange that she
+should be sitting at the head of the table, wearing a green wreath and
+gold-embroidered robe, while Undine was lying a corpse, stiff and
+cold, at the bottom of the Danube, or carried out by the current into
+the ocean. For ever since her father had suggested something of this
+sort, his words were continually sounding in her ear; and this day in
+particular, they would neither fade from her memory nor yield to other
+thoughts.
+
+Evening had scarcely arrived when the company returned to their homes;
+not dismissed by the impatience of the bridegroom, as wedding parties
+are sometimes broken up, but constrained solely by heavy sadness and
+forebodings of evil. Bertalda retired with her maidens, and the knight
+with his attendants, to undress; but there was no gay laughing company
+of bridesmaids and bridesmen at this mournful festival.
+
+Bertalda wished to awake more cheerful thoughts: she ordered her
+maidens to spread before her a brilliant set of jewels, a present from
+Huldbrand, together with rich apparel and veils, that she might select
+from among them the brightest and most beautiful for her dress in the
+morning. The attendants rejoiced at this opportunity of pouring forth
+good wishes and promises of happiness to their young mistress, and
+failed not to extol the beauty of the bride with the most glowing
+eloquence. This went on for a long time, until Bertalda at last,
+looking in a mirror, said with a sigh:--
+
+"Ah, but do you not see plainly how freckled I am growing? Look here
+on the side of my neck."
+
+They looked at the place and found the freckles indeed, as their fair
+mistress had said; but they called them mere beauty-spots, the
+faintest touches of the sun, such as would only heighten the whiteness
+of her delicate complexion. Bertalda shook her head, and still viewed
+them as a blemish.
+
+"And I could remove them," she said at last, sighing. "But the castle
+fountain is covered, from which I formerly used to have that precious
+water, so purifying to the skin. Oh, had I this evening only a single
+flask of it!"
+
+"Is that all?" cried an alert waiting-maid, laughing as she glided out
+of the apartment.
+
+"She will not be so foolish," said Bertalda, well pleased and
+surprised, "as to cause the stone cover of the fountain to be taken
+off this very evening?" That instant they heard the tread of men
+already passing along the court-yard, and could see from the window
+where the officious maiden was leading them directly up to the
+fountain, and that they carried levers and other instruments on their
+shoulders.
+
+"It is certainly my will," said Bertalda with a smile, "if it does not
+take them too long." And pleased with the thought that a word from her
+was now sufficient to accomplish what had formerly been refused with a
+painful reproof, she looked down upon their operations in the bright
+moonlit castle court.
+
+The men raised the enormous stone with an effort; some one of the
+number indeed would occasionally sigh, when he recollected that they
+were destroying the work of their former beloved mistress. Their
+labor, however, was much lighter than they had expected. It seemed as
+if some power from within the fountain itself aided them in raising
+the stone.
+
+"It appears," said the workmen to one another in astonishment, "as if
+the confined water had become a springing fountain." And the stone
+rose more and more, and almost without the assistance of the
+workpeople, rolled slowly down upon the pavement with a hollow sound.
+But an appearance from the opening of the fountain filled them with
+awe, as it rose like a white column of water; at first they imagined
+it really to be a fountain, until they perceived the rising form to be
+a pale female, veiled in white. She wept bitterly, raised her hands
+above her head, wringing them sadly as with slow and solemn step she
+moved toward the castle. The servants shrank back, and fled from the
+spring, while the bride, pale and motionless with horror, stood with
+her maidens at the window. When the figure had now come close beneath
+their room, it looked up to them sobbing, and Bertalda thought she
+recognized through the veil the pale features of Undine. But the
+mourning form passed on, sad, reluctant, and lingering, as if going to
+the place of execution. Bertalda screamed to her maids to call the
+knight; not one of them dared to stir from her place; and even the
+bride herself became again mute, as if trembling at the sound of her
+own voice.
+
+While they continued standing at the window, motionless as statues,
+the mysterious wanderer had entered the castle, ascended the
+well-known stairs, and traversed the well-known halls, in silent
+tears. Alas, how differently had she once passed through these rooms!
+
+The knight had in the mean time dismissed his attendants. Half
+undressed and in deep dejection, he was standing before a large
+mirror; a wax taper burned dimly beside him. At this moment some one
+tapped at his door very, very softly. Undine had formerly tapped in
+this way, when she was playing some of her endearing wiles.
+
+"It is all an illusion!" said he to himself. "I must to my nuptial
+bed."
+
+"You must indeed, but to a cold one!" he heard a voice, choked with
+sobs, repeat from without; and then he saw in the mirror that the door
+of his room was slowly, slowly opened, and the white figure entered,
+and gently closed it behind her.
+
+"They have opened the spring," said she in a low tone; "and now I am
+here, and you must die."
+
+He felt in his failing breath that this must indeed be; but covering
+his eyes with his hands, he cried:--"Do not in my death-hour, do not
+make me mad with terror. If that veil conceals hideous features, do
+not lift it! Take my life, but let me not see you."
+
+"Alas!" replied the pale figure, "will you not then look upon me once
+more? I am as fair now as when you wooed me on the island!"
+
+"Oh, if it indeed were so," sighed Huldbrand, "and that I might die by
+a kiss from you!"
+
+"Most willingly, my own love," said she. She threw back her veil;
+heavenly fair shone forth her pure countenance. Trembling with love
+and the awe of approaching death, the knight leant towards her. She
+kissed him with a holy kiss; but she relaxed not her hold, pressing
+him more closely in her arms, and weeping as if she would weep away
+her soul. Tears rushed into the knight's eyes, while a thrill both of
+bliss and agony shot through his heart, until he at last expired,
+sinking softly back from her fair arms upon the pillow of his couch a
+corpse.
+
+"I have wept him to death!" said she to some domestics who met her in
+the ante-chamber; and passing through the terrified group, she went
+slowly out, and disappeared in the fountain.
+
+
+
+
+SONG FROM 'MINSTREL LOVE'
+
+
+  Oh welcome, Sir Bolt, to me!
+  And a welcome, Sir Arrow, to thee!
+    But wherefore such pride
+    In your swift airy ride?
+  You're but splints of the ashen tree.
+    When once on earth lying,
+    There's an end of your flying!
+      Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!
+    But we freshly will wing you
+    And back again swing you,
+    And teach you to wend
+    To your Moorish friend.
+
+  Sir Bolt, you have oft been here;
+  And Sir Arrow, you've often flown near;
+    But still from pure haste
+    All your courage would waste
+  On the earth and the streamlet clear.
+    What! over all leaping,
+    In shame are you sleeping?
+      Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!
+    Or if you smote one,
+    'Twas but darklingly done,
+    As the grain that winds fling
+    To the bird on the wing.
+
+
+
+
+ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+(1844-)
+
+[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]
+
+
+Anatole France, whose real name of Thibault is sunk in his literary
+signature, was born in Paris, April 16th, 1844. His father, a wealthy
+bookseller, seems to have been a thoughtful, meditative man, and his
+mother a woman of great refinement and tenderness. Their son shows the
+result of the double influence. Always fond of books, he early devoted
+himself to literary work, and made his début as writer in 1868 in a
+biographical study of Alfred de Vigny. This was shortly followed by
+two volumes of poetry: 'Les Poèmes Dorés' (Golden Verses) and 'Les
+Noces Corinthéennes' (Corinthian Revels). Since this work of his youth
+he has published at least twelve novels and romances, of which the
+most familiar are: 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' (The Crime of
+Sylvestre Bonnard), 'Le Livre de Mon Ami' (My Friend's Book), 'Le Lys
+Rouge' (The Red Lily), and 'Les Désirs de Jean Servieu' (Jean
+Servieu's Wishes). Several volumes of essays, critical introductions
+to splendid editions of Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, and Le Sage, of
+'Manon Lescaut' and 'Paul and Virginia,' numberless studies of men and
+books for the reviews and journals,--these measure the tireless
+industry of an incessant worker. In 1876 M. France became an attaché
+of the Library of the Senate. In December 1896 he was received as
+member of the French Academy, succeeding to the chair of Ferdinand de
+Lesseps, whose eulogy he pronounced with exquisite taste and grace.
+
+Like Renan, whose disciple he is, this fine artist was formed in the
+clerical schools. His perfection of style, clear, distinguished,
+scintillating with wit and fancy, furnishes, as a distinguished French
+critic remarks, a strong contrast to the painful and heavy periods of
+the literary products of a State education. He is an enthusiastic
+humanist, a fervent Neo-Hellenist, delicately sensitive to the beauty
+of the antique, the magic of words, and the harmony of phrase.
+
+Outside of France, his best known works are 'Le Crime de Sylvestre
+Bonnard' (crowned by the Academy) and 'Le Livre de Mon Ami.' The
+first of these expresses the author's Hellenism, sentiment,
+experience, love of form, and gentle pessimism. Into the character of
+Sylvestre Bonnard, that intelligent, contemplative, ironical,
+sweet-natured old philosopher, he has put most of himself. In 'Le
+Livre de Mon Ami' are reflected the childhood and youth of the author.
+It is a living book, made out of the impulses of the heart, holding
+the very essence of moral grace, written with exquisite irony
+absolutely free from bitterness.
+
+It is to be regretted that in some of his later writings this charming
+writer has fallen short of the standard of these works, though the
+versatility of talent he displays is great and admirable. In 'Thaïs'
+he has painted the magnificent Alexandria of the Ptolemies; in 'Le Lys
+Rouge' the Florence of to-day. In 'La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pedauque'
+(The Cook-Shop of the Queen Pedauque) and in 'Les Opinions de M.
+Jérome Coignard,' Gil Blas, Rabelais, Wilhelm Meister, and Montaigne
+seem to jostle each other. In 'Le Jardin d'Épicure' (The Garden of
+Epicurus) a modern Epicurus, discreet, indulgent, listless, listens to
+lively discussions between the shades of Plato, Origen, Augustine,
+Hegel, and Schopenhauer, while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a
+Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin
+agree in their estimate of a future life.
+
+In his own words, M. Anatole France has always been inclined to take
+life as a spectacle, offering no solution of its perplexities,
+proposing no remedies for its ills. His literary quality, as M. Jules
+Lemaître observes, owes little or nothing to the spirit or literature
+of the North. His intelligence is the pure and extreme product of
+Greek and Latin tradition.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE GARDENS
+
+From 'The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.' Copyright, 1890, by Harper &
+Brothers
+
+
+                                                         APRIL 16.
+
+St. Droctoveus and the early abbots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés have
+been occupying me for the past forty years; but I do not know whether
+I shall be able to write their history before I go to join them. It is
+already quite a long time since I became an old man. One day last
+year, on the Pont des Arts, one of my fellow-members at the Institute
+was lamenting before me over the _ennui_ of becoming old.
+
+"Still," Sainte-Beuve replied to him, "it is the only way that has yet
+been found of living a long time."
+
+I have tried this way, and I know just what it is worth. The trouble
+of it is not that one lasts too long, but that one sees all about him
+pass away--mother, wife, friends, children. Nature makes and unmakes
+all these divine treasures with gloomy indifference, and at last we
+find that we have not loved,--we have only been embracing shadows. But
+how sweet some shadows are! If ever creature glided like a shadow
+through the life of a man, it was certainly that young girl whom I
+fell in love with when--incredible though it now seems--I was myself a
+youth.
+
+A Christian sarcophagus from the catacombs of Rome bears a formula of
+imprecation, the whole terrible meaning of which I only learned with
+time. It says:--"_Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may
+he die the last of his own people!_" In my capacity of archæologist I
+have opened tombs and disturbed ashes, in order to collect the shreds
+of apparel, metal ornaments, or gems that were mingled with those
+ashes. But I did it only through that scientific curiosity which does
+not exclude the feelings of reverence and of piety. May that
+malediction graven by some one of the first followers of the Apostles
+upon a martyr's tomb never fall upon me! I ought not to fear to
+survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there
+are always some whom one can love.
+
+But the power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with
+age, like all the other energies of man. Example proves it; and it is
+this which terrifies me. Am I sure that I have not myself already
+suffered this great loss? I should surely have felt it, but for the
+happy meeting which has rejuvenated me. Poets speak of the Fountain of
+Youth: it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we
+take. And one passes by without drinking of it!
+
+The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed,
+all gray-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter--so
+that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now once more
+finds a purpose and a reason for being.
+
+To-day I "take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the
+terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite de
+Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. I sit and
+dream. My thoughts escape from my head like the foam from a bottle of
+beer. They are light, and their fizzing amuses me. I dream; such a
+pastime is certainly permissible to an old fellow who has published
+thirty volumes of texts, and contributed to the Journal des Savants
+for twenty-six years. I have the satisfaction of feeling that I
+performed my task as well as it was possible for me, and that I
+utilized to their fullest extent those mediocre faculties with which
+nature endowed me. My efforts were not all in vain, and I have
+contributed, in my own modest way, to that renaissance of historical
+labors which will remain the honor of this restless century. I shall
+certainly be counted among those ten or twelve who revealed to France
+her own literary antiquities. My publication of the poetical works of
+Gautier de Coincy inaugurated a judicious system and made a date. It
+is in the austere calm of old age that I decree to myself this
+deserved credit, and God, who sees my heart, knows whether pride or
+vanity have aught to do with this self-award of justice.
+
+But I am tired; my eyes are dim; my hand trembles, and I see an image
+of myself in those old men of Homer, whose weakness excluded them from
+the battle, and who, seated upon the ramparts, lifted up their voices
+like crickets among the leaves.
+
+So my thoughts were wandering, when three young men seated themselves
+near me. I do not know whether each one of them had come in three
+boats, like the monkey of La Fontaine, but the three certainly
+displayed themselves over the space of twelve chairs. I took pleasure
+in watching them, not because they had anything very extraordinary
+about them, but because I discerned in them that brave joyous manner
+which is natural to youth. They were from the schools. I was less
+assured of it by the books they were carrying than by the character of
+their physiognomy. For all who busy themselves with the things of the
+mind can be at once recognized by an indescribable something which is
+common to all of them. I am very fond of young people; and these
+pleased me, in spite of a certain provoking wild manner which recalled
+to me my own college days with marvelous vividness. But they did not
+wear velvet doublets and long hair, as we used to do; they did not
+walk about, as we used to do, with a death's-head; they did not cry
+out, as we used to do, "Hell and malediction!" They were quite
+properly dressed, and neither their costume nor their language had
+anything suggestive of the Middle Ages. I must also add that they paid
+considerable attention to the women passing on the terrace, and
+expressed their admiration of some of them in very animated language.
+But their reflections, even on this subject, were not of a character
+to oblige me to flee from my seat. Besides, so long as youth is
+studious, I think it has a right to its gayeties.
+
+One of them having made some gallant pleasantry which I forget, the
+smallest and darkest of the three exclaimed, with a slight Gascon
+accent:--
+
+"What a thing to say! Only physiologists like us have any right to
+occupy ourselves about living matter. As for you, Gélis, who only live
+in the past,--like all your fellow archivists and paleographers,--you
+will do better to confine yourself to those stone women over there,
+who are your contemporaries."
+
+And he pointed to the statues of the Ladies of Ancient France which
+towered up, all white, in a half-circle under the trees of the
+terrace. This joke, though in itself trifling, enabled me to know that
+the young man called Gélis was a student at the École des Chartes.
+From the conversation which followed I was able to learn that his
+neighbor, blond and wan almost to diaphaneity, taciturn and sarcastic,
+was Boulmier, a fellow-student. Gélis and the future doctor (I hope he
+will become one some day) discoursed together with much fantasy and
+spirit. In the midst of the loftiest speculations they would play upon
+words, and make jokes after the peculiar fashion of really witty
+persons--that is to say, in a style of enormous absurdity. I need
+hardly say, I suppose, that they only deigned to maintain the most
+monstrous kind of paradoxes. They employed all their powers of
+imagination to make themselves as ludicrous as possible, and all their
+powers of reasoning to assert the contrary of common-sense. All the
+better for them! I do not like to see young folks too rational.
+
+The student of medicine, after glancing at the title of the book that
+Boulmier held in his hand, exclaimed:--
+
+"What!--you read Michelet--you?"
+
+"Yes," replied Boulmier very gravely. "I like novels."
+
+Gélis, who dominated both by his fine stature, imperious gestures, and
+ready wit, took the book, turned over a few pages rapidly, and said:--
+
+"Michelet always had a great propensity to emotional tenderness. He
+wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man who introduced
+_la paperasserie_ into the September massacres. But as emotional
+tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the
+victims. There is no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age.
+The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite
+unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever
+before. There is no common-sense in it; it is simply wonderful!
+Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies
+and fainting spells and epileptic fits over matters which he never
+deigns to explain. Childish outcries--_envies de femme grosse!_--and a
+style, my friends!--not a single finished phrase! It is astounding!"
+
+And he handed the book back to his comrade. "This is amusing madness,"
+I thought to myself, "and not quite so devoid of common-sense as it
+appears. This young man, though only playing, has sharply touched the
+defect in the cuirass."
+
+But the Provençal student declared that history was a thoroughly
+despicable exercise of rhetoric. According to him, the only true
+history was the natural history of man. Michelet was in the right path
+when he came in contact with the fistula of Louis XIV., but he fell
+back into the old rut almost immediately afterwards.
+
+After this judicious expression of opinion, the young physiologist
+went to join a party of passing friends. The two archivists, less well
+acquainted in the neighborhood of a garden so far from the Rue
+Paradis-aux-Marais, remained together, and began to chat about their
+studies. Gélis, who had completed his third class-year, was preparing
+a thesis, on the subject of which he expatiated with youthful
+enthusiasm. Indeed, I thought the subject a very good one,
+particularly because I had recently thought myself called upon to
+treat a notable part of it. It was the 'Monasticum Gallicanum.' The
+young erudite (I give him the name as a presage) wants to describe all
+the engravings made about 1690 for the work which Dom Michel Germain
+would have had printed, but for the one irremediable hindrance which
+is rarely foreseen and never avoided. Dom Michel Germain left his
+manuscript complete, however, and in good order when he died. Shall I
+be able to do as much with mine?--but that is not the present
+question. So far as I am able to understand, M. Gélis intends to
+devote a brief archæological notice to each of the abbeys pictured by
+the humble engravers of Dom Michel Germain.
+
+His friend asked him whether he was acquainted with all the
+manuscripts and printed documents relating to the subject. It was then
+that I pricked up my ears. They spoke at first of original sources;
+and I must confess they did so in a satisfactory manner, despite
+their innumerable and detestable puns. Then they began to speak about
+contemporary studies on the subject.
+
+"Have you read," asked Boulmier, "the notice of Courajod?"
+
+"Good!" I thought to myself.
+
+"Yes," replied Gélis; "it is accurate."
+
+"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the article by Tamisey de Larroque in
+the Revue des Questions Historiques?"
+
+"Good!" I thought to myself, for the second time.
+
+"Yes," replied Gélis, "it is full of things...."
+
+"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the 'Tableau des Abbayes Bénédictines
+en 1600,' by Sylvestre Bonnard?"
+
+"Good!" I said to myself, for the third time.
+
+"_Ma foi!_ no!" replied Gélis. "Bonnard is an idiot!"
+
+Turning my head, I perceived that the shadow had reached the place
+where I was sitting. It was growing chilly, and I thought to myself
+what a fool I was to have remained sitting there, at the risk of
+getting the rheumatism, just to listen to the impertinence of those
+two young fellows!
+
+"Well! well!" I said to myself as I got up. "Let this prattling
+fledgeling write his thesis, and sustain it! He will find my colleague
+Quicherat, or some other professor at the school, to show him what an
+ignoramus he is. I consider him neither more nor less than a rascal;
+and really, now that I come to think of it, what he said about
+Michelet awhile ago was quite insufferable, outrageous! To talk in
+that way about an old master replete with genius! It was simply
+abominable!"
+
+
+
+
+CHILD-LIFE
+
+From 'The Book of My Friend'
+
+
+Everything in immortal nature is a miracle to the little child.
+
+I was happy. A thousand things at once familiar and mysterious filled
+my imagination, a thousand things which were nothing in themselves,
+but which made my life. It was very small, that life of mine; but it
+was a life--which is to say, the centre of all things, the kernel of
+the world. Do not smile at what I say,--or smile only in sympathy, and
+reflect: whoever lives, be it only a dog, is at the centre of all
+things.
+
+Deciding to be a hermit and a saint, and to resign the good things of
+this world, I threw my toys out of the window.
+
+"The child is a fool!" cried my father, closing the window. I felt
+anger and shame at hearing myself thus judged. But immediately I
+considered that my father, not being so holy as I, could never share
+with me the glory of the blessed, and this thought was for me a great
+consolation.
+
+Every Saturday we were taken to confession. If any one will tell me
+why, he will greatly oblige me. The practice inspired me with both
+respect and weariness. I hardly think it probable that M. le Curé took
+a lively interest in hearing my sins; but it was certainly
+disagreeable to me to cite them to him. The first difficulty was to
+find them. You can perhaps believe me, when I declare that at ten
+years of age I did not possess the psychic qualities and the methods
+of analysis which would have made it possible rationally to explore my
+inmost conscience. Nevertheless it was necessary to have sins: for--no
+sins, no confession. I had been given, it is true, a little book which
+contained them all: I had only to choose. But the choice itself was
+difficult. There was so much obscurely said of "larceny, simony,
+prevarication"! I read in the little book, "I accuse myself of having
+despaired; I accuse myself of having listened to evil conversations."
+Even this furnished little wherewith to burden my conscience.
+Therefore ordinarily I confined myself to "distractions." Distractions
+during mass, distractions during meals, distractions in "religious
+assemblies,"--I avowed all; yet the deplorable emptiness of my
+conscience filled me with deep shame. I was humiliated at having no
+sins....
+
+I will tell you what, each year, the stormy skies of autumn, the first
+dinners by lamplight, the yellowing leaves on the shivering trees,
+bring to my mind; I will tell you what I see as I cross the Luxembourg
+garden in the early October days--those sad and beautiful days when
+the leaves fall, one by one, on the white shoulders of the statues
+there.
+
+What I see then is a little fellow who with his hands in his pockets
+is going to school, hopping along like a sparrow. I see him in thought
+only, for he is but a shadow, a shadow of the "me" as I was
+twenty-five years ago. Really, he interests me,--this little fellow.
+When he was living I gave him but little thought, but now that he is
+no more, I love him well. He was worth altogether more than the rest
+of the "me's" that I have been since. He was a happy-hearted boy as he
+crossed the Luxembourg garden in the fresh air of the morning. All
+that he saw then I see to-day. It is the same sky, and the same
+earth; the same soul of things is here as before,--that soul that
+still makes me gay, or sad, or troubled: only _he_ is no more! He was
+heedless enough, but he was not wicked; and in justice to him I must
+declare that he has not left me a single harsh memory. He was an
+innocent child that I have lost. It is natural that I should regret
+him; it is natural that I should see him in thought, and delight in
+recalling him to memory....
+
+Nothing is of more value for giving a child a knowledge of the great
+social machine than the life of the streets. He should see in the
+morning the milkwomen, the water carriers, the charcoal men; he should
+look in the shop windows of the grocer, the pork vender, and the
+wine-seller; he should watch the regiments pass, with the music of the
+band. In short, he should suck in the air of the streets, that he may
+learn that the law of labor is Divine, and that each man has his work
+to do in the world....
+
+Oh! ye sordid old Jews of the Rue Cherche-Midi, and you my masters,
+simple sellers of old books on the quays, what gratitude do I owe you!
+More and better than university professors, have you contributed to my
+intellectual life! You displayed before my ravished eyes the
+mysterious forms of the life of the past, and every sort of monument
+of precious human thought. In ferreting among your shelves, in
+contemplating your dusty display laden with the pathetic relics of our
+fathers and their noble thoughts, I have been penetrated with the most
+wholesome of philosophies. In studying the worm-eaten volumes, the
+rusty iron-work, the worn carvings of your stock, I experienced, child
+as I was, a profound realization of the fluent, changing nature of
+things and the nothingness of all, and I have been always since
+inclined to sadness, to gentleness, and pity.
+
+The open-air school taught me, as you see, great lessons; but the home
+school was more profitable still. The family repast, so charming when
+the glasses are clear, the cloth white, and the faces tranquil,--the
+dinner of each day with its familiar talk,--gives to the child the
+taste for the humble and holy things of life, the love of loving. He
+eats day by day that blessed bread which the spiritual Father broke
+and gave to the pilgrims in the inn at Emmaus, and says, like them,
+"My heart is warmed within me." Ah! how good a school is the school of
+home!...
+
+The little fellow of whom I spoke but just now to you, with a sympathy
+for which you pardon me, perhaps, reflecting that it is not egotistic
+but is addressed only to a shadow,--the little fellow who crossed the
+Luxembourg garden, hopping like a sparrow,--became later an
+enthusiastic humanist.
+
+I studied Homer. I saw Thetis rise like a white mist over the sea, I
+saw Nausicaa and her companions, and the palm-tree of Delos, and the
+sky, and the earth, and the sea, and the tearful smile of Andromache.
+I comprehended, I felt. For six months I lived in the Odyssey. This
+was the cause of numerous punishments: but what to me were _pensums_?
+I was with Ulysses on his violet sea. Alcestis and Antigone gave me
+more noble dreams than ever child had before. With my head swallowed
+up in the dictionary on my ink-stained desk, I saw divine
+forms,--ivory arms falling on white tunics,--and heard voices sweeter
+than the sweetest music, lamenting harmoniously.
+
+This again cost me fresh punishments. They were just; I was "busying"
+myself "with things foreign to the class." Alas! the habit remains
+with me still. In whatever class in life I am put for the rest of my
+days, I fear yet, old as I am, to encounter again the reproach of my
+old professor: "Monsieur Pierre Nozièrre, you busy yourself with
+things foreign to the class."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the evening falls over the plane-trees of the Luxembourg, and the
+little phantom which I have evoked disappears in the shadow. Adieu!
+little "me" whom I have lost, whom I should forever regret, had I not
+found thee again, beautified, in my son!
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS'
+
+
+Irony and pity are two good counselors: the one, who smiles, makes
+life amiable; the other, who weeps, makes it sacred. The Irony that I
+invoke is not cruel. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle
+and benevolent. Her smile calms anger, and it is she who teaches us to
+laugh at fools and sinners whom, but for her, we might be weak enough
+to hate.
+
+
+
+
+ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI
+
+(1182-1226)
+
+BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+
+
+Francis d'Assisi was at first called Francis Bernardone. His father
+Pietro was a merchant of Assisi, much given to the pomps and vanities
+of the world, a lover of France and of everything French. It was after
+a visit to France in 1182 that, rejoining his beloved wife Pica in the
+vale of Umbria, he found that God had given to him a little son. Pica
+called the boy John, in honor of the playmate of the little Christ;
+but Pietro commanded that he should be named Francis, because of the
+bright land from whence he drew the rich silks and thick velvets he
+liked to handle and to sell.
+
+The vale of Umbria is the place for poets; it should be visited in the
+summer, when the roses bloom on the trellises which the early Italian
+painters put as backgrounds to their mothers and children. Florence is
+not far away; and near is the birthplace of one of the fathers of the
+sonnet, Fra Guittone, and of another poet, Propertius.
+
+Francis's childhood, boyhood, and later youth were happy. His father
+denied him no luxury in his power to give; he was sent to the priests
+of the church of St. George. They taught him some Latin and much of
+the Provençal tongue,--for at that time there was no Italian language;
+there were only dialects, and the Provençal was used by the elegant,
+those who loved poetry. Francis Bernardone was one of these; he sang
+the popular Provençal songs of the day to the lute, for he had learned
+music. And so passionately did he long for "excess of it," that, the
+legend says, he stayed up all one night singing a duet with a
+nightingale. The bird conquered; and later, Francis made a poem
+glorifying the Creator who had given such a thrilling voice to it.
+
+Up to the age of twenty-four Francis had been one of the lightest
+hearted and the lightest headed of the rich young men of Assisi. His
+father openly rejoiced in his extravagance, and admired the graceful
+manner with which he wore gay clothes cut in latest fashions of
+France. Madonna Pica, his mother, trembled for his future, while she
+adored him and in spite of herself believed in him. Her neighbors
+reproached her: "Your son throws money away; he is the son of a
+prince!" And Pica, troubled, answered, "He whom you call the child of
+a prince will one day be a child of God."
+
+Pietro was delighted to see his son lead in all the sports of the
+_corti_ of Assisi. The _corti_ were associations of young men addicted
+to Provençal poetry and music and all sorts of gayety. Folgore da San
+Gemiano gives, in a series of sonnets, well translated by Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti, descriptions of their sports arranged according to
+the months. March was the season for
+
+  "--lamprey, salmon, eel, and trout,
+  Dental and dolphin, sturgeon, all the rout
+  Of fish in all the streams that fill the seas."
+
+In April are dances:--
+
+  "And through hollow brass
+  A sound of German music on the air."
+
+When summer came, Folgore says the _corti_ had other things:--
+
+  "For July, in Siena by the willow-tree
+  I give you barrels of white Tuscan wine,
+  In ice far down your cellars stored supine;
+  And morn and eve to eat, in company,
+  Of those vast jellies dear to you and me;
+  Of partridges and youngling pheasants sweet,
+  Boiled capons, sovereign kids;--and let their treat
+  Be veal and garlic, with whom these agree."
+
+Francis was permeated with the ideas of chivalry, and his language was
+its phraseology. So much was he in love with chivalry that he became
+the founder of a new order, whose patroness should be the Lady
+Poverty. Never had there been a time in Europe since the decay of the
+Roman empire, when poverty was more derided. Princes, merchants, even
+many prelates and priests, neglected and contemned the poor. The
+voices of the outcasts and the leper went up to God, and he sent their
+terrible echoes to awaken the heart of Francis.
+
+In Sicily, Frederick II.--the Julian of the time--lived among
+fountains and orange blossoms and gorgeous pomegranate arches,--a type
+of the arrogant voluptuousness of the time, a voluptuousness which
+Dante symbolized later as the leopard. Against this luxury Francis put
+the lady of his love, Poverty. In the 'Poètes Franciscains,' Frederick
+Ozanam says:--
+
+"He thus designated what had become for him the ideal of all
+perfection,--the type of all moral beauty. He loved to personify
+Poverty as the symbolic genius of his time: he imagined her as the
+daughter of Heaven; and he called her by turns the lady of his
+thoughts, his affianced, and his bride."
+
+The towns of Italy were continually at war, in 1206 and thereabout.
+Francis was taken prisoner in a battle of his native townsmen with the
+Perugians. Restless and depressed, unsatisfied by the revelry of his
+comrades, he threw himself into the train of the Count de Brienne, who
+was making war on the German Emperor for the two Sicilies. About this
+time, he was moved to give his fine military clothes to a shivering
+soldier. At Spoleto, after this act of charity, he dreamed that the
+voice of God asked what he valued most in life. "Earthly fame," he
+said.--"But which of two is better for you,--the Master, or the
+servant? And why will you forsake the Master for the servant, the Lord
+for the slave?"--"O Lord, what shall I do?" asked Francis.--"Return
+unto the city," said the voice, "and there it will be told you what
+you shall do and how you may interpret this vision."
+
+He obeyed; he left the army; his old companions were glad to see him,
+and again he joined the _corti_. But he was paler and more silent.
+"You are in love!" his companions said, laughingly.
+
+"I am in truth thinking of a bride more noble, more richly dowered,
+and more beautiful than the world has ever seen."
+
+Pietro was away from home, and his son made donations to the poor. He
+grew more tranquil, though the Voice had not explained its message. He
+knelt at the foot of the crucifix one day in the old chapel of St.
+Damian, and waited. Then the revelation came:--"Francis, go to rebuild
+my house, which is falling into ruin!"
+
+Francis took this command, which seemed to have come from the lips of
+his crucified Redeemer, literally. It meant that he should repair the
+chapel of St. Damian. Later, he accepted it in a broader sense. More
+important things than the walls of St. Damian were falling into ruin.
+
+Francis was a man of action, and one who took life literally. He went
+to his father's shop, chose some precious stuffs, and sold them with
+his horse at Foliquo, for much below their value. Pietro had brought
+Francis up in a princely fashion: why should he not behave as a
+prince? And surely the father who had not grudged the richest of his
+stuffs for the celebrations of the _corti_, would not object to their
+sacrifice at the command of the Voice for the repairing of St. Damian!
+Pietro, who had not heard the Voice, vowed vengeance on his son for
+his foolishness. The priest at St. Damian's had refused the money; but
+Francis threw it into the window, and Pietro, finding it, went away
+swearing that his son had kept some of it. Francis wandered about
+begging stones for the rebuilding of St. Damian's. Pietro, maddened by
+the foolishness of his son, appealed to a magistrate. Francis cast off
+all his garments, and gave them to his father. The Bishop of Assisi
+covered his nakedness with his own mantle until the gown of a poor
+laborer was brought to him. Dipping his right hand in a pile of
+mortar, Francis drew a rough cross upon his breast: "Pietro
+Bernardone," he said, "until now I have called you my father;
+henceforth I can truly say, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' for
+he is my wealth, and in him do I place all my hope."
+
+Francis went away, to build his chapel and sing in the Provençal
+speech hymns in honor of God and of love for his greatness. In June
+1208 he began to preach. He converted two men, one rich and of rank,
+the other a priest. They gave all to the poor, and took up their abode
+near a hospital for lepers. They had no home but the chapel of the
+Angels, near the Portiuncula. This was the beginning of the great
+order of the Friars Minors, the Franciscans.
+
+Francis was the first poet to use the Italian speech--a poet who was
+inspired to change the fate of Europe. "He would never," the author of
+a recent monograph on St. Francis says, "destroy or tread on a written
+page. If it were Christian writing, it might contain the name of God;
+even if it were the work of a pagan, it contained the letters that
+make up the sacred name. When St. Francis, of the people and singing
+for the people, wrote in the vernacular, he asked Fra Pacifico, who
+had been a great poet in the world, to reduce his verses to the rules
+of metre."
+
+St. Bonaventura, Jacomino di Verona, and Jacopone di Todi, the author
+of the 'Stabat Mater,' were Franciscans who followed in his footsteps.
+"The Crusades were," to quote again, "defensive as well as offensive.
+The Sultan, whom St. Francis visited and filled with respect, was not
+far from Christendom." Frederick of Sicily, with his Saracens, menaced
+Assisi itself. Hideous doctrines and practices were rife; and the
+thirty thousand friars who soon enrolled themselves in the band of
+Francis gained the love of the people, preached Christianity anew,
+symbolized it rudely for folk that could not read, and, as St. Francis
+had done, they appealed to the imagination. The legends of St.
+Francis--one can find them in the 'Little Flowers,' of which there are
+at least two good English translations--became the tenderest poems of
+the poor.
+
+If St. Francis had been less of a poet, he would have been less of a
+saint. He died a poet, on October 4, 1226: he asked to be buried on
+the Infernal Hill of Assisi, where the crusaders were laid to rest;
+"and," he said, "sing my 'Canticle of the Sun,' so that I may add a
+song in praise of my sister Death. The lines," he added, "will be
+found at the end of the 'Cantico del Sole.'"
+
+Paul Sabatier's 'Life of St. Francis,' and Mrs. Oliphant's, are best
+known to English-speaking readers. The most exhaustive 'Life' is by
+the Abbé Leon Le Monnier, in two volumes. It has lately been
+translated into English.
+
+                                 [Signature: Maurice Francis Egan]
+
+
+
+
+ORDER
+
+[_Our Lord Speaks_]
+
+
+  And though I fill thy heart with hottest love,
+    Yet in true order must thy heart love me,
+    For without order can no virtue be;
+  By thine own virtue, then, I from above
+  Stand in thy soul; and so, most earnestly,
+  Must love from turmoil be kept wholly free:
+    The life of fruitful trees, the seasons of
+    The circling year move gently as a dove:
+  I measured all the things upon the earth;
+    Love ordered them, and order kept them fair,
+      And love to order must be truly wed.
+  O soul, why all this heat of little worth?
+    Why cast out order with no thought of care?
+      For by love's heat must love be governed?
+
+                                Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.
+
+
+
+
+THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN
+
+
+    [The title is 'Incipiunt Laudes Creaturarum quas fecit
+    Franciscus ad Laudem et Honorem Dei cum esset Infirmus ad
+    Sanctum Damianum.' It is sometimes called the 'Canticle of
+    the Creatures.' It is in Italian, and it opens with these
+    words:--"Altissimi, omnipotente, bon Signore, tue so le laude
+    la gloria e l'onore et omne benedictione."]
+
+O Most High, Almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory,
+honor, and all blessing.
+
+Praised be my Lord God, with all his creatures, and specially our
+brother the sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light;
+fair is he, and he shines with a very great splendor. O Lord, he
+signifies to us thee!
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the
+which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and clouds,
+calms and all weather, by which thou upholdest life in all creatures.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable to
+us, and humble and precious and clean.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us
+light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant, and very mighty
+and strong.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us
+and keep us, and bringest forth divers fruits, and flowers of many
+colors, and grass.
+
+Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for love's
+sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who
+peacefully shall endure, for thou, O Most High, wilt give them a
+crown.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from which no
+man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin. Blessed are those
+who die in thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no
+power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks
+to him and serve him with great humility.
+
+    [The last stanza, in praise of death, was added to the poem
+    on the day St. Francis left the world, October 4th, 1225.]
+
+                                Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN.]
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
+
+(1706-1790)
+
+BY JOHN BIGELOW
+
+
+The youngest son of the seventeen children of a Boston tallow-chandler
+named Franklin was born a subject of Queen Anne of England, on the 6th
+of January, 1706; and on the same day received the baptismal name of
+Benjamin at the Old South Church in that city. He continued for more
+than seventy of the eighty-four years of his life a subject of four
+successive British monarchs. During that period, neither Anne nor
+either of the three Georges who succeeded her had a subject of whom
+they had more reason to be proud, nor one whom at his death their
+people generally supposed they had more reason to detest. No
+Englishman of his generation can now be said to have established a
+more enduring fame, in any way, than Franklin established in many
+ways. As a printer, as a journalist, as a diplomatist, as a statesman,
+as a philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.
+
+On the other hand, it is no disparagement of the services of any of
+his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, to say that no one
+of his generation contributed more effectually to the dissolution of
+the bonds which united the principal British-American colonies to the
+mother country, and towards conferring upon them independence and a
+popular government.
+
+As a practical printer Franklin was reported to have had no superiors;
+as a journalist he exerted an influence not only unrivaled in his day,
+but more potent, on this continent at least, than either of his
+sovereigns or their Parliaments. The organization of a police, and
+later of the militia, for Philadelphia; of companies for extinguishing
+fires; making the sweeping and paving of the streets a municipal
+function; the formation of the first public library for Philadelphia,
+and the establishment of an academy which has matured into the now
+famous University of Pennsylvania, were among the conspicuous reforms
+which he planted and watered in the columns of the Philadelphia
+Gazette. This journal he founded; upon the earnings of it he mainly
+subsisted during a long life, and any sheet of it to-day would bring a
+larger price in the open market probably than a single sheet of any
+other periodical ever published.
+
+Franklin's Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism,
+published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,--better known since
+as Poor Richard,--is still one of the marvels of modern literature.
+Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication,
+exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue
+having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers,
+probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any
+other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the
+first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in
+foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being
+the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity
+entirely to its literary merit.
+
+What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and
+fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its
+reputation was established by its first number, and when its author
+was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years,
+and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward
+to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more
+impatience than now awaits a President's annual message to Congress.
+
+Franklin graduated from journalism into diplomacy as naturally as
+winter glides into spring. This was simply because he was by common
+acclaim the fittest man for any kind of public service the colony
+possessed, and especially for any duty requiring talents for
+persuasion, in which he proved himself to be unquestionably past
+master among the diplomatists of his time.
+
+The question of taxing the Penn proprietary estates in Pennsylvania,
+for the defense of the province from the French and Indians, had
+assumed such an acute stage in 1757 that the Assembly decided to
+petition the King upon the subject; and selected Franklin, then in the
+forty-first year of his age, to visit London and present their
+petition. The next forty-one years of his life were practically all
+spent in the diplomatic service. He was five years absent on this his
+first mission. Every interest in London was against him. He finally
+surmounted all obstacles by a compromise, which pledged the Assembly
+to pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed lands of the
+Penn estate,--the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the
+usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never
+forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.
+
+Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The
+question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust
+upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out
+again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he
+remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the
+surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the colonies would never be
+made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III.
+Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for
+Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his
+arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the
+Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies,
+placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first
+Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the
+imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the
+empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people
+and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on
+ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up
+the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September
+following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to
+be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and
+the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance
+of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly
+favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science.
+While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity,
+which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an
+English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of
+these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the
+Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent
+natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore,
+he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe,
+one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the
+eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three
+editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these
+advantages must be added another of even greater weight: his errand
+there was to assist in dismembering the British Empire, than which
+nothing of a political nature was at this time much nearer every
+Frenchman's heart.
+
+The history of this mission, and how Franklin succeeded in procuring
+from the French King financial aid to the amount of twenty-six
+millions of francs, at times when the very existence of the republic
+depended upon them, and finally a treaty of peace more favorable to
+his country than either England or France wished to concede, has been
+often told; and there is no chapter in the chronicles of this republic
+with which the world is more familiar.
+
+Franklin's reputation grew with his success. "It was," wrote his
+colleague John Adams, "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton,
+Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and
+esteemed than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the
+gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a
+greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon _le grand Franklin_
+would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever
+lived."
+
+A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty of peace in 1783,
+Franklin renewed an application which he had previously made just
+after signing the preliminary treaty, to be relieved of his mission;
+but it was not until the 7th of March, 1785, that Congress adopted a
+resolution permitting "the Honorable Benjamin Franklin to return to
+America as soon as convenient." Three days later, Thomas Jefferson was
+appointed to succeed him.
+
+On the 13th of September, 1785, and after a sojourn of nearly nine
+years in the French capital, first in the capacity of commissioner and
+subsequently of minister plenipotentiary, Franklin once more landed in
+Philadelphia, on the same wharf on which, sixty-two years before, he
+had stepped, a friendless and practically penniless runaway apprentice
+of seventeen.
+
+Though now in his seventy-ninth year, and a prey to infirmities not
+the necessary incidents of old age, he had scarcely unpacked his
+trunks after his return when he was chosen a member of the municipal
+council of Philadelphia, and its chairman. Shortly after, he was
+elected president of Pennsylvania, his own vote only lacking to make
+the vote unanimous. "I have not firmness," he wrote to a friend, "to
+resist the unanimous desire of my countryfolks; and I find myself
+harnessed again into their service another year. They engrossed the
+prime of my life; they have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to
+pick my bones."
+
+He was unanimously re-elected to this dignity for the two succeeding
+years, and while holding that office was chosen a member of the
+convention which met in May 1787 to frame the Constitution under which
+the people of the United States are still living.
+
+With the adoption of that instrument, to which he probably contributed
+as much as any other individual, he retired from official life; though
+not from the service of the public, to which for the remaining years
+of his stay on earth his genius and his talents were faithfully
+consecrated.
+
+Among the fruits of that unfamiliar leisure, always to be remembered
+among the noblest achievements of his illustrious career, was the part
+he had in organizing the first anti-slavery society in the world; and
+as its president, writing and signing the first remonstrance against
+slavery ever addressed to the Congress of the United States.
+
+In surveying the life of Dr. Franklin as a whole, the thing that most
+impresses one is his constant study and singleness of purpose to
+promote the welfare of human society. It was his daily theme as a
+journalist, and his yearly theme as an almanac-maker. It is that
+which first occurs to us when we recall his career as a member of the
+Colonial Assembly; as an agent of the provinces in England; as a
+diplomatist in France; and as a member of the conventions which
+crowned the consistent labors of his long life. Nor are there any now
+so bold as to affirm that there was any other person who could have
+been depended upon to accomplish for his country or the world, what
+Franklin did in any of the several stages of his versatile career.
+
+Though holding office for more than half of his life, the office
+always sought Franklin, not Franklin the office. When sent to England
+as the agent of the colony, he withdrew from business with a modest
+competence judiciously invested mostly in real estate. He never seems
+to have given a thought to its increase. Frugal in his habits, simple
+in his tastes, wise in his indulgences, he died with a fortune neither
+too large nor too small for his fame as a citizen or a patriot. For
+teaching frugality and economy to the colonists, when frugality and
+economy were indispensable to the conservation of their independence
+and manhood, he has been sneered at as the teacher of a
+"candle-end-saving philosophy," and his 'Poor Richard' as a
+"collection of receipts for laying up treasures on earth rather than
+in heaven." Franklin never taught, either by precept or example, to
+lay up treasures on earth. He taught the virtues of industry, thrift,
+and economy, as the virtues supremely important in his time, to keep
+people out of debt and to provide the means of educating and
+dignifying society. He never countenanced the accumulation of wealth
+for its own sake, but for its uses,--its prompt convertibility into
+social comforts and refinements. It would be difficult to name another
+man of any age to whom an ambition to accumulate wealth as an end
+could be imputed with less propriety. Though probably the most
+inventive genius of his age, and thus indirectly the founder of many
+fortunes, he never asked a patent for any of his inventions or
+discoveries. Though one of the best writers of the English language
+that his country has yet produced, he never wrote a line for money
+after he withdrew from the calling by which he made a modest provision
+for his family.
+
+For the remaining half of his life both at home and abroad, though
+constantly operating upon public opinion by his pen, he never availed
+himself of a copyright or received a penny from any publisher or
+patron for any of these labors. In none of the public positions which
+he held, even when minister plenipotentiary, did his pay equal his
+expenditures. He was three years president of Pennsylvania after his
+return from France, and for his services declined to appropriate to
+his own use anything beyond his necessary expenditures for stationery,
+postage, and transportation. It is not by such methods that men
+justly incur the implied reproach of "laying up treasures on earth,"
+or of teaching a candle-end-saving philosophy.
+
+Franklin courted fame no more than fortune. The best of his writings,
+after his retirement from journalism, he never gave to the press at
+all; not even his incomparable autobiography, which is still
+republished more frequently than any of the writings of Dickens or of
+Thackeray. He always wrote for a larger purpose than mere personal
+gratification of any kind. Even his bagatelles and _jeux d'esprit_
+read in the salons of Paris, though apparently intended for the eyes
+of a small circle, were inspired by a desire to make friends and
+create respect for the struggling people and the great cause he
+represented. Few if any of them got into print until many years after
+his decease.
+
+Franklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he
+entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as
+agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too
+eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not
+to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of
+every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly
+correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any
+distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say
+planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long
+resist.
+
+Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from
+his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least
+printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose
+names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about
+him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his
+autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official
+correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and
+correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr.
+Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson,
+Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters,
+Voltaire, the habitués of the Helvétius salon, the Marquis de Ségur,
+the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le
+Veillard, the _maire_ of Passy,--all that we learn of his
+achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or
+many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might
+be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater
+obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and
+except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written
+anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written
+in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began
+to be published a quarter of a century after his death) that we must
+turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this
+last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his
+correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a
+necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the
+posthumous fame to which his correspondence during that period was
+destined to contribute so much. Hence, all the biographies--and they
+are numberless--owe almost their entire interest and value to his own
+pen. All, so far as they are biographies, are autobiographies; and for
+that reason it may be fairly said that all of them are interesting.
+
+It is also quite remarkable that though Franklin's life was a
+continuous warfare, he had no personal enemies. His extraordinary and
+even intimate experience of every phase of human life, from the very
+lowest to the very highest, had made him so tolerant that he regarded
+differences of opinion and of habits much as he regarded the changes
+of the weather,--as good or bad for his purposes, but which, though he
+might sometimes deplore, he had no right to quarrel with or assume
+personal responsibility for. Hence he never said or did things
+personally offensive. The causes that he represented had enemies, for
+he was all his life a reformer. All men who are good for anything have
+such enemies. "I have, as you observe," wrote Franklin to John Jay the
+year that he retired from the French mission, "some enemies in
+England, but they are my enemies as an American; I have also two or
+three in America who are my enemies as a minister; but I thank God
+there are not in the whole world any who are my enemies as a man: for
+by his grace, through a long life, I have been enabled so to conduct
+myself that there does not exist a human being who can justly say,
+'Ben Franklin has wronged me.' This, my friend, is in old age a
+comfortable reflection. You too have or may have your enemies; but let
+not that render you unhappy. If you make a right use of them, they
+will do you more good than harm. They point out to us our faults; they
+put us upon our guard and help us to live more correctly."
+
+Franklin's place in literature as a writer has not been generally
+appreciated, probably because with him writing was only a means, never
+an end, and his ends always dwarfed his means, however effective. He
+wrote to persuade others, never to parade his literary skill. He never
+wrote a dull line, and was never _nimious_. The longest production of
+his pen was his autobiography, written during the closing years of his
+life. Nearly all that he wrote besides was in the form of letters,
+which would hardly average three octavo pages in length. And yet
+whatever the subject he touched upon, he never left the impression of
+incompleteness or of inconclusiveness. Of him may be said, perhaps
+with as much propriety as of any other man, that he never said a word
+too soon, nor a word too late, nor a word too much. Tons of paper have
+been devoted to dissuasives from dueling, but the argument was never
+put more effectively than Franklin put it in these dozen lines of a
+letter to a Mr. Percival, who had sent him a volume of literary and
+moral dissertations.
+
+    "A gentleman in a coffee-house desired another to sit further
+    from him. 'Why so?'--'Because you stink.'--'That is an
+    affront, and you must fight me.'--'I will fight you if you
+    insist upon it, but I do not see how that will mend the
+    matter. For if you kill me, I shall stink too; and if I kill
+    you, you will stink, if possible, worse than at present.' How
+    can such miserable sinners as we are, entertain so much pride
+    as to conceit that every offense against our imagined honor
+    merits death? These petty princes, in their opinion, would
+    call that sovereign a tyrant who should put one of them to
+    death for a little uncivil language, though pointed at his
+    sacred person; yet every one of them makes himself judge in
+    his own cause, condemns the offender without a jury, and
+    undertakes himself to be the executioner."
+
+Some one wrote him that the people in England were abusing the
+Americans and speaking all manner of evil against them. Franklin
+replied that this was natural enough:
+
+    "They impute to us the evil they wished us. They are angry
+    with us, and speak all manner of evil of us; but we flourish
+    notwithstanding. They put me in mind of a violent High Church
+    factor, resident in Boston when I was a boy. He had bought
+    upon speculation a Connecticut cargo of onions which he
+    flattered himself he might sell again to great profit; but
+    the price fell, and they lay upon his hands. He was heartily
+    vexed with his bargain, especially when he observed they
+    began to grow in his store he had filled with them. He showed
+    them one day to a friend. 'Here they are,' said he, 'and they
+    are growing too. I damn them every day, but I think they are
+    like the Presbyterians; the more I curse them, the more they
+    grow.'"
+
+Mr. Jefferson tells us that Franklin was sitting by his side in the
+convention while the delegates were picking his famous declaration of
+Independence to pieces, and seeing how Jefferson was squirming under
+their mutilations, comforted him with the following stories, the rare
+excellence of which has given them a currency which has long since
+worn off their novelty:--
+
+    "'I have made it a rule,' said he, 'whenever in my power, to
+    avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a
+    public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will
+    relate to you.
+
+    "'When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an
+    apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to
+    open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a
+    handsome sign-board with the proper inscription. He composed
+    it in these words: _John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells
+    Hats for ready Money_, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But
+    he thought he would submit it to his friends for their
+    amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word
+    _hatter_ tautologous, because followed by the words _makes
+    hats_, which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The
+    next observed that the word _makes_ might as well be omitted,
+    because his customers would not care who made the hats; if
+    good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.
+    He struck it out. A third said he thought the words _for
+    ready money_ were useless, as it was not the custom of the
+    place to sell on credit: every one who purchased expected to
+    pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood,
+    _John Thompson sells hats_. "_Sells_ hats," says his next
+    friend; "why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What
+    then is the use of that word?" It was stricken out, and
+    _hats_ followed, the rather as there was one painted on the
+    board. So his inscription was ultimately reduced to _John
+    Thompson_, with the figure of a hat subjoined.'"
+
+When the members were about to sign the document, Mr. Hancock is
+reported to have said, "We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling
+different ways; we must all hang together." "Yes," replied Franklin,
+"we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang
+separately."
+
+The Doric simplicity of his style; his incomparable facility of
+condensing a great principle into an apologue or an anecdote, many of
+which, as he applied them, have become the folk-lore of all nations;
+his habitual moderation of statement, his aversion to exaggeration,
+his inflexible logic, and his perfect truthfulness,--made him one of
+the most persuasive men of his time, and his writings a model which no
+one can study without profit. A judicious selection from Franklin's
+writings should constitute a part of the curriculum of every college
+and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure style
+and correct literary taste.
+
+There was one incident in Franklin's life, which, though more
+frequently referred to in terms of reproach than any other, will
+probably count for more in his favor in the Great Assize than any
+other of his whole life. While yet in his teens he became a father
+before he was a husband. He never did what men of the loftiest moral
+pretensions not unfrequently do,--shirk as far as possible any
+personal responsibility for this indiscretion. On the contrary, he
+took the fruit of it to his home; gave him the best education the
+schools of the country then afforded. When he went abroad, this son
+accompanied him, was presented as his son wherever he went, was
+presented in all the great houses in which he himself was received; he
+entered him at the Inns of Court, and in due time had him admitted to
+the English bar; made him his private secretary, and at an early age
+caused him to be appointed by the Crown, Governor of New Jersey. The
+father not only did everything to repair the wrong he had done his
+son, but at a time when he was at the zenith of his fame and official
+importance, publicly proclaimed it as one of the great errors of his
+life. The world has always abounded with bastards; but with the
+exception of crowned heads claiming to hold their sceptres by Divine
+right, and therefore beyond the reach of popular criticism or
+reproach, it would be difficult to name another parent of his
+generation of anything like corresponding eminence with Franklin, who
+had the courage and the magnanimity to expiate such a wrong to his
+offspring so fully and effectively.
+
+Franklin was not a member of the visible Church, nor did he ever
+become the adherent of any sect. He was three years younger than
+Jonathan Edwards, and in his youth heard his share of the then
+prevailing theology of New England, of which Edwards was regarded, and
+perhaps justly, as the most eminent exponent. The extremes to which
+Edwards carried those doctrines at last so shocked the people of
+Massachusetts that he was rather ignominiously expelled from his
+pulpit at Northampton; and the people of Massachusetts, in very
+considerable proportions, gradually wandered over into the Unitarian
+communion. To Jonathan Edwards and the inflexible law of action and
+reaction, more than to Priestley or any one else of their generation,
+that sect owes to this day its numerical strength, its influence, and
+its dignity, in New England. With the creed of that sect Dr. Franklin
+had more in common than with any other, though he was much too wise a
+man to suppose that there was but one gate of admission to the Holy
+City. He believed in one God; that Jesus was the best man that ever
+lived, and his example the most profitable one ever given us to
+follow. He never succeeded in accepting the doctrine that Jehovah and
+Jesus were one person, or that miracles attributed to the latter in
+the Bible were ever worked. He thought the best service and sufficient
+worship of God was in doing all the good we can to his creatures. He
+therefore never occupied himself much with ecclesiastical ceremonies,
+sectarian differences, or theological subtleties. A reverend candidate
+for episcopal orders wrote to Franklin, complaining that the
+Archbishop of Canterbury had refused to ordain him unless he would
+take the oath of allegiance, which he was too patriotic a Yankee to
+do. Franklin, in reply, asked what necessity there was for his being
+connected with the Church of England; if it would not be as well were
+it the Church of Ireland. Perhaps were he to apply to the Bishop of
+Derry, who was a man of liberal sentiments, he might give him orders,
+as of that Church. Should both England and Ireland refuse, Franklin
+assumed that the Bishops of Sweden and Norway would refuse also,
+unless the candidates embraced Lutheranism. He then added:--
+
+    "Next to becoming Presbyterians, the Episcopalian clergy of
+    America, in my humble opinion, cannot do better than to
+    follow the example of the first clergy of Scotland, soon
+    after the conversion of that country to Christianity. When
+    the King had built the cathedral of St. Andrew's, and
+    requested the King of Northumberland to lend his bishops to
+    ordain one for them, that their clergy might not as
+    heretofore be obliged to go to Northumberland for orders, and
+    their request was refused, they assembled in the cathedral,
+    and the mitre, crosier, and robes of a bishop being laid upon
+    the altar, they after earnest prayers for direction in their
+    choice elected one of their own number; when the King said to
+    him, "_Arise, go to the altar, and receive your office at the
+    hand of God._" His brethren led him to the altar, robed him,
+    put the crosier in his hand and the mitre on his head, and he
+    became the first Bishop of Scotland.
+
+    "If the British islands were sunk in the sea (and the surface
+    of this globe has suffered great changes), you would probably
+    take some such method as this; and if they persist in denying
+    your ordination, it is the same thing. A hundred years hence,
+    when people are more enlightened, it will be wondered at that
+    men in America, qualified by their learning and piety to pray
+    for and instruct their neighbors, should not be permitted to
+    do it till they had made a voyage of six thousand miles out
+    and home, to ask leave of a cross old gentleman at
+    Canterbury."
+
+Franklin, however, was in no sense an agnostic. What he could not
+understand he did not profess to understand or believe; neither was
+he guilty of the presumption of holding that what he could not
+understand, he might not have understood if he had been a wiser and
+better man. Though impatient of cant and hypocrisy, especially in the
+pulpit, he never spoke lightly of the Bible, or of the Church and its
+offices. When his daughter Sally was about to marry, he wrote to
+her:--
+
+    "My dear child, the natural prudence and goodness of heart
+    God has blest you with, make it less necessary for me to be
+    particular in giving you advice. I shall therefore only say,
+    that the more attentively dutiful and tender you are towards
+    your good mamma, the more you will recommend yourself to me.
+    But why should I mention _me_, when you have so much higher a
+    promise in the Commandments, that such conduct will recommend
+    you to the favor of God? You know I have many enemies, all
+    indeed on the public account (for I cannot recollect that I
+    have in a private capacity given just cause of offense to any
+    one whatever): yet they are enemies, and very bitter ones;
+    and you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree
+    to you, so that your slightest indiscretions will be
+    magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound
+    and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to
+    be extremely circumspect in all your behavior, that no
+    advantage may be given to their malevolence.
+
+    "Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of
+    devotion in the Common Prayer Book is your principal business
+    there, and if properly attended to will do more towards
+    amending the heart than sermons generally can do. For they
+    were composed by men of much greater piety and wisdom than
+    our common composers of sermons can pretend to be; and
+    therefore I wish you would never miss the prayer days: yet
+    I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the
+    preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better
+    than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very
+    dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head, as you
+    seemed to express a little before I came away some
+    inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you
+    do."
+
+I cannot more fitly close this imperfect sketch of America's
+most illustrious citizen, than by quoting from a touching and
+most affectionate letter from Mrs. Hewson (Margaret Stevenson),--one
+of Franklin's worthiest, most faithful, and most valued
+friends,--addressed to one of Franklin's oldest friends in England.
+
+    "We have lost that valued, venerable, kind friend whose
+    knowledge enlightened our minds and whose philanthropy warmed
+    our hearts. But we have the consolation to think that if a
+    life well spent in acts of universal benevolence to mankind,
+    a grateful acknowledgment of Divine favor, a patient
+    submission under severe chastisement, and an humble trust in
+    Almighty mercy, can insure the happiness of a future state,
+    our present loss is his gain. I was the faithful witness of
+    the closing scene, which he sustained with that calm
+    fortitude which characterized him through life. No repining,
+    no peevish expression ever escaped him during a confinement
+    of two years, in which, I believe, if every moment of ease
+    could be added together, would not amount to two whole
+    months. When the pain was not too violent to be amused, he
+    employed himself with his books, his pen, or in conversation
+    with his friends; and upon every occasion displayed the
+    clearness of his intellect and the cheerfulness of his
+    temper. Even when the intervals from pain were so short that
+    his words were frequently interrupted, I have known him to
+    hold a discourse in a sublime strain of piety. I say this to
+    you because I know it will give you pleasure.
+
+    "I never shall forget one day that I passed with our friend
+    last summer. I found him in bed in great agony; but when that
+    agony abated a little I asked if I should read to him. He
+    said yes; and the first book I met with was Johnson's 'Lives
+    of the Poets.' I read the 'Life of Watts,' who was a favorite
+    author with Dr. Franklin; and instead of lulling him to
+    sleep, it roused him to a display of the powers of his memory
+    and his reason. He repeated several of Watts's 'Lyric Poems,'
+    and descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of them
+    and of their pious author. It is natural for us to wish that
+    an attention to some ceremonies had accompanied that religion
+    of the heart which I am convinced Dr. Franklin always
+    possessed; but let us who feel the benefit of them continue
+    to practice them, without thinking lightly of that piety
+    which could support pain without a murmur, and meet death
+    without terror."
+
+Franklin made a somewhat more definite statement of his views on the
+subject of religion, in reply to an inquiry from President Styles of
+Yale College, who expressed a desire to know his opinion of Jesus of
+Nazareth. Franklin's reply was written the last year of his life, and
+in the eighty-fourth of his age:--
+
+    "You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first
+    time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your
+    curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify
+    it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of
+    the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he
+    ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we
+    render to him is doing good to his other children. That the
+    soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in
+    another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to
+    be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard
+    them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
+
+    "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly
+    desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he
+    left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to
+    see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting
+    changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in
+    England, some doubts as to his Divinity; though it is a
+    question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
+    and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I
+    expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less
+    trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if
+    that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of
+    making his doctrines more respected and more observed;
+    especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it
+    amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of
+    the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
+
+    "I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having
+    experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me
+    prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its
+    continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit
+    of meriting such goodness. My sentiments on this head you
+    will see in the copy of an old letter inclosed, which I wrote
+    in answer to one from an old religionist whom I had relieved
+    in a paralytic case by electricity, and who, being afraid I
+    should grow proud upon it, sent me his serious though rather
+    impertinent caution."
+
+                                         [Signature: John Bigelow]
+
+
+
+
+OF FRANKLIN'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with three
+children into New England about 1682. The conventicles having been
+forbidden by law and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable
+men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was
+prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy
+their mode of religion with freedom. By the same wife he had four
+children more born there, and by a second wife ten more, in all
+seventeen; of which I remember thirteen sitting at one time at his
+table, who all grew up to be men and women, and married. I was the
+youngest son and the youngest child but two, and was born in Boston,
+New England. My mother, the second wife, was Abiah Folger, daughter of
+Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom
+honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in his church history of
+that country, entitled 'Magnalia Christi Americana,' as "_a goodly,
+learned Englishman_," if I remember the words rightly. I have heard
+that he wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was
+printed, which I saw now many years since....
+
+My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was
+put to the grammar school at eight years of age, my father intending
+to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.
+My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very
+early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of
+all his friends that I should certainly make a good scholar,
+encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin too approved
+of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of
+sermons,--I suppose as a stock to set up with,--if I would learn his
+character. I continued, however, at the grammar school not quite one
+year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the
+class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was removed into
+the next class above it, in order to go with that into the third at
+the end of the year. But my father in the mean time,--from a view of
+the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he
+could not well afford, and the mean living many so educated were
+afterwards able to obtain,--reasons that he gave to his friends in my
+hearing,--altered his first intention, took me from the grammar
+school, and sent me to a school for writing and arithmetic, kept by a
+then famous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his
+profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging methods. Under him
+I acquired fair writing pretty soon, but I failed in the arithmetic,
+and made no progress in it. At ten years old I was taken home to
+assist my father in his business, which was that of a tallow-chandler
+and soap-boiler,--a business he was not bred to, but had assumed on
+his arrival in New England, and on finding his dyeing trade would not
+maintain his family, being in little request. Accordingly I was
+employed in cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping-mold and
+the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands, etc.
+
+I disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my
+father declared against it: however, living near the water, I was much
+in and about it, learnt early to swim well and to manage boats; and
+when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to
+govern, especially in any case of difficulty; and upon other occasions
+I was generally a leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into
+scrapes, of which I will mention one instance, as it shows an early
+projecting public spirit, though not then justly conducted.
+
+There was a salt-marsh that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge
+of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much
+trampling we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a
+wharf there, fit for us to stand upon; and I showed my comrades a
+large heap of stones which were intended for a new house near the
+marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the
+evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number of my
+playfellows, and working with them diligently like so many emmets,
+sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought them all away and built
+our little wharf. The next morning the workmen were surprised at
+missing the stones, which were found in our wharf. Inquiry was made
+after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of
+us were corrected by our fathers, and though I pleaded the usefulness
+of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not
+honest.
+
+I continued thus employed in my father's business for two years, that
+is, till I was twelve years old; and my brother John, who was bred to
+that business, having left my father, married, and set up for himself
+at Rhode Island, there was all appearance that I was destined to
+supply his place and become a tallow-chandler. But my dislike to the
+trade continuing, my father was under apprehensions that if he did not
+find one for me more agreeable, I should break away and get to sea, as
+his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation. He therefore sometimes
+took me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners,
+braziers, etc., at their work, that he might observe my inclination,
+and endeavor to fix it on some trade or other on land. It has ever
+since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools;
+and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it as to be
+able to do little jobs myself in my house when a workman could not
+readily be got, and to construct little machines for my experiments,
+while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my
+mind. My father at last fixed upon the cutler's trade, and my uncle
+Benjamin's son Samuel, who was bred to that business in London, being
+about that time established in Boston, I was sent to be with him some
+time on liking. But his expectations of a fee with me displeasing my
+father, I was taken home again.
+
+From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came
+into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's
+Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate
+little volumes. I afterward sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton's
+'Historical Collections'; they were small chapmen's books, and cheap,
+40 or 50 in all. My father's little library consisted chiefly of books
+in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often
+regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more
+proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved I
+should not be a clergyman. Plutarch's Lives there was, in which I read
+abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage.
+There was also a book of De Foe's, called 'An Essay on Projects,' and
+another of Dr. Mather's, called 'Essays To Do Good,' which perhaps
+gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the
+principal future events of my life.
+
+This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a
+printer, though he had already one son (James) of that profession. In
+1717 my brother James returned from England with a press and letters,
+to set up his business in Boston. I liked it much better than that of
+my father, but still had a hankering for the sea. To prevent the
+apprehended effect of such an inclination, my father was impatient to
+have me bound to my brother. I stood out some time, but at last was
+persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve years
+old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of
+age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year.
+In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became
+a useful hand to my brother. I now had access to better books. An
+acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes
+to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and clean.
+Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when
+the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the
+morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.
+
+
+
+
+FRANKLIN'S JOURNEY TO PHILADELPHIA: HIS ARRIVAL THERE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+I proceeded on my journey on foot, having fifty miles to Burlington,
+where I was told I should find boats that would carry me the rest of
+the way to Philadelphia.
+
+It rained very hard all the day; I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon
+a good deal tired; so I stopt at a poor inn, where I stayed all night,
+beginning now to wish that I had never left home. I cut so miserable a
+figure too that I found, by the questions asked me, I was suspected to
+be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that
+suspicion. However, I proceeded the next day, and got in the evening
+to an inn within eight or ten miles of Burlington, kept by one Dr.
+Brown. He entered into conversation with me while I took some
+refreshment; and finding I had read a little, became very sociable and
+friendly. Our acquaintance continued as long as he lived. He had been,
+I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England or
+country in Europe of which he could not give a very particular
+account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an
+unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travestie the
+Bible in doggrel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he
+set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt
+weak minds if his work had been published, but it never was.
+
+At his house I lay that night, and the next morning reached
+Burlington, but had the mortification to find that the regular boats
+were gone a little before my coming, and no other expected to go
+before Tuesday, this being Saturday; wherefore I returned to an old
+woman in the town, of whom I had bought ginger-bread to eat on the
+water, and asked her advice. She invited me to lodge at her house
+till a passage by water should offer; and being tired with my
+foot-traveling, I accepted the invitation. She, understanding I was a
+printer, would have had me stay at that town and follow my business,
+being ignorant of the stock necessary to begin with. She was very
+hospitable, gave me a dinner of ox-cheek with great good-will,
+accepting only of a pot of ale in return; and I thought myself fixed
+till Tuesday should come. However, walking in the evening by the side
+of the river, a boat came by, which I found was going towards
+Philadelphia, with several people in her. They took me in, and as
+there was no wind, we rowed all the way; and about midnight, not
+having yet seen the city, some of the company were confident we must
+have passed it, and would row no farther; the others knew not where we
+were; so we put toward the shore, got into a creek, landed near an old
+fence, with the rails of which we made a fire,--the night being cold,
+in October,--and there we remained till daylight. Then one of the
+company knew the place to be Cooper's Creek, a little above
+Philadelphia, which we saw as soon as we got out of the creek, and
+arrived there about eight or nine o'clock on the Sunday morning, and
+landed at the Market Street wharf.
+
+I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and
+shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your
+mind compare such unlike beginnings with the figure I have since made
+there. I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round
+by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with
+shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for
+lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I
+was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch
+dollar and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of
+the boat for my passage, who at first refused it, on account of my
+rowing, but I insisted on their taking it; a man being sometimes more
+generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty,
+perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.
+
+Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house
+I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and inquiring
+where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to,
+in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in
+Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I
+asked for a threepenny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not
+considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater
+cheapness nor the names of his bread, I bade him give me threepenny
+worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I
+was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and having no room in my
+pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm and eating the other.
+Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the
+door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the
+door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward,
+ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and
+part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way, and coming round
+found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to
+which I went for a draught of the river water; and being filled with
+one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came
+down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther.
+
+Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had
+many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I
+joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the
+Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and after looking
+round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labor
+and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and
+continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to
+rouse me. This was therefore the first house I was in, or slept in, in
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+
+
+FRANKLIN AS A PRINTER
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+I now began to think of getting a little money beforehand, and
+expecting better work, I left Palmer's to work at Watts's, near
+Lincoln's Inn Fields, a still greater printing-house. Here I continued
+all the rest of my stay in London.
+
+At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at
+press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been used
+to in America, where presswork is mixed with composing. I drank only
+water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of
+beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types
+in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered
+to see, from this and several instances, that the _Water American_, as
+they called me, was _stronger_ than themselves, who drank _strong_
+beer! We had an alehouse boy, who attended always in the house to
+supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint
+before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a
+pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the
+afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's
+work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he
+supposed, to drink _strong_ beer that he might be _strong_ to labor. I
+endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer
+could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley
+dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour
+in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a
+pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.
+He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his
+wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was
+free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.
+
+Watts after some weeks desiring to have me in the composing-room, I
+left the pressmen: a new _bien venu_ or sum for drink, being five
+shillings, was demanded of me by the compositors. I thought it an
+imposition, as I had paid below: the master thought so too, and
+forbade my paying it. I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly
+considered as an excommunicate, and had so many little pieces of
+private mischief done me, by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages,
+breaking my matter, etc., etc., if I were ever so little out of the
+room,--and all ascribed to the chappel ghost, which they said ever
+haunted those not regularly admitted,--that notwithstanding the
+master's protection I found myself obliged to comply and pay the
+money, convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is
+to live with continually.
+
+I was now on a fair footing with them, and soon acquired considerable
+influence. I proposed some reasonable alterations in their chappel
+laws, and carried them against all opposition. From my example, a
+great part of them left their muddling breakfast of beer and bread and
+cheese, finding they could with me be supplied from a neighboring
+house with a large porringer of hot water-gruel sprinkled with pepper,
+crumbed with bread, and a bit of butter in it, for the price of a pint
+of beer; viz., three half-pence. This was a more comfortable as well
+as cheaper breakfast, and kept their heads clearer. Those who
+continued sotting with beer all day were often, by not paying, out of
+credit at the alehouse, and used to make interest with me to get beer;
+their _light_, as they phrased it, _being out_. I watched the
+pay-table on Saturday night, and collected what I stood engaged for
+them, having to pay sometimes near thirty shillings a week on their
+account. This, and my being esteemed a pretty good _rigile_,--that is,
+a jocular verbal satirist,--supported my consequence in the society.
+My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to
+the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being
+put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid. So I
+went on now very agreeably.
+
+
+
+
+RULES OF HEALTH
+
+From Poor Richard's Almanack: 1742
+
+
+Eat and drink such an exact quantity as the constitution of thy body
+allows of, in reference to the services of the mind.
+
+They that study much ought not to eat as much as those that work hard,
+their digestion being not so good.
+
+The exact quantity and quality being found out, is to be kept to
+constantly.
+
+Excess in all other things whatever, as well as in meat and drink, is
+also to be avoided.
+
+Youth, age, and sick require a different quantity.
+
+And so do those of contrary complexions; for that which is too much
+for a phlegmatic man, is not sufficient for a choleric.
+
+The measure of food ought to be (as much as possibly may be) exactly
+proportionable to the quality and condition of the stomach, because
+the stomach digests it.
+
+That quantity that is sufficient, the stomach can perfectly concoct
+and digest, and it sufficeth the due nourishment of the body.
+
+A greater quantity of some things may be eaten than of others, some
+being of lighter digestion than others.
+
+The difficulty lies in finding out an exact measure; but eat for
+necessity, not pleasure: for lust knows not where necessity ends.
+
+Wouldst thou enjoy a long life, a healthy body, and a vigorous mind,
+and be acquainted also with the wonderful works of God, labor in the
+first place to bring thy appetite to reason.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAY TO WEALTH
+
+From Poor Richard's Almanack
+
+
+Courteous reader, I have heard that nothing gives an author so great
+pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by others. Judge,
+then, how much I must have been gratified by an incident I am going to
+relate to you. I stopped my horse lately where a great number of
+people were collected at an auction of merchants' goods. The hour of
+the sale not being come, they were conversing on the badness of the
+times; and one of the company called to a plain, clean old man with
+white locks: "Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the times? Will
+not these heavy taxes quite ruin the country? How shall we ever be
+able to pay them? What would you advise us to?" Father Abraham stood
+up and replied, "If you would have my advice, I will give it you in
+short; for 'A word to the wise is enough,' as Poor Richard says." They
+joined in desiring him to speak his mind, and gathering round him, he
+proceeded as follows:--
+
+"Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those
+laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might
+more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more
+grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness,
+three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly;
+and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by
+allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and
+something may be done for us: 'God helps them that help themselves,'
+as Poor Richard says....
+
+"Beware of little expenses: 'A small leak will sink a great ship,' as
+Poor Richard says; and again, 'Who dainties love, shall beggars
+prove;' and moreover, 'Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.'
+
+"Here you are all got together at this sale of fineries and
+knick-knacks. You call them _goods_; but if you do not take care, they
+will prove _evils_ to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap,
+and perhaps they may, for less than they cost; but if you have no
+occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor
+Richard says: 'Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt
+sell thy necessaries.' And again, 'At a great pennyworth pause a
+while.' He means that perhaps the cheapness is apparent only and not
+real; or the bargain, by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee
+more harm than good. For in another place he says, 'Many have been
+ruined by buying good pennyworths.' Again, 'It is foolish to lay out
+money in a purchase of repentance;' and yet this folly is practiced
+every day at auctions, for want of minding the Almanack. Many a one,
+for the sake of finery on the back, have gone with a hungry belly and
+half starved their families. 'Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets,
+put out the kitchen fire,' as Poor Richard says.
+
+"These are not the necessaries of life; they can scarcely be called
+the conveniences: and yet, only because they look pretty, how many
+want to have them! By these and other extravagances the genteel are
+reduced to poverty, and forced to borrow of those whom they formerly
+despised, but who through industry and frugality have maintained their
+standing; in which case it appears plainly that 'A plowman on his legs
+is higher than a gentleman on his knees,' as poor Richard says.
+Perhaps they have had a small estate left them, which they knew not
+the getting of; they think, 'It is day, and will never be night;' that
+a little to be spent out of so much is not worth minding; but 'Always
+taking out of the meal-tub and never putting in, soon comes to the
+bottom,' as Poor Richard says; and then, 'When the well is dry, they
+know the worth of water.' But this they might have known before, if
+they had taken his advice. 'If you would know the value of money, go
+and try to borrow some: for he that goes a-borrowing goes
+a-sorrowing,' as Poor Richard says; and indeed, so does he that lends
+to such people, when he goes to get it in again. Poor Dick further
+advises and says:--
+
+  'Fond pride of dress is sure a very curse;
+  Ere fancy you consult, consult your purse.'
+
+And again, 'Pride is as loud a beggar as Want, and a great deal more
+saucy.' When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more,
+that your appearance may be all of a piece; but Poor Dick says, 'It is
+easier to suppress the first desire, than to satisfy all that follow
+it.' And it is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the
+frog to swell in order to equal the ox.
+
+  'Vessels large may venture more,
+  But little boats should keep near shore.'
+
+It is however a folly soon punished; for, as Poor Richard says, 'Pride
+that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. Pride breakfasted with Plenty,
+dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy.' And after all, of what
+use is this pride of appearance, for which so much is risked, so much
+is suffered? It cannot promote health nor ease pain; it makes no
+increase of merit in the person; it creates envy; it hastens
+misfortune.
+
+"But what madness must it be to _run in debt_ for these superfluities!
+We are offered by the terms of this sale six months' credit; and that
+perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare
+the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But ah! think
+what you do when you run in debt: you give to another power over your
+liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see
+your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will
+make poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your
+veracity and sink into base downright lying; for 'The second vice is
+lying, the first is running in debt,' as Poor Richard says: and again
+to the same purpose, 'Lying rides upon Debt's back;' whereas a
+free-born Englishman ought not to be ashamed nor afraid to see or
+speak to any man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all
+spirit and virtue. 'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'
+
+"What would you think of that prince or of that government who should
+issue an edict forbidding you to dress like a gentleman or a
+gentlewoman, on pain of imprisonment or servitude? Would you not say
+that you were free, have a right to dress as you please; and that such
+an edict would be a breach of your privileges, and such a government
+tyrannical? And yet you are about to put yourself under such tyranny,
+when you run in debt for such dress! Your creditor has authority, at
+his pleasure, to deprive you of your liberty by confining you in jail
+till you shall be able to pay him. When you have got your bargain, you
+may perhaps think little of payment; but as Poor Richard says,
+'Creditors have better memories than debtors; creditors are a
+superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.' The day
+comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you
+are prepared to satisfy it; or if you bear your debt in mind, the
+term which at first seemed so long will, as it lessens, appear
+extremely short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as
+well as his shoulders. 'Those have a short Lent who owe money to be
+paid at Easter.' At present, perhaps, you may think yourselves in
+thriving circumstances, and that you can bear a little extravagance
+without injury, but--
+
+  'For age and want save while you may;
+  No morning sun lasts a whole day.'
+
+Gain may be temporary and uncertain, but ever while you live, expense
+is constant and certain; and 'It is easier to build two chimneys than
+to keep one in fuel,' as Poor Richard says; so, 'Rather go to bed
+supperless than rise in debt.'
+
+  'Get what you can, and what you get hold;
+  'Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.'
+
+And when you have got the Philosopher's Stone, sure you will no longer
+complain of bad times or the difficulty of paying taxes.
+
+"This doctrine, my friends, is reason and wisdom: but after all, do
+not depend too much upon your own industry and frugality and prudence,
+though excellent things; for they may all be blasted, without the
+blessing of Heaven; and therefore ask that blessing humbly, and be not
+uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it; but comfort and
+help them. Remember, Job suffered and was afterwards prosperous.
+
+"And now, to conclude, 'Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will
+learn in no other,' as Poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it
+is true, 'We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.' However,
+remember this: 'They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped;'
+and further, that 'If you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap
+your knuckles,' as Poor Richard says."
+
+Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and
+approved the doctrine; and immediately practiced the contrary, just as
+if it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened and they began
+to buy extravagantly. I found the good man had thoroughly studied my
+Almanacks, and digested all I had dropped on these topics during the
+course of twenty-five years. The frequent mention he made of me must
+have tired any one else; but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with
+it, though I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my
+own, which he had ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings that I had
+made of the sense of all ages and nations. However, I resolved to be
+the better for the echo of it; and though I had at first determined to
+buy stuff for a new coat, I went away resolved to wear my old one a
+little longer. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy profit will be as
+great as mine. I am, as ever, thine to serve thee,
+
+                                                   RICHARD SAUNDERS.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH IN THE FEDERAL CONVENTION, IN FAVOR OF OPENING ITS SESSIONS
+WITH PRAYER
+
+
+_Mr. President:_
+
+The small progress we have made, after four or five weeks' close
+attendance and continual reasons with each other, our different
+sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as
+many _Noes_ as _Ayes_, is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the
+imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to _feel_ our
+own want of political wisdom, since we have been running all about in
+search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of
+government, and examined the different forms of those republics,
+which, having been originally formed with the seeds of their own
+dissolution, now no longer exist; and we have viewed modern States all
+round Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our
+circumstances.
+
+In this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the dark to
+find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented
+to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once
+thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our
+understandings? In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we
+were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for the
+Divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard; and they were
+graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must
+have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our
+favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of
+consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national
+felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we
+imagine we no longer need its assistance? I have lived, sir, a long
+time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this
+truth, _that_ GOD _governs in the affairs of men_. And if a sparrow
+cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an
+empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the
+sacred writings, that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in
+vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that
+without his concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political
+building no better than the builders of Babel: we shall be divided by
+our little partial local interests, our projects will be confounded,
+and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future
+ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate
+instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom, and
+leave it to chance, war, and conquest.
+
+I therefore beg leave to move,--
+
+That henceforth prayers, imploring the assistance of Heaven and its
+blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning
+before we proceed to business; and that one or more of the clergy of
+this city be requested to officiate in that service.
+
+
+
+
+ON WAR
+
+
+I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war. Abstracted
+from the inhumanity of it, I think it wrong in point of human
+prudence; for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another,
+whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with
+them, free passage on their rivers, etc., it would be much cheaper to
+purchase such advantage with ready money than to pay the expense of
+acquiring it by war. An army is a devouring monster; and when you have
+raised it, you have, in order to subsist it, not only the fair charges
+of pay, clothing, provisions, arms, and ammunition, with numberless
+other contingent and just charges to answer and satisfy, but you have
+all the additional knavish charges of the numerous tribe of
+contractors to defray, with those of every other dealer who furnishes
+the articles wanted for your army, and takes advantage of that want to
+demand exorbitant prices. It seems to me that if statesmen had a
+little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars
+would be much less frequent. I am confident that Canada might have
+been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money England spent
+in the conquest of it. And if instead of fighting with us for the
+power of taxing us, she had kept us in good humor by allowing us to
+dispose of our own money, and now and then giving us a little of hers,
+by way of donation to colleges, or hospitals, or for cutting canals,
+or fortifying ports, she might have easily drawn from us much more by
+our occasional voluntary grants and contributions than ever she could
+by taxes. Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry
+pump, that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for.
+Her ministry were deficient in that little point of common-sense; and
+so they spent one hundred millions of her money and after all lost
+what they contended for.
+
+
+
+
+REVENGE
+
+LETTER TO MADAME HELVÉTIUS
+
+
+Mortified at the barbarous resolution pronounced by you so positively
+yesterday evening,--that you would remain single the rest of your
+life, as a compliment due to the memory of your husband,--I retired to
+my chamber. Throwing myself upon my bed, I dreamt that I was dead, and
+was transported to the Elysian Fields.
+
+I was asked whether I wished to see any persons in particular; to
+which I replied that I wished to see the philosophers.--"There are two
+who live here at hand in this garden; they are good neighbors, and
+very friendly towards one another."--"Who are they?"--"Socrates and
+Helvétius."--"I esteem them both highly; but let me see Helvétius
+first, because I understand a little French, but not a word of Greek."
+I was conducted to him: he received me with much courtesy, having
+known me, he said, by character, some time past. He asked me a
+thousand questions relative to the war, the present state of religion,
+of liberty, of the government in France. "You do not inquire, then,"
+said I, "after your dear friend, Madame Helvétius; yet she loves you
+exceedingly: I was in her company not more than an hour ago." "Ah,"
+said he, "you make me recur to my past happiness, which ought to be
+forgotten in order to be happy here. For many years I could think of
+nothing but her, though at length I am consoled. I have taken another
+wife, the most like her that I could find; she is not indeed
+altogether so handsome, but she has a great fund of wit and good
+sense; and her whole study is to please me. She is at this moment gone
+to fetch the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me; stay here awhile
+and you will see her." "I perceive," said I, "that your former friend
+is more faithful to you than you are to her; she has had several good
+offers, but refused them all. I will confess to you that I loved her
+extremely; but she was cruel to me, and rejected me peremptorily for
+your sake." "I pity you sincerely," said he, "for she is an excellent
+woman, handsome and amiable. But do not the Abbé de la Roche and the
+Abbé Morellet visit her?"--"Certainly they do; not one of your friends
+has dropped her acquaintance."--"If you had gained the Abbé Morellet
+with a bribe of good coffee and cream, perhaps you would have
+succeeded: for he is as deep a reasoner as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas:
+he arranges and methodizes his arguments in such a manner that they
+are almost irresistible. Or if by a fine edition of some old classic
+you had gained the Abbé de la Roche to speak _against_ you, that would
+have been still better; as I always observed that when he recommended
+anything to her, she had a great inclination to do directly the
+contrary." As he finished these words the new Madame Helvétius entered
+with the nectar, and I recognized her immediately as my former
+American friend Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she answered me
+coldly:--"I was a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four
+months,--nearly half a century; let that content you. I have formed a
+new connection here, which will last to eternity."
+
+Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately resolved to
+quit those ungrateful shades, and return to this good world again, to
+behold the sun and you! Here I am: let us _avenge ourselves_!
+
+
+
+
+THE EPHEMERA; AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE
+
+LETTER TO MADAME BRILLON OF PASSY, WRITTEN IN 1778
+
+
+You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy
+day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I
+stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the
+company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little
+fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told,
+were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living
+company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation.
+You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great
+application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the
+little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened
+through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as
+they in their natural vivacity spoke three, or four together, I could
+make but little of their conversation. I found however by some broken
+expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on
+the merit of two foreign musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a
+_moscheto_; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as
+regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living
+a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise,
+just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to
+complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and
+imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old
+gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to
+himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in
+hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the
+most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly
+harmony.
+
+"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race
+who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world,
+the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours;
+and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the
+apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature,
+and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the
+ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be
+extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in
+cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and
+destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no
+less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
+continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
+My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends
+of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them;
+for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect
+to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my
+toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot
+live to enjoy? What the political struggles I have been engaged in for
+the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my
+philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general? for in
+politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of
+ephemeræ will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of
+other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in
+philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is
+short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I
+shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to
+nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no
+longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth
+hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to
+its end, and be buried in universal ruin?"
+
+To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but
+the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible
+conversation of a few good lady ephemeræ, and now and then a kind
+smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.
+
+
+
+
+A PROPHECY
+
+LETTER TO LORD KAMES, JANUARY 3D, 1760
+
+
+No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of
+Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a
+Briton. I have long been of opinion that _the foundations of the
+future grandeur and stability of the British empire lie in America_;
+and though like other foundations they are low and little now, they
+are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest
+political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected. I am therefore
+by no means for restoring Canada. If we keep it, all the country from
+the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled
+with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous,
+by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic sea will be
+covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence
+continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole
+globe, and awe the world! If the French remain in Canada they will
+continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede if not
+prevent their growth; your progress to greatness will at best be
+slow, and give room for many accidents that may forever prevent it.
+But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant,
+and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.
+
+
+
+
+EARLY MARRIAGES
+
+LETTER TO JOHN ALLEYNE, DATED CRAVEN STREET, AUGUST 9TH, 1768
+
+
+You desire, you say, my impartial thoughts on the subject of an early
+marriage, by way of answer to the numberless objections that have been
+made by numerous persons to your own. You may remember, when you
+consulted me on the occasion, that I thought youth on both sides to be
+no objection. Indeed, from the marriages that have fallen under my
+observation, I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the
+best chance of happiness. The temper and habits of the young are not
+become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life; they
+form more easily to each other, and hence many occasions of disgust
+are removed. And if youth has less of that prudence which is necessary
+to manage a family, yet the parents and elder friends of young married
+persons are generally at hand to afford their advice, which amply
+supplies that defect; and by early marriage, youth is sooner formed to
+regular and useful life; and possibly some of those accidents or
+connections that might have injured the constitution or reputation, or
+both, are thereby happily prevented.
+
+Particular circumstances of particular persons may possibly sometimes
+make it prudent to delay entering into that state; but in general,
+when nature has rendered our bodies fit for it, the presumption is in
+nature's favor, that she has not judged amiss in making us desire it.
+Late marriages are often attended, too, with this further
+inconvenience: that there is not the same chance that the parents will
+live to see their offspring educated. "_Late children_," says the
+Spanish proverb, "_are early orphans_." A melancholy reflection to
+those whose case it may be! With us in America, marriages are
+generally in the morning of life; our children are therefore educated
+and settled in the world by noon: and thus, our business being done,
+we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves;
+such as our friend at present enjoys. By these early marriages we are
+blessed with more children; and from the mode among us, founded by
+nature, every mother suckling and nursing her own child, more of them
+are raised. Thence the swift progress of population among us,
+unparalleled in Europe.
+
+In fine, I am glad you are married, and congratulate you most
+cordially upon it. You are now in the way of becoming a useful
+citizen; and you have escaped the unnatural state of celibacy for
+life, the fate of many here who never intended it, but who, having too
+long postponed the change of their condition, find at length that it
+is too late to think of it, and so live all their lives in a situation
+that greatly lessens a man's value. An odd volume of a set of books
+bears not the value of its proportion to the set. What think you of
+the odd half of a pair of scissors? It cannot well cut anything; it
+may possibly serve to scrape a trencher.
+
+Pray make my compliments and best wishes acceptable to your bride. I
+am old and heavy, or I should ere this have presented them in person.
+I shall make but small use of the old man's privilege, that of giving
+advice to younger friends. Treat your wife always with respect: it
+will procure respect to you, not only from her, but from all that
+observe it. Never use a slighting expression to her, even in jest; for
+slights in jest, after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry
+earnest. Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be
+industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate,
+and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be
+happy: at least, you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for
+such consequences. I pray God to bless you both; being ever your
+affectionate friend.
+
+
+
+
+THE ART OF VIRTUE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+We have an English proverb that says, "_He that would thrive must ask
+his wife_." It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to
+industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me cheerfully in my
+business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing
+old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc. We kept no idle
+servants; our table was plain and simple, our furniture of the
+cheapest. For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and milk
+(no tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer, with a
+pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families, and make a
+progress, in spite of principle: being called one morning to
+breakfast, I found it in a china bowl, with a spoon of silver! They
+had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife, and had cost
+her the enormous sum of three-and-twenty shillings, for which she had
+no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought _her_ husband
+deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his
+neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate and china in our
+house, which afterward, in a course of years, as our wealth increased,
+augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value.
+
+I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and though some of
+the dogmas of that persuasion, such as _the eternal decrees of God,
+election, reprobation_, etc., appeared to me unintelligible, others
+doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of
+the sect (Sunday being my studying day), I never was without some
+religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of
+the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence;
+that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man;
+that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished and
+virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the
+essentials of every religion; and being to be found in all the
+religions we had in our country, I respected them all, though with
+different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mixed with
+other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or
+confirm morality, served principally to divide us and make us
+unfriendly to one another. This respect to all, with an opinion that
+the worst had some good effects, induced me to avoid all discourse
+that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his
+own religion; and as our province increased in people, and new places
+of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary
+contribution, my mite for such purpose, whatever might be the sect,
+was never refused.
+
+Though I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of
+its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I
+regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only
+Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He used to
+visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to attend his
+administrations; and I was now and then prevailed on to do so, once
+for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a good
+preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion
+I had for the Sunday's leisure in my course of study; but his
+discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of
+the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry,
+uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was
+inculcated or enforced; their aim seeming to be rather to make us
+Presbyterians than good citizens.
+
+At length he took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of
+Philippians, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest,
+just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue or any
+praise, think on these things." And I imagined, in a sermon on such a
+text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confined
+himself to five points only, as meant by the Apostle, viz.:--1.
+Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy
+Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the public worship. 4. Partaking of the
+Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God's ministers.--These might be
+all good things; but as they were not the kind of good things that I
+expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from
+any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more. I had
+some years before composed a little liturgy, or form of prayer, for my
+own private use (viz., in 1728), entitled 'Articles of Belief and Acts
+of Religion.' I returned to the use of this, and went no more to the
+public assemblies. My conduct might be blamable, but I leave it,
+without attempting further to excuse it; my present purpose being to
+relate facts, and not to make apologies for them.
+
+It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of
+arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any
+fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural
+inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or
+thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might
+not always do the one and avoid the other....
+
+I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the
+virtues. I ruled each page with red ink so as to have seven columns,
+one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for
+the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the
+beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues,
+on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little
+black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been
+committed respecting that virtue upon that day.
+
+And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom, I thought it right
+and necessary to solicit his assistance for obtaining it; to this end
+I formed the following little prayer, which was prefixed to my tables
+of examination, for daily use:--
+
+    "O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide!
+    Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest
+    interest. Strengthen my resolutions to perform what that
+    wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children
+    as the only return in my power for thy continual favors to
+    me."
+
+I used also sometimes a little prayer which I took from Thomson's
+Poems, viz.:--
+
+  "Father of light and life, thou Good supreme!
+  O teach me what is good; teach me thyself!
+  Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
+  From every low pursuit; and fill my soul
+  With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
+  Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!"
+
+I entered upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and
+continued it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was
+surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined;
+but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.
+
+My scheme of _Order_ gave me the most trouble; and I found that though
+it might be practicable where a man's business was such as to leave
+him the disposition of his time,--that of a journeyman printer, for
+instance,--it was not possible to be exactly observed by a master, who
+must mix with the world, and often receive people of business at their
+own hours. _Order_, too, with regard to places for things, papers,
+etc., I found extremely difficult to acquire. I had not been early
+accustomed to it; and having an exceeding good memory, I was not so
+sensible of the inconvenience attending want of method. This article,
+therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it
+vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had
+such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the
+attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that respect;
+like the man who in buying an axe of a smith, my neighbor, desired to
+have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith
+consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he
+turned, while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard and
+heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The
+man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went
+on, and at length would take his axe as it was without farther
+grinding. "No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have it
+bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes," says the man,
+"_but I think I like a speckled axe best_." And I believe this may
+have been the case with many who, having for want of some such means
+as I employed, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad
+habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle
+and concluded that "_a speckled axe was best_": for something that
+pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that
+such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery
+in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a
+perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being
+envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults
+in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.
+
+In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to order; and now I
+am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.
+But on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been
+so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the
+endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been
+if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by
+imitating the engraved copies, though they never reach the wished-for
+excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and
+is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.
+
+It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little
+artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor owed the constant
+felicity of his life down to his 79th year, in which this is written.
+What reverses may attend the remainder is in the hand of Providence;
+but if they arrive, the reflection on past happiness enjoyed ought to
+help his bearing them with more resignation. To Temperance he ascribes
+his long-continued health, and what is still left to him of a good
+constitution; to Industry and Frugality, the early easiness of his
+circumstances and acquisition of his fortune, with all that knowledge
+that enabled him to be a useful citizen, and obtained for him some
+degree of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice, the
+confidence of his country, and the honorable employs it conferred upon
+him; and to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even
+in the imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that evenness
+of temper, and that cheerfulness in conversation, which makes his
+company still sought for, and agreeable even to his younger
+acquaintance. I hope therefore that some of my descendants may follow
+the example and reap the benefit.
+
+It will be remarked that though my scheme was not wholly without
+religion, there was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets
+of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for being fully
+persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it
+might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some
+time or other to publish it, I would not have anything in it that
+should prejudice any one of any sect against it.
+
+In this piece it was my design to explain and enforce this doctrine:
+that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but
+forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
+considered; that it was therefore every one's interest to be virtuous,
+who wished to be happy even in this world; and I should from this
+circumstance (there being always in the world a number of rich
+merchants, nobility, States, and princes who have need of honest
+instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so
+rare) have endeavored to convince young persons that no qualities were
+so likely to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and
+integrity.
+
+My list of virtues contained at first but twelve: but a Quaker friend
+having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my
+pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content
+with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing
+and rather insolent, of which he convinced me by mentioning several
+instances;--I determined endeavoring to cure myself, if I could, of
+this vice or folly among the rest, and I added _Humility_ to my list,
+giving an extensive meaning to the word.
+
+I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the _reality_ of this
+virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the _appearance_ of it.
+I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments
+of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself,
+agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or
+expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as
+_certainly_, _undoubtedly_, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, _I
+conceive_, _I apprehend_, or _I imagine_ a thing to be so or so; or it
+_so appears to me at present_. When another asserted something that I
+thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him
+abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his
+proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain
+cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present
+case there _appeared_ or _seemed_ to me some difference, etc. I soon
+found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I
+engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed
+my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction;
+I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I
+more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join
+with me when I happened to be in the right.
+
+And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural
+inclination, became at length so easy and so habitual to me, that
+perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical
+expression escape me. And to this habit (after my character of
+integrity) I think it principally owing that I had early so much
+weight with my fellow-citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
+alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when
+I became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent,
+subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in
+language: and yet I generally carried my points.
+
+In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to
+subdue as _pride_. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle
+it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will
+every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it perhaps
+often in this history; for even if I could conceive that I had
+completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
+
+
+
+
+LOUIS HONORÉ FRECHETTE
+
+(1839-)
+
+BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+
+
+Louis Honoré Fréchette, the best known of the French-Canadian poets,
+was born near the forties, at Lévis, a suburb of Quebec. He is
+patriotic; his genius is plainly that of New France, while the form of
+it is of that older France which produced the too exquisite sonnets of
+Voiture; and what counts greatly with the Canadians, he has received
+the approbation of the Academy; he is a personage in Paris, where he
+spends a great deal of time. From 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary
+Workers: Montreal, 1873), we learn that the father of M. Fréchette was
+a man of business, and that he did not encourage his son's poetic
+tendencies to the detriment of the practical side of his character.
+
+Lévis has traditions which are part of that stirring French-Canadian
+history now being made known to us by Mrs. Catherwood and Gilbert
+Parker. And the great St. Lawrence spoke to him in
+
+  "All those nameless voices, which are
+  Beating at the heart."
+
+At the age of eight he began to write verses. He was told by his
+careful father that poets never become rich; but he still continued
+to make verses. He grew to be a philosopher as well as a poet, and a
+little later became firmly of Horace's opinion, that a poet to be
+happy does not need riches gained by work. His father, who no doubt
+felt that a philosopher of this cult was not fit for the world, sent
+him to the Seminary at Quebec. At the Seminary he continued to write
+verses. The teachers there found merit in the verses. The "nameless
+voices" still beat at his heart, though the desks of the preparatory
+college had replaced the elms of the St. Lawrence. But poets are so
+rare that even when one is caught young, his captors doubt his
+species. The captors in this case determined to see whether Pegasus
+could trot as well as gallop. "Transport yourself, little Fréchette,"
+they said, "to the Council of Clermont and be a troubadour." What is
+time to the poet? He became a troubadour: but this was not enough; his
+preceptors were still in doubt; they locked him in a room and gave him
+as a subject the arrival of Mgr. de Laval in Canada. An hour passed;
+the first sufferings of the young poet having abated, he produced his
+verses. It was evident that Pegasus could acquire any pace. His
+talent was questioned no more.
+
+    [Illustration: _MUSIC, SCIENCE AND ART._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by Francois Lafon.]
+
+As he became older, Fréchette had dreams of becoming a man of action,
+and began to learn telegraphy at Ogdensburg; but he found the art too
+long and life too brief. He went back to the seminary and contributed
+'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare Hours) to the college paper. From the
+seminary--the _Petit Seminaire_, of course,--he went to the College of
+Ste. Anne, to Nicolet, and finally to Laval University, "singing, and
+picking up such crumbs of knowledge as suited his taste."
+
+In 1864 M. Fréchette was admitted to practice at the bar of Quebec. He
+was a poet first and always; but just at this time he was second a
+journalist, third a politician, and perhaps fourth a barrister. He
+began to publish a paper, Le Journal de Lévis. It failed: disgusted,
+he bade farewell to Canada, and began in Chicago the publication of
+L'Observateur: it died in a day. He poured forth his complaints in
+'Voix d'un Exilé' (The Voice of an Exile). "Never," cries M. Darveau
+in 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary Workers), "did Juvenal scar the
+faces of the corrupt Romans as did Fréchette lash the shoulders of our
+wretched politicians." His L'Amérique, a journal started in Chicago,
+had some success, but it temporarily ruined Fréchette, as the Swiss
+whom he had placed in charge of it suddenly changed its policy, and
+made it sympathize with Germany in the Franco-Prussian war.
+
+Fréchette's early prose is fiery and eloquent; his admirers compared
+it to that of Louis Veuillot and Junius, for the reason, probably,
+that he used it to denounce those whom he hated politically.
+Fréchette's verse has the lyrical ring. And although M. Camille Doucet
+insisted that the French Academy in crowning his poems honored a
+Frenchman, it must be remembered that Fréchette is both an American
+and a British subject; and these things, not likely to disarm
+Academical conservatism, made the action the more significant of the
+poet's value.
+
+There is strong and noble passion in 'La Voix d'un Exilé' and in the
+'Ode to the Mississippi.' His arraignment of the Canadian politicians
+may be forgotten without loss,--no doubt he has by this time forgiven
+them,--but the real feeling of the poet, who finds in the Mississippi
+the brother of his beloved St. Lawrence, is permanent:--
+
+  "Adieu, vallons ombreux, mes campagnes fleuries,
+  Mes montagnes d'azur et mes blondes prairies,
+  Mon fleuve harmonieux, mon beau del embaumé--
+  Dans les grandes cités, dans les bois, sur les grêves,
+  Ton image flottera dans mes rêves,
+                      O mon Canada, bien aimé.
+
+  Je n'écouterai plus, dans nos forêts profondes,
+  Dans nos près verdoyants, et sur nos grandes ondes,
+  Toutes ces voix sans nom qui font battre le coeur."
+
+    [Farewell, shaded valleys, my flowery meadows, my azure
+    mountains and my pale prairies, my musical stream, my fair
+    sky! In the great towns, in the wood, along the water-sides,
+    thy scenes will float on in my dreams, O Canada, my beloved!
+
+    I shall hear no more, in our deep forests, in our verdant
+    meads and upon our broad waters, all those nameless voices
+    which make one's heart throb.]
+
+In 1865 the first book of poems which appealed to the world from
+French Canada appeared. It was Fréchette's 'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare
+Hours). Later came 'Pêle-Mêle' (Pell-Mell), full of fine cameo-like
+poems,--but like cameos that are flushed by an inner and vital fire.
+Longfellow praised 'Pêle-Mêle': it shows the influence of Hugo and
+Lamartine; it has the beauty of De Musset, with more freshness and
+"bloom" than that poet of a glorious past possessed; but there are
+more traces of Lamartine in 'Pêle-Mêle' than of Hugo.
+
+"Fréchette's imagination," says an admiring countryman of his, "is a
+chisel that attacks the soulless block; and with it he easily forms a
+column or a flower." His poems have grown stronger as he has become
+more mature. There is a great gain in dramatic force, so that it has
+surprised none of his readers that he should have attempted tragedy
+with success. He lost some of that quality of daintiness which
+distinguished 'Le Matin' (Morning), 'La Nuit' (Night), and 'Fleurs
+Fanées' (Faded Flowers). The 'Pensées d'Hiver' (Winter Reflections)
+had this quality, but 'La Dernière Iroquoise' (The Last Iroquois) rose
+above it, and like much of 'Les Fleurs Boréales' (Boreal Flowers) and
+his latest work, it is powerful in spirit, yet retains the greatest
+chastity of form.
+
+M. Fréchette translated several of Shakespeare's plays for the Théâtre
+Français. After 'Les Fleurs Boréales' was crowned by the Academy,
+there appeared 'Les Oiseaux de Neige' (The Snow-Birds), 'Feuilles
+Volantes' (Leaves in the Wind), and 'La Forêt Vierge' (The Virgin
+Forest). The volume which shows the genius of Fréchette at its highest
+is undoubtedly 'La Légende d'un Peuple' (The Legend of a Race), which
+has an admirable preface by Jules Claretie.
+
+                                 [Signature: Maurice Francis Egan]
+
+
+
+
+OUR HISTORY
+
+Fragments from 'La Légende d'un Peuple': translated by Maurice Francis
+Egan
+
+
+  O history of my country,--set with pearls unknown,--
+  With love I kiss thy pages venerated.
+
+  O register immortal, poem of dazzling light
+  Written by France in purest of her blood!
+  Drama ever acting, records full of pictures
+  Of high facts heroic, stories of romance,
+  Annals of the giants, archives where we follow,
+  As each leaf we turn, a life resplendent,
+  And find a name respected or a name beloved,
+  Of men and women of the antique time!
+
+  Where the hero of the past and the hero of the future
+  Give the hand of friendship and the kiss of love;
+  Where the crucifix and sword, the plowshare and the volume,--
+  Everything that builds and everything that saves,--
+  Shine, united, living glories of past time
+  And of time that is to be.
+
+  The glories of past time, serene and pure before you,
+  O virtues of our day!
+  Hail first to thee, O Cartier, brave and hardy sailor,
+  Whose footstep sounded on the unexplored shores
+  Of our immense St. Lawrence. Hail, Champlain,
+  Maisonneuve, illustrious founders of two cities,
+  Who show above our waves their rival beauties.
+  There was at first only a group of Bretons
+  Brandishing the sword-blade and the woodman's axe,
+  Sea-wolves bronzed by sea-winds at the port of St. Malo;
+  Cradled since their childhood beneath the sky and water.
+  Men of iron and high of heart and stature,
+  They, under eye of God, set sail for what might come.
+  Seeking, in the secrets of the foggy ocean,
+  Not the famous El Dorados, but a soil where they might plant,
+  As symbols of their saving, beside the cross of Christ,
+  The flag of France.
+
+  After them came blond-haired Normans
+  And black-eyed Pontevins, robust colonists,
+  To make the path a road, and for this holy work
+  To offer their strong arms: the motive was the same;
+  The dangers that they fronted brought out prodigies of courage.
+  They seemed to know no dangers; or rather,
+  They seemed to seek the ruin that they did not meet.
+  Frightful perils vainly rose before them,
+  And each element against them vainly had conspired:
+  These children of the furrow founded an empire!
+
+  Then, conquering the waves of great and stormy lakes,
+  Crossing savannahs with marshes of mud,
+  Piercing the depths of the forests primeval,
+  Here see our founders and preachers of Faith!
+  Apostles of France, princes of our God,
+  Having said farewell to the noise of the world,
+  They came to the bounds of the New World immense
+  To sow the seed of the future,
+  And to bear, as the heralds of eternal law,
+  To the end of the world the torch of progress.
+
+  Leaning on his bow, ferociously calm,
+  The child of the forest, bitter at heart,
+  A hunted look mingling with his piercing glance,
+  Sees the strangers pass,--encamped on the plain or ambushed in
+          the woods,--
+  And thinks of the giant spirits he has seen in his dreams.
+  For the first time he trembles and fears--
+  Then casting off his deceitful calm,
+  He will rush forth, uttering his war-cry,
+  To defend, foot by foot, his soil so lately virgin,
+  And ferocious, tomahawk in hand, bar this road to civilization!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A cowardly king, tool of a more cowardly court,
+  Satyr of the _Parc aux cerfs_, slave at the Trianon,
+  Plunged in the horrors of nameless debauches,
+  At the caprice of Pompadour dancing like an atom,--
+  The blood of his soldiers and the honor of his kingdom,
+  Of our dying heroes hearing he no voice.
+  Montcalm, alas! conquered for the first time,
+  Falling on the field of battle, wrapped in his banner.
+  Lévis, last fighter of the last fight,
+  Tears--avenging France and her pride!--
+  A supreme triumph from fate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  That was all. In front of our tottering towers
+  The stranger planted his insolent colors,
+  And an old flag, wet with bitter tears,
+  Closed its white wings and went across the sea!
+
+
+
+
+CAUGHNAWAGA
+
+Paraphrased by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  A world in agony breathes its last sigh!
+    Gaze on the remnants of an ancient race,--
+    Great kings of desert terrible to face,
+  Crushed by the new weights that upon them lie;
+    Stand near the Falls, and at this storied place
+    You see a humble hamlet;--by-and-by
+  You'll talk of ambuscades and treacherous chase.
+
+  Can history or sight a traitor be?
+    Where are the red men of the rolling plains?
+    Ferocious Iroquois,--ah, where is he?--
+  Without concealment (this for all our pains!)
+  The Chief sells groceries for paltry gains,
+    With English tang in speech of Normandy!
+
+
+
+
+LOUISIANA
+
+Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  Land of the Sun! where Fancy free
+    Weaveth her woof beneath a sky of gold,
+  Another Andalusia, thee I see;
+    Thy charming memories my heart-strings hold,
+    As if the song of birds had o'er them rolled.
+
+  In thy fresh groves, where scented orange glows,
+    Circle vague loves about my longing heart;
+  Thy dark banana-trees, when soft wind flows,
+    In concert weird take up their sombre part,
+    As evening shadows, listening, float and dart.
+
+  'Neath thy green domes, where the lianas cling,
+    Show tropic flowers with wide-opened eyes,
+  With arteries afire till morn-birds sing;
+    More than old Werthier, in new love's surprise,
+    Stand on the threshold of thy Paradise.
+
+  Son of the North, I, of the realm of snows,--
+    Vision afar, but always still a power,--
+  In these soft nights and in the days of rose,
+    Dreaming I feel, e'en in the saddest hour,
+    Within my heart unclose a golden flower.
+
+
+
+
+THE DREAM OF LIFE
+
+TO MY SON
+
+Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  At twenty years, a poet lone,
+    I, when the rosy season came,
+  Walked in the woodland, to make moan
+    For some fair dame;
+
+  And when the breezes brought to me
+    The lilac spent in fragrant stream,
+  I wove her infidelity
+    In love's young dream.
+
+  A lover of illusions, I!
+    Soon other dreams quite filled my heart,
+  And other loves as suddenly
+    Took old love's part.
+
+  One Glory, a deceitful fay,
+    Who flies before a man can stir,
+  Surprised my poor heart many a day,--
+    I dreamed of her!
+
+  But now that I have grown so old,
+    At lying things I grasp no more.
+  My poor, deceived heart takes hold
+    Of other lore.
+
+  Another life before us glows,
+    Casts on all faithful souls its gleam:
+  Late, late, my heart its glory knows,--
+    Of it I dream!
+
+
+
+
+HAROLD FREDERIC
+
+(1856-)
+
+[Illustration: HAROLD FREDERIC]
+
+
+Mr. Frederic was born in Utica, New York, August 19th, 1856. He spent
+his boyhood in that neighborhood, and was educated in its schools. The
+rural Central New York of a half-century ago was a region of rich
+farms, of conservative ideas, and of strong indigenous types of
+character. These undoubtedly offered unconscious studies to the future
+novelist.
+
+Like many of his guild he began writing on a newspaper, rising by
+degrees from the position of reporter to that of editor. The drill and
+discipline taught him to make the most of time and opportunity, and he
+contrived leisure enough to write two or three long stories. Working
+at journalism in Utica, Albany, and New York, in 1884 he became chief
+foreign correspondent of the New York Times, making his headquarters
+in London, where he has since lived.
+
+Mr. Frederic's reputation rests on journalistic correspondence of the
+higher class, and on his novels, of which he has published six. His
+stories are distinctively American. He has caught up contrasting
+elements of local life in the eastern part of the United States, and
+grouped them with ingenuity and power. His first important story was
+'Seth's Brother's Wife,' originally appearing as a serial in
+Scribner's Magazine. Following this came 'The Lawton Girl,' a study
+of rustic life; 'In the Valley,' a semi-historical novel, turning on
+aspects of colonial times along the Mohawk River; 'The Copperhead,'
+a tale of the Civil War; 'Mukena and Other Stories,' graphic character
+sketches, displaying humor and insight; 'The Damnation of Theron
+Ware,' the most serious and carefully studied of his books; and 'March
+Hares,' a sketch of contemporary society.
+
+A student of the life about him, possessing a dramatic sense and
+a saving grace of humor, Mr. Frederic in his fiction is often
+photographic and minute in detail, while he does not forget the
+importance of the mass which the detail is to explain or embellish.
+He likes to deal with types of that mixed population peculiar to
+the farming valleys of Central New York,--German, Irish, and
+American,--bringing out by contrast their marked social and individual
+traits. Not a disciple of realism, his books are emphatically "human
+documents."
+
+There is always moreover a definite plot, often a dramatic
+development. But it is the attrition of character against character
+that really interests him. 'Seth's Brother's Wife' and 'The Lawton
+Girl' leave a definite ethical intention. In the 'Damnation of Theron
+Ware' is depicted the tragedy of a weak and crude character suddenly
+put in touch with a higher intellectual and emotional life, which it
+is too meagre and too untrained to adopt, and through which it suffers
+shipwreck. In 'In the Valley' the gayety and seriousness of homely
+life stand out against a savage and martial background.
+
+Mr. Frederic profoundly respects his art, is never careless, and never
+unconscientious. Of his constructive instinct a distinguished English
+critic has said that it "ignores nothing that is significant; makes
+use of nothing that is not significant; and binds every element of
+character and every incident together in a consistent, coherent,
+dramatic whole."
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST RITE
+
+From 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Copyright 1896, by Stone &
+Kimball
+
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk, and his
+mind all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work and
+impatience to be at it, Theron Ware came abruptly upon a group of men
+and boys who occupied the whole path, and were moving forward so
+noiselessly that he had not heard them coming. He almost ran into the
+leader of this little procession, and began a stammering apology, the
+final words of which were left unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him
+and his talk were all the faces he saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four workingmen, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured
+across them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by
+another blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From
+beneath its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown
+upward at such an angle as to hide everything beyond those in front.
+The tall young minister, stepping aside and standing tiptoe, could see
+sloping downward, behind this hedge of beard, a pinched and
+chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull
+lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter,
+a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in
+whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's
+workmen in the wagonshops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree
+in front of his employer's house, and being unused to such work, had
+fallen from the top and broken all his bones. They would have cared
+for him at Madden's house, but he insisted upon being taken home. His
+name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's
+and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause, the lad, a bright-eyed,
+freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information
+that his big brother had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance
+that he might be in time to administer "extry munction."
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through back
+streets,--where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the
+gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the
+passers-by,--and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy
+lane, before one of a half-dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps
+and débris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some
+messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were
+whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster
+of women of the neighborhood; some of the more elderly of whom,
+shriveled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their
+eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently
+should rise into the _keen_ of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no
+moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than
+sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an
+instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked--one could have sworn
+impassively--into his staring eyes. Then, still without a word, she
+waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself a minute later inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved
+by the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze
+upon the open door of the only other apartment, the bedchamber.
+Through this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and
+standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife
+and old Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his
+crushed limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these
+proceedings, they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured
+man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home
+to his wife, and the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended
+to his religious duties. They admitted freely that by the light of his
+example, their own husbands and sons left much to be desired; and from
+this wandered easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But
+all the while their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron
+made out, after he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell,
+that many of them were telling their beads even while they kept the
+muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention to him,
+or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a
+different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through
+the throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the
+owner of this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and
+pleasing spring attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized
+silver handle of a quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that
+her face was of a lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin,
+full red lips, and big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She
+made a grave little inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed
+in response. Since her arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others
+had entirely ceased.
+
+"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling
+that at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence
+in this Romish house was due. "I hope they won't feel that I have
+intruded."
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood.
+
+"They'll take the will for the deed," she whispered back. "Father
+Forbes will be here in a minute. Do you know, is it too late?"
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding
+bulk of a new-comer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the
+deferential way in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a
+passage, made his identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an
+unaccustomed way as this priest of a strange Church advanced across
+the room,--a broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height,
+with a shapely, strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm,
+commanding tread. He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small
+leather-bound case. To this and to him the women curtsied and bowed
+their heads as he passed.
+
+"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol, to Theron;
+and he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted
+the priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on
+the arm.
+
+"Just to tell you that I am here," she said. The priest nodded with a
+grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.
+
+"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. "Stay here
+for a minute."
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among
+the crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table,
+covered with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a
+basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in
+readiness before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared
+space were kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the
+click of beads on their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway
+with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over
+his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender
+light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by
+Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and
+overflowed now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing
+with the others to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's
+white fingers; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in
+impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the
+priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears,
+nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil
+with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the
+invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all
+he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest
+rolled it forth in the 'Asperges me, Domine,' and 'Misereatur vestri
+omnipotens Deus,' with its soft Continental vowels and liquid _r_'s.
+It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the
+astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the 'Confiteor'
+vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a
+different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still
+dominated the murmured undertone of the other's prayers the last
+moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bed-sides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the
+girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names,--'beatum Michaelem Archangelum,' 'beatum Joannem Baptistam,'
+'sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,'--invoked with such proud
+confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected
+him.
+
+He came out with the others at last,--the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind,--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it
+had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all
+this.
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
+
+(1823-1892)
+
+BY JOHN BACH McMASTER
+
+[Illustration: EDWARD A. FREEMAN]
+
+
+Edward Augustus Freeman, one of the most prolific of recent English
+historians, was born at Harborne in Staffordshire, England, on August
+2d, 1823. His early education was received at home and in private
+schools, from which at the age of eighteen he went up to Oxford, where
+he was elected a scholar of Trinity College. Four years later (1845)
+he took his degree and was elected a Fellow of Trinity, an honor which
+he held till his marriage in 1847 forced him to relinquish it.
+
+Long before this event, Freeman was deep in historical study. His
+fortune was easy. The injunction that he should eat bread in the sweat
+of his face had not been laid on him. His time was his own, and was
+devoted with characteristic zeal and energy to labor in the field of
+history, which in the course of fifty years was made to yield him a
+goodly crop.
+
+Year after year he poured forth a steady stream of Essays, Thoughts,
+Remarks, Suggestions, Lectures, Short Histories on matters of current
+interest, little monographs on great events or great men,--all
+covering a range of subjects which bear evidence to most astonishing
+versatility and learning. Sometimes his topic was a cathedral church,
+as that of Wells or Leominster Priory; or a cathedral city, as Ely or
+Norwich. At others it was a grave historical theme, as the 'Unity of
+History'; or 'Comparative Politics'; or the 'Growth of the English
+Constitution from the Earliest Times'; or 'Old English History for
+Children.' His 'General Sketch of European History' is still a
+standard text book in our high schools and colleges. His 'William the
+Conqueror' in Macmillan's 'Twelve English Statesmen'; his 'Short
+History of the Norman Conquest of England' in the Clarendon Press
+Series; his studies of Godwin, Harold, and the Normans, in the
+'Encyclopædia Britannica,' are the best of their kind.
+
+His contributions to the reviews and magazines make a small library,
+encyclopædic in character. Thirty-one essays were published in the
+Fortnightly Review; thirty in the Contemporary Review; twenty-seven in
+Macmillan's Magazine; twelve in the British Quarterly, and as many
+more in the National Review; while such as are scattered through the
+other periodicals of Great Britain and the United States swell the
+list to one hundred and fifty-seven titles. Every conceivable subject
+is treated,--politics, government, history, field sports,
+architecture, archaeology, books, linguistics, finance, great men
+living and dead, questions of the day. But even this list does not
+comprise all of Freeman's writings, for regularly every week, for more
+than twenty years, he contributed two long articles to the Saturday
+Review.
+
+Taken as a whole, this array of publications represents an industry
+which was simply enormous, and a learning as varied as it was immense.
+If classified according to their subjects, they fall naturally into
+six groups. The antiquarian and architectural sketches and addresses
+are the least valuable and instructive. They are of interest because
+they exhibit a strong bent of mind which appears constantly in
+Freeman's works, and because it was by the aid of such remains that he
+studied the early history of nations. Then come the studies in
+politics and government, such as the essays on presidential
+government; on American institutional history; on the House of Lords;
+the growth of commonwealths, and such elaborate treatises as the six
+lectures on 'Comparative Politics,' and the 'History of Federal
+Government,'--all notable because of the liberal spirit and breadth of
+view that mark them, and because of a positiveness of statement and
+confidence in the correctness of the author's judgments. Then come the
+historical essays; then the lectures and addresses; then his
+occasional pieces, written at the request of publishers or editors to
+fill some long-felt want; and finally the series of histories on
+which, in the long run, the reputation of Freeman must rest. These, in
+the order of merit and value, are the 'Norman Conquest'; the 'Reign of
+William Rufus,' which is really a supplement to the 'Conquest'; the
+'History of Sicily,' which the author did not live to finish.
+
+The roll of his works is enough to show that the kind of history which
+appealed to Freeman was that of the distant past, and that which dealt
+with politics rather than with social life. Of ancient history he had
+a good mastery; English history from its dawn to the thirteenth
+century he knew minutely: European history of the same period he knew
+profoundly. After the thirteenth century his interest grew less and
+less as modern times were approached, and his knowledge smaller and
+smaller till it became that of a man very well read in history and no
+more.
+
+Freeman was therefore essentially a historian of the far past; and as
+such had, it is safe to say, no living superior in England. But in his
+treatment of the past he presents a small part of the picture. He is
+concerned with great conquerors, with military leaders, with battles
+and sieges and systems of government. The mass of the people have no
+interest for him at all. His books abound in battle-pieces of the age
+of the long-bow and the javelin, of the battle-axe, the mace, and the
+spear; of the age when brain went for little and when brawn counted
+for much; and when the fate of nations depended less on the skill of
+individual commanders than on the personal prowess of those who met in
+hand-to-hand encounters. He delights in descriptions of historic
+buildings; he is never weary of drawing long analogies between one
+kind of government and another; but for the customs, the manner, the
+usages, the daily life of the people, he has never a word. "History,"
+said he on one occasion, "is past politics; politics is present
+history," and to this epigram he is strictly faithful. The England of
+the serf and the villein, the curfew and the monastery, is brushed
+aside to leave room for the story of the way in which William of
+Normandy conquered the Saxons, and of the way in which William Rufus
+conducted his quarrels with Bishop Anselm.
+
+With all of this no fault is to be found. It was his cast of mind, his
+point of view; and the questions which alone concern us in any
+estimate of his work are: Did he do it well? What is its value? Did he
+make a real contribution to historical knowledge? What are its merits
+and defects? Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief
+merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an
+intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost;
+a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every
+man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to
+reproduce the past most graphically.
+
+From these merits comes Freeman's chief defect,--prolixity. His
+earnest desire to be accurate made him not only say the same thing
+over and over again, but say it with an unnecessary and useless
+fullness of detail, and back up his statement with a profusion of
+notes, which in many cases amount to more than half the text. Indeed,
+were they printed in the same type as the text, the space they occupy
+would often exceed it. Thus, in the first volume of the 'Norman
+Conquest' there are 528 pages of text, with foot-notes occupying from
+a third to a half of almost every page, and an appendix of notes of
+244 pages; in the second volume, the text and foot-notes amount to
+512, and the appendix 179; in the third, the text covers 562 and the
+appendix 206 pages. These notes are always interesting and always
+instructive. But the end of a volume is not the place for an
+exhibition of the doubts and fears that have tormented the historian,
+for a statement of the reasons which have led him to one conclusion
+rather than another, nor for the denunciation or reputation of the
+opinions of his predecessors. When the building is finished, we do not
+want to see the lumber used as the scaffolding piled in the back yard.
+Mr. Freeman's histories would be all the better for a condensation of
+the text and an elimination of the long appendices.
+
+With these exceptions, the workmanship is excellent. He entered so
+thoroughly into the past that it became to him more real and
+understandable than the present. He was not merely the contemporary
+but the companion of the men he had to deal with. He knew every spot
+of ground, every Roman ruin, every mediæval castle, that came in any
+way to be connected with his story, as well as he knew the topography
+of the country that stretched beneath his study window, or the
+arrangement of the house in which he lived.
+
+In his histories, therefore, we are presented at every turn with
+life-like portraits of the illustrious dead, bearing all the marks of
+having been taken from life; with descriptions of castles and towers,
+minsters and abbeys, and of the scenes that have made them memorable;
+with comparisons of one ruler with another, always sane and just; and
+with graphic pictures of coronations, of battles, sieges, burnings,
+and all the havoc and pomp of war.
+
+The essays and studies in politics show Mr. Freeman in a yet more
+interesting light; many are elaborate reviews of historical works, and
+therefore cover a wide range of topics, both ancient and of the
+present time. Now his subject is Mr. Bryce's 'Holy Roman Empire'; now
+the Flavian Cæsars; now Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer and the Homeric Age';
+now Kirk's 'Charles the Bold'; now presidential government; now
+Athenian democracy; now the Byzantine Empire; now the Eastern Church;
+now the growth of commonwealths; now the geographical aspects of the
+Eastern Question.
+
+By so wide a range of topics, an opportunity is afforded for a variety
+of remarks, analogies, judgments of men and times, far greater than
+the histories could give. In the main, these judgments may be
+accepted; but so thoroughly was Freeman a historian of the past, that
+some of his estimates of contemporary men and things were singularly
+erroneous. While our Civil War was still raging he began a 'History of
+Federal Government,' which was to extend from the Achaean League "to
+the disruption of the United States." A prudent historian would not
+have taken up the role of prophet. He would have waited for the end of
+the struggle. But absolute self-confidence in his own good judgment
+was one of Freeman's most conspicuous traits. His estimate of Lincoln
+is another instance of inability to understand the times in which he
+lived. In the 'Essay on Presidential Government,' published in the
+National Review in 1864 and republished in the first series of
+'Historical Essays' in 1871, the greatest President and the grandest
+public character the United States has yet produced is declared
+inferior to each and all the Presidents from Washington to John Quincy
+Adams. A comparison of Lincoln with Monroe or Madison or Jefferson by
+Freeman would have been entertaining.
+
+Two views of history as set forth in the essays are especially
+deserving of notice. He is never weary of insisting on the unity and
+the continuity of history in general and that of England in
+particular, and he attaches unreasonable importance to the influence
+of the Teutonic element in English history. This latter was the
+inevitable result of his method of studying the past along the lines
+of philology and ethnology, and has carried him to extremes which
+taken by anybody else he would have been quick to see.
+
+An examination of Freeman's minor contributions to the reviews--such
+essays, sketches, and discussions as he did not think important enough
+to republish in book form--is indicative of his interest in current
+affairs. They made little draft on his learning, yet the point of view
+is generally the result of his learning. He believed, for instance,
+that a sound judgment on the Franco-Prussian War could not be found
+save in the light of history. "The present war," he wrote to the Pall
+Mall Gazette, "has largely risen out of a misconception of history,
+out of the dream of a frontier of the Rhine which never existed. The
+war on the part of Germany is in truth a vigorous setting forth of the
+historical truth that the Rhine is, and always has been, a German
+river."
+
+Freeman was still busy with his 'History of Sicily' from the earliest
+times, and had just finished the preface to the third volume, when he
+died at Alicante in Spain, March 16th, 1892. Since his death a fourth
+volume, prepared from his notes, has been published.
+
+But one biography of Freeman has yet appeared, 'The Life and Letters
+of Edward A. Freeman,' by W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols., 1895.
+
+                                   [Signature: John Bach McMartin]
+
+
+
+
+THE ALTERED ASPECTS OF ROME
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' Third Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1879
+
+
+The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are
+the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the
+general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are
+fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that
+the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard--a sack and fire done in the
+cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor--was the immediate cause
+of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction
+which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were
+at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than
+dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could
+keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no
+resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on
+the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest
+itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient
+ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual
+amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without
+seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient
+wall on every side,--when we stumble at every step on fragments of
+marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,--we are apt to think that
+they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places.
+The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and
+fragments--again setting aside the more perfect monuments--proves that
+destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any
+other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly
+swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin.
+But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former
+existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly
+Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman
+cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare
+those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome
+as the dwelling-places of her own Cæsars,--Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier
+itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and
+some pieces of wall through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier
+is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her _Porta Nigra_, one
+monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as
+Trier--the second Rome--is, she is certainly not richer in proportion
+than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a
+single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is
+something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick
+Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than
+Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,--Christian Roman,
+Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is
+no trace--no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no
+amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the
+city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of
+Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial
+residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is--even
+proportionally--far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman
+remains than Italy herself; but even the Provençal cities are hardly
+so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is
+nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued
+prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to
+the standard of each age, which has been always building and
+rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a
+gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the
+havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few
+special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state;
+but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered
+with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the
+perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman
+scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of
+the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their
+prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings,
+temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number
+were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble
+columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the
+loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with
+the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of
+the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes
+from another cause. As the buildings became disused,--and if we
+rejoice at the disuse of the amphitheatre, we must both mourn and
+wonder at the disuse of the baths,--they were sometimes turned into
+fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses.
+Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the
+ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his
+brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the
+slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator.
+Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came
+whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful
+government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the
+building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of
+robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and
+Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle
+Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric
+undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious
+objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any
+buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to
+Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of
+Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and
+accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the
+ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient
+Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from
+Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way
+towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman
+hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian
+were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.
+
+But the barons of mediæval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction
+which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the
+basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome
+have had to suffer. The mediæval barons simply did according to their
+kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings
+or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one
+purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic
+destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of
+Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and
+their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may
+have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews.
+Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace
+raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line--
+
+  "Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?
+
+And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of
+the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same
+evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so
+sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age
+of the _Renaissance_, the time when men turned away from all reverence
+for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the
+feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times
+when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed.
+Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand
+or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed
+to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in
+the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could
+to efface their truest interest, their local and historical
+association.
+
+A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds
+of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places,
+and which need special scientific classification, such collections are
+necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot
+where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far
+nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had
+been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he
+had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the
+Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a
+private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the
+recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that
+sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead;
+that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and
+that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more
+instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of
+the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of
+"Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the
+light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and
+_gentiles_ laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican,
+numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome
+inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber
+who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a
+heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of
+ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of
+heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.
+
+Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St.
+Constantia--be her legend true or false, it makes no difference--to
+trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian
+worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned
+about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see
+the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the
+central point of the building, with the series of images which is
+begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn
+away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as
+number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is
+the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities,
+pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their
+destroying will.
+
+In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other
+cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city
+itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome
+is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts
+of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in
+common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and
+of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond
+both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field
+of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city
+largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part
+of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no
+space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine,
+Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been
+spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined
+fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a
+Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre
+of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia;
+above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of
+Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point
+a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the
+utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of
+Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive
+transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most
+living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at
+such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the
+days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which
+adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is
+a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the
+Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at
+work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work
+in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is
+only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And
+wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be
+allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the
+Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of
+such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1871
+
+
+A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany,
+as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth
+working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common
+to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly
+different. The distinctive character of English history is its
+continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there
+is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be
+drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a
+superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman
+invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate
+us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the
+history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor
+Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest.
+Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign
+kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a
+foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of
+wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real
+and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the
+greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages
+before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England
+has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon
+kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and
+Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The
+England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all
+external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age
+immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely
+removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a
+conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and
+slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of
+power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is
+an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and
+circumstance of our own.
+
+When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its
+beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be
+drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great
+creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia--the
+thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England
+which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is
+essentially the still living England in which we have our own being.
+Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries;
+from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King
+Ælfred's Witenagemót is a valuable link in the chain of our political
+progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by
+the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A
+statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be
+shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good
+to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we
+may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our
+political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see
+the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in
+wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought
+improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others
+capable of further improvement still.
+
+Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since
+the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never
+known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly,
+Witenagemót, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been,
+capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more
+or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria,
+England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary
+constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken
+it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English
+Witenagemóts, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian
+research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries
+fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a
+veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In
+the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional
+principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the
+seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything
+new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is
+on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our
+rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or
+proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ,
+conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of
+England.
+
+This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point
+which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special
+continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most
+instructive part of the comparison between English history and the
+history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the
+many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one
+Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and
+barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every
+institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth
+century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young
+indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very
+things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a
+King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor
+impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high
+hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of
+the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen,
+and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons
+still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons
+whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual
+changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard
+questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take
+their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great
+offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have
+assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character
+they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun;
+doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but
+statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions
+of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is
+rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few
+great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy
+yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but
+both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent
+extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal
+status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.
+
+With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes,
+and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at
+least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language
+was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible
+at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it
+was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England
+at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest,
+ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a
+purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he
+could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could
+not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled
+over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds.
+The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems
+truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more
+on the throne of Cerdic and of Ælfred. The modern English nation is
+now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French
+dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and
+fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of
+our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character
+for good and for evil.
+
+Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and
+institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before
+said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the
+early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagemót. The latter
+institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been
+substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be
+ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of
+ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to
+obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands
+the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all
+its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its mediæval, and in all its
+modern forms--Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics
+without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories,
+Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments;
+all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of
+them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by
+year; his successors in the Eastern _Francia_, the Kings of the
+Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in
+Western _Francia_, after it fell away from the common centre, no such
+assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments;
+every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and
+Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to
+contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair,
+for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the
+States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish
+Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe,
+in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From
+that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful
+course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of
+England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of
+political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive
+measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King
+could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If
+they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked
+minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit
+reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from
+magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both
+were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the
+States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France
+generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their
+extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791
+to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year,
+made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our
+liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected
+nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old
+Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their
+constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian
+curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National
+Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen
+and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of
+Commons have gone on undisturbed.
+
+
+
+
+RACE AND LANGUAGE
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1871
+
+
+Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the
+working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups
+in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has
+grown,--how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to
+mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
+qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
+classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
+unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
+only; and that that test is language.
+
+It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined
+by the merely political arrangements which group men under various
+governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes
+of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this
+standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe
+for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer
+to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without
+their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national
+divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political
+divisions. That is to say, _primâ facie_ a nation and a government
+should coincide. I say only _primâ facie_, for this is assuredly no
+inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be
+otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good
+reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a
+government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the
+less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That
+is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it
+as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause;
+so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by
+asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation
+should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of
+governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of
+nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing,
+something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government
+should as far as possible conform. How then do we define the nation
+which is, if there is no special reason to the contrary, to fix the
+limits of a government? Primarily, I say, as a rule,--but a rule
+subject to exceptions,--as a _primâ facie_ standard, subject to
+special reasons to the contrary,--we define the nation by language. We
+may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule
+that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality;
+but we may safely say that where there is not community of language,
+there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that
+without community of language there may be an artificial nationality,
+a nationality which may be good for all political purposes, and which
+may engender a common national feeling. Still, this is not quite the
+same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is
+community of language.
+
+In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of
+nationality. We so far take it as the badge, that we instinctively
+assume community of language as a nation as the rule, and we set down
+anything that departs from that rule as an exception. The first idea
+suggested by the word Frenchman, or German, or any other national
+name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother
+tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us
+think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a
+speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise,
+we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause.
+Again, the rule is none the less the rule nor the exceptions the
+exceptions, because the exceptions may easily outnumber the instances
+which conform to the rule. The rule is still the rule, because we take
+the instances which conform to it as a matter of course, while in
+every case which does not conform to it we ask for the explanation.
+All the larger countries of Europe provide us with exceptions; but we
+treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask why a native of France
+speaks French. But when a native of France speaks as his mother tongue
+some other tongue than French, when French, or something which
+popularly passes for French, is spoken as his mother tongue by some
+one who is not a native of France, we at once ask the reason. And the
+reason will be found in each case in some special historical cause,
+which withdraws that case from the operation of the general law. A
+very good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly
+passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose
+inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be
+given, and it may fairly be asked.
+
+In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the
+bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,
+we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In
+a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken
+which differ alike from English and from French, but which are
+strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of
+a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the
+settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other
+tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find
+islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as
+French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the
+English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems
+so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people
+which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did
+not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by
+force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part
+of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually
+became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave
+to their connection with the land which their forefathers had
+conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never
+became French in feeling. This last case, that of the Norman Islands,
+is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically
+connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union
+between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy,
+where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography
+together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a
+Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong,
+political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against
+language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not
+become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone
+remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached
+to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage.
+Between States of the relative size of England and the Norman Islands,
+the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of
+the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our
+forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman
+Islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.
+
+These instances and countless others bear out the position, that while
+community of language is the most obvious sign of common
+nationality,--while it is the main element, or something more than an
+element, in the formation of nationality,--the rule is open to
+exceptions of all kinds; and that the influence of language is at all
+times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the
+exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases
+which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases
+which do conform to it.
+
+
+
+
+THE NORMAN COUNCIL AND THE ASSEMBLY OF LILLEBONNE
+
+From 'The History of the Norman Conquest of England'
+
+
+The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his
+own people, on the minds of the neighboring countries whence he
+invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes
+whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and above all,
+on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these
+various negotiations is not very clear, and in all probability all
+were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that
+William's first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender
+his crown,--or whatever else was the exact purport of the English
+King's answer,--was to lay the matter before a select body of his most
+trusted counselors. The names of most of the men whom William thus
+honored with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They
+were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful
+vassals who had fought at his side against French invaders and Norman
+rebels. There was his brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, the lord of
+the castle by the waterfalls, the spoil of the banished Warling. And
+there was one closer than a brother,--the proud William the son of
+Osborn, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood. There,
+perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other
+brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of
+heart and as strong of arm as any of his race. There too, not
+otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of
+William, Robert, and Odo. There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate
+succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself,--Richard of
+Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the
+Fearless. There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the
+frontier fortress of Eu, the brother of the traitor Busac and of the
+holy prelate of Lisieux. There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the
+world of Roger of Toesny, and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old
+foe of Normandy and mankind. There was Ralph's companion in
+banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil, and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal
+son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle. There too were
+the other worthies of the day of Mortemar, Walter Giffard and Hugh of
+Montfort, and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received
+the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush. These men, chiefs of
+the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater
+houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign's
+bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the
+enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the
+land which with so many in that assembly was to become a second home,
+a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of
+their own right hands.
+
+To this select Council the duke made his first appeal. He told them,
+what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he
+had suffered from Harold of England. It was his purpose to cross the
+sea, in order to assert his rights and to chastise the wrong-doer.
+With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful
+Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed. He had
+gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they
+approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power?
+Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to recover his
+right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and
+friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved
+his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power
+of Normandy to accomplish. The valor of the Norman knighthood, the
+wealth of the Norman Church, was fully enough to put their duke in
+possession of all that he claimed. Their own personal service they
+pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge,
+they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But
+they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work,
+all ought to share in the counsel. Those whom the duke had gathered
+together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other
+wise and brave men in the duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose
+counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he
+spoke. Let the duke call a larger meeting of all the barons of his
+duchy, and lay his designs before them.
+
+The duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons
+for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we
+come across any details of the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And
+we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed
+from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or
+more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of
+political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the
+war against England was a widely different body from the Great Cemór
+which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his
+speech before the King and all the people of the land. That people had
+met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city
+of the realm. But in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons.
+The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories
+of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand.
+The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution
+of the mediæval States had not yet arisen. There was no Third Estate,
+because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether
+vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular
+privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And if the Third Order was
+wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in
+other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as
+an important element in the duke's ways and means, and both the wealth
+and the personal prowess of the Norman clergy were, when the day came,
+freely placed at William's disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman
+Assemblies, which shut out the clergy from all share in the national
+deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied rather
+than asserted that the bishops of Normandy were present in the
+Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the
+debates fell on the lay barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly
+was a spirit which was especially theirs.
+
+Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it
+met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary
+boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of
+Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the
+people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the
+virtues and the vices of a real Popular Assembly. William had already
+consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by
+their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in
+Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman
+people. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were
+valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of
+what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the
+privileges of their order. The duke laid his case before them. He told
+once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had
+done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force
+of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on
+which they had entered. But without their help he could do nothing. Of
+his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an
+enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a
+cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how
+many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a
+free-will offering.
+
+A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent,
+even when the craft and the eloquence of William was brought to bear
+upon it. The barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They
+would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the
+conclusion to which they came. William was obliged to consent to this
+delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each
+eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty,
+thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic
+speaker. Some professed their readiness to follow the duke; others
+were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards. Other
+speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise.
+Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land
+would be ruined by the attempt. The conquest of England was an
+undertaking beyond the power of a Roman emperor. Harold and his land
+were rich; they had wealth to take foreign kings and dukes into their
+service; their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could
+not hope to strive against. They had abundance of tried soldiers, and
+above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other
+men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea. How could a fleet
+be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they
+be taught, within a year's space, to cope with such an enemy? The
+feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an
+enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and
+schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning
+through the opposition of his own subjects.
+
+A daring though cunning attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern,
+the duke's nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an
+assent to his master's will. He appealed to their sense of feudal
+honor; they owed the duke service for their fiefs: let them come
+forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their
+tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven
+to implore the services of his subjects. Let them rather forestall his
+will; let them win his favor by ready offerings even beyond their
+power to fulfill. He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom
+they had to deal. William's jealous temper would not brook
+disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the
+end, if the duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his
+enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.
+
+The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and
+perplexed even the stout hearts with whom he had to deal. The barons
+prayed him to be their spokesman with the duke. He knew their minds
+and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said.
+But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to
+the duke's demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way;
+they feared the sea,--so changed was the race which had once manned
+the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand,--and they were not bound to
+serve beyond it.
+
+A point seemed to have been gained, by the seeming license given by
+the Assembly to the duke's most intimate friend to speak as he would
+in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to
+the duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty,
+setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for
+their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not
+willingly undergo in his service. But the orator soon overshot his
+mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man
+would not only cross the sea with the duke, but would bring with him
+double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of
+twenty knights' fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a
+hundred with two hundred. He himself, of his love and zeal, would
+furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.
+
+The barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly
+the same case as the king against whom they were called on to march.
+They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to
+speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond
+all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to
+engagements which had never entered into their minds. Loud shouts of
+dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the
+regular contingent awakened special indignation. With a true
+parliamentary instinct, the Norman barons feared lest a consent to
+this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs
+should be forever burthened with this double service. The shouts grew
+louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no
+man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.
+
+The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of
+a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is
+possible that the duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment
+of his seneschal. It is even possible that the manoeuvre may have been
+concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely
+that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree
+to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth
+by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on
+a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the
+seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly,
+in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and
+the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy
+had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one,
+within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign.
+William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on
+minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd,
+could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the
+doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's
+fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from
+time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way
+within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to
+promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill.
+William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the
+formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won
+over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And
+wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should
+draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and
+the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once
+set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up
+in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday
+of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William
+of England in his royal palace at Winchester.
+
+
+
+
+FERDINAND FREILIGRATH
+
+(1810-1876)
+
+[Illustration: FERDINAND FREILIGRATH]
+
+
+In times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from
+their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the
+glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands.
+Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and
+Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of
+the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the
+Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful
+'Gaselen,' Rückert sang in Persian measure and translated the
+Indian 'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of
+"Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon
+his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant
+climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea),
+written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai'
+(The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der Löwenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in
+these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to
+which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an
+illustrated Bible in his childhood.
+
+But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a
+patriot. The revolution of 1848 had brought fresh breezes into the
+stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again,
+the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams
+that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission,
+and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.
+
+Freiligrath was a schoolmaster's son; he was born at Detmold on June
+17th, 1810, and much against his private inclinations, he was sent in
+his sixteenth year to an uncle in Soest to prepare himself for a
+mercantile career. The death of his father threw him upon his own
+resources, and he took a position in an Amsterdam bank. Here the
+inspiration of the sea widened the range of his poetic fancy. To
+Chamisso is due the credit of introducing the poet to the general
+public through the pages of the Musenalmanach. This was in 1835. In
+1838 appeared the first volume of his poems, and it won instant and
+unusual favor; Gutzkow called him the German Hugo. With this
+encouragement Freiligrath definitely abandoned mercantile life. In
+1841 he married. At the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt, the King
+of Prussia granted him a royal pension; and as no conditions were
+attached, it was accepted. This was a bitter disappointment to the
+ardent revolutionary poets, who had counted Freiligrath as one of
+themselves; but the turbulent times which preceded the revolution soon
+forced him into an open declaration of principles, and although he had
+said in one of his poems that the poet was above all party, in 1844,
+influenced by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he resigned his pension,
+announced his position, and in May published a volume of revolutionary
+poems entitled 'Mein Glaubensbekenntniss' (My Confession of Faith).
+This book created the wildest enthusiasm, and placed its author at
+once in the front rank of the people's partisans. He fled to Brussels,
+and in 1846 published under the title of 'Ça Ira' six new songs, which
+were a trumpet-call to revolution. The poet deemed it prudent to
+retire to London, and he was about to accept an invitation from
+Longfellow to cross the ocean when the revolution broke out, and he
+returned to Düsseldorf to put himself at the head of the democratic
+party on the Rhine. But he was a poet and not a leader, and he
+indiscreetly exposed himself to arrest by an inflammatory poem, 'Die
+Todten an die Lebenden' (The Dead to the Living). The jury however
+acquitted him, and he at once assumed the management of the New
+Rhenish Gazette at Cologne.
+
+It is a curious fact that during this agitated time Freiligrath wrote
+some of his tenderest poetry. In the collection which appeared in 1849
+with the title 'Zwischen den Garben' (Between the Sheaves), was
+included that exquisite hymn to love: 'Oh, Love So Long as Love Thou
+Canst,' perhaps the most perfect of all his lyrical productions, and
+certainly evidence that the poet could touch the strings to deep
+emotions. In the following year both volumes of his 'New Political and
+Social Poems' were ready. Once more he prudently retired to London;
+his fears were confirmed by the immediate confiscation of these new
+volumes, and by the publication of a letter of apprehension. By way of
+reprisal he wrote his poem 'The Revolution,' which was published in
+London.
+
+In 1867 the Swiss bank with which Freiligrath was connected closed its
+London branch, and the poet again faced an uncertain future. His
+friends on the Rhine, hearing of his difficulties, raised a generous
+subscription, and taking advantage of a general amnesty, he returned
+to the fatherland and became associated with the Stuttgart Illustrated
+Magazine. In 1870 appeared a complete collection of his poems; in
+1876, 'New Poems'; and in the latter year, on March 18th, he died at
+Cannstatt in Würtemburg.
+
+The question which Freiligrath asks the emigrants in his early poem of
+that name,--'O say, why seek ye other lands?'--was destined to find
+frequent and bitter answer in his own checkered career; but he never
+swerved from the liberal principles which he had publicly announced.
+His political poems were among the most powerful influences of his
+time, and they have a permanent value as the expression of the spirit
+of freedom. His translations are marvels of fidelity and beauty. His
+'Hiawatha' and 'The Ancient Mariner,' together with his versions of
+Victor Hugo, are perhaps the best examples of his surpassing skill.
+His own works have been for the most part excellently translated into
+English. His daughter published during her father's lifetime a volume
+of his poems, in which were collected all the best English
+translations then available. The exotic subjects of his early poems
+make them seem the most original, as for example 'Der Mohrenfürst'
+(The Moorish Prince) and 'Der Blumen Rache' (The Revenge of the
+Flowers); the unusual rhymes hold the attention, and the sonorous
+melody of the verse delights the ear: but it is in a few of his superb
+love lyrics that he touches the highest point of his genius, although
+his fame continues to rest upon his impassioned songs of freedom and
+his name to be associated with the rich imagery of the Orient.
+
+
+
+
+THE EMIGRANTS
+
+
+  I cannot take my eyes away
+    From you, ye busy, bustling band,
+  Your little all to see you lay
+    Each in the waiting boatman's hand.
+
+  Ye men, that from your necks set down
+    Your heavy baskets on the earth,
+  Of bread, from German corn baked brown
+    By German wives on German hearth,--
+
+  And you, with braided tresses neat,
+    Black-Forest maidens, slim and brown,
+  How careful on the sloop's green seat
+    You set your pails and pitchers down!
+
+  Ah! oft have home's cool shady tanks
+    Those pails and pitchers filled for you;
+  By far Missouri's silent banks
+    Shall these the scenes of home renew,--
+
+  The stone-rimmed fount in village street
+    Where oft ye stooped to chat and draw,--
+  The hearth, and each familiar seat,--
+    The pictured tiles your childhood saw.
+
+  Soon, in the far and wooded West
+    Shall log-house walls therewith be graced;
+  Soon many a tired tawny guest
+    Shall sweet refreshment from them taste.
+
+  From them shall drink the Cherokee,
+    Faint with the hot and dusty chase;
+  No more from German vintage, ye
+    Shall bear them home, in leaf-crowned grace.
+
+  O say, why seek ye other lands?
+    The Neckar's vale hath wine and corn;
+  Full of dark firs the Schwarzwald stands;
+    In Spessart rings the Alp-herd's horn.
+
+  Ah, in strange forests you will yearn
+    For the green mountains of your home,--
+  To Deutschland's yellow wheat-fields turn,--
+    In spirit o'er her vine-hills roam.
+
+  How will the form of days grown pale
+    In golden dreams float softly by,
+  Like some old legendary tale,
+    Before fond memory's moistened eye!
+
+  The boatman calls,--go hence in peace!
+    God bless you,--wife, and child, and sire!
+  Bless all your fields with rich increase,
+    And crown each faithful heart's desire!
+
+                                         Translation of C.T. Brooks.
+
+
+
+
+THE LION'S RIDE
+
+
+  What! wilt thou bind him fast with a chain?
+    Wilt bind the king of the cloudy sands?
+    Idiot fool! he has burst from thy hands and bands,
+  And speeds like Storm through his far domain.
+      See! he crouches down in the sedge,
+                By the water's edge,
+  Making the startled sycamore boughs to quiver!
+  Gazelle and giraffe, I think, will shun that river.
+
+  Not so! The curtain of evening falls,
+    And the Caffre, mooring his light canoe
+    To the shore, glides down through the hushed karroo,
+  And the watch-fires burn in the Hottentot kraals,
+      And the antelope seeks a bed in the bush
+              Till dawn shall blush,
+  And the zebra stretches his limbs by the tinkling fountain,
+  And the changeful signals fade from the Table Mountain.
+
+  Now look through the dusk! What seest thou now?
+    Seest such a tall giraffe! She stalks,
+    All majesty, through the desert walks,--
+  In search of water to cool her tongue and brow.
+      From tract to tract of the limitless waste
+              Behold her haste!
+  Till, bowing her long neck down, she buries her face in
+  The reeds, and kneeling, drinks from the river's basin.
+
+  But look again! look! see once more
+    Those globe-eyes glare! The gigantic reeds
+    Lie cloven and trampled like puniest weeds,--
+  The lion leaps on the drinker's neck with a roar!
+      Oh, what a racer! Can any behold,
+              'Mid the housings of gold
+  In the stables of kings, dyes half so splendid
+  As those on the brindled hide of yon wild animal blended?
+
+  Greedily fleshes the lion his teeth
+    In the breast of his writhing prey; around
+    Her neck his loose brown mane is wound.
+  Hark, that hollow cry! She springs up from beneath
+      And in agony flies over plains and heights.
+              See, how she unites,
+  Even under such monstrous and torturing trammel,
+  With the grace of the leopard, the speed of the camel!
+
+  She reaches the central moon-lighted plain,
+    That spreadeth around all bare and wide;
+    Meanwhile, adown her spotted side
+  The dusky blood-gouts rush like rain--
+      And her woeful eyeballs, how they stare
+              On the void of air!
+  Yet on she flies--on, on; for her there is no retreating;
+  And the desert can hear the heart of the doomed one beating!
+
+  And lo! A stupendous column of sand,
+    A sand-spout out of that sandy ocean, upcurls
+    Behind the pair in eddies and whirls;
+  Most like some colossal brand,
+          Or wandering spirit of wrath
+              On his blasted path,
+  Or the dreadful pillar that lighted the warriors and women
+  Of Israel's land through the wilderness of Yemen.
+
+  And the vulture, scenting a coming carouse,
+    Sails, hoarsely screaming, down the sky;
+    The bloody hyena, be sure, is nigh,--
+  Fierce pillager, he, of the charnel-house!
+      The panther, too, who strangles the Cape-Town sheep
+              As they lie asleep,
+  Athirst for his share in the slaughter, follows;
+  While the gore of their victim spreads like a pool in the sandy
+          hollows!
+
+  She reels,--but the king of the brutes bestrides
+    His tottering throne to the last: with might
+    He plunges his terrible claws in the bright
+  And delicate cushions of her sides.
+      Yet hold!--fair play!--she rallies again!
+              In vain, in vain!
+  Her struggles but help to drain her life-blood faster;
+  She staggers, gasps, and sinks at the feet of her slayer and master!
+
+  She staggers, she falls; she shall struggle no more!
+    The death-rattle slightly convulses her throat;
+    Mayest look thy last on that mangled coat,
+  Besprent with sand, and foam, and gore!
+      Adieu! The orient glimmers afar,
+              And the morning-star
+  Anon will rise over Madagascar brightly.--
+  So rides the lion in Afric's deserts nightly.
+
+
+
+
+REST IN THE BELOVED
+
+(RUHE IN DER GELIEBTEN)
+
+    From 'Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and Other German Poets.'
+    Copyright 1892, by Frances Hellman. Reprinted by permission
+    of G.P. Putnam's Sons, publishers, New York.
+
+
+  Oh, here forever let me stay, love!
+    Here let my resting-place e'er be;
+  And both thy tender palms then lay, love,
+    Upon my hot brow soothingly.
+  Here at thy feet, before thee kneeling,
+    In heavenly rapture let me rest,
+  And close my eyes, bliss o'er me stealing,
+    Within thine arms, upon thy breast.
+
+  I'll open them but to the glances
+    That from thine own in radiance fall;
+  The look that my whole soul entrances,
+    O thou who art my life, my all!
+  I'll open them but at the flowing
+    Of burning tears that upward swell,
+  And joyously, without my knowing,
+    From under drooping lashes well.
+
+  Thus am I meek, and kind, and lowly,
+    And good and gentle evermore;
+  I have thee--now I'm blessed wholly;
+    I have thee--now my yearning's o'er.
+  By thy sweet love intoxicated,
+    Within thine arms I'm lulled to rest,
+  And every breath of thine is freighted
+    With slumber songs that soothe my breast.
+
+  A life renewed each seems bestowing;
+    Oh, thus to lie day after day,
+  And hearken with a blissful glowing
+    To what each other's heart-beats say!
+  Lost in our love, entranced, enraptured,
+    We disappear from time and space;
+  We rest and dream; our souls lie captured
+    Within oblivion's sweet embrace.
+
+
+
+
+OH, LOVE SO LONG AS LOVE THOU CANST
+
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+  And let thy heart forever glow
+    And throb with love, and hold love's heat,
+  So long on earth another heart
+    Shall echo to its yearning beat.
+
+  And who to thee his heart shall show,
+    Oh raise it up and make it glad!
+  Oh make his every moment blithe,
+    And not a moment make him sad!
+
+  Guard well thy tongue; a bitter word
+    Soon from the mouth of anger leaps.
+  O God! it was not meant to wound,--
+    But ah! the other goes and weeps.
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+  Thou kneelest down upon the grave,
+    And sink'st in agony thine eyes,--
+  They never more the dead shall see,--
+    The silent church-yard hears thy sighs.
+
+  Thou mourn'st:--"Oh, look upon this heart,
+    That here doth weep upon this mound!
+  Forgive me if I caused thee pain,--
+    O God, it was not meant to wound!"
+
+  But he, he sees and hears thee not;
+    He comes not, he can never know:
+  The mouth that kissed thee once says not,
+    "Friend, I forgave thee long ago!"
+
+  He did forgive thee long ago,
+    Though many a hot tear bitter fell
+  For thee and for thy angry word;
+    But still he slumbers soft and well!
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+                                    Translation of Dr. Edward Breck.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: FREYTAG]
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAV FREYTAG
+
+(1816-1895)
+
+
+Gustav Freytag, one of the foremost of German novelists, was born July
+13th, 1816, in Kreuzburg, Silesia, where his father was a physician.
+He studied alternately at Breslau and Berlin, at which latter
+university he was given the degree of a doctor of philosophy in 1838.
+In 1839 he settled as a _privatdocent_ at the University of Breslau,
+where he lectured on the German language and literature until 1844,
+when he resigned his position to devote himself to literature. He
+removed to Leipzig in 1846, and the following year to Dresden, where
+he married. In 1848 he returned to Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt
+the weekly journal Die Grenzboten, which he conducted until 1861, and
+again from 1869 to 1870. In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt
+in the North German Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the
+Franco-Prussian war, he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince,
+later the German Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until
+after the battle of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work
+was chiefly for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen
+Reich. In 1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in
+Wiesbaden, except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate
+Siebleben near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.
+
+All of Freytag's earliest work, with the single exception of a volume
+of poems published in 1845 under the title 'In Breslau,' is dramatic.
+His first production was a comedy, 'Die Brautfahrt' (The Wedding
+Journey), published in 1844, which although it was awarded a prize
+offered by the Royal Theatre in Berlin, found but indifferent popular
+favor, as did its successor, the one-act tragedy 'Die Gelehrte' (The
+Scholar). With his next play, 'Die Valentine' (1846), Freytag however
+was signally successful. This was followed the year after by 'Graf
+Waldemar.' He attained his highest dramatic success with the comedy
+'Die Journalisten' (The Journalists), which appeared in 1853, and
+since its first production in 1854 has maintained its place as one of
+the most popular plays on the German stage. But one other play
+followed, the tragedy 'Die Fabier' (The Fabii), which appeared in
+1859.
+
+He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his most
+famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was
+published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success.
+The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most significant,
+for it marked at the same time an era both in German literature and in
+its author's own career, in that it introduced into the one in its
+most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of modern life in
+Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other, the direction
+which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement has a
+twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels Freytag did
+his most important and lasting work, but that the whole of this work
+was in a manner the development of a similar tendency. Although as
+different as need be in environment, all of his subsequent novels
+embody inherently the characteristics of 'Debit and Credit,' for like
+it, they are all well-defined attempts to depict the typical social
+conditions of the period in which they move, and their characters are
+the carefully considered types of their time. Freytag, with a
+philosophic seriousness of purpose perhaps characteristically German,
+is writing not only novels but the history of civilization, in his
+early work. Later on, the didactic purpose to a certain extent
+overshadows the rest; and although he never loses his power of telling
+a story, it is the history in the end that is paramount.
+
+'Debit and Credit' is a novel of the century, and it takes up the
+great problem of the century, the position of modern industrialism in
+the social life of the day. Its principal centre of action is the
+business house of the wholesale grocer T.O. Schröter, who is an
+admirable embodiment of the careful, industrious, and successful
+merchant. In sharp contradistinction to him is the Baron von
+Rothsattel, the representative of earlier conditions in the
+organization of the State, which made the nobleman pre-eminently a
+social force. Freytag's polemic is not only the dignity of labor under
+present conditions, but the absolute effeteness of the old order of
+things that despised it. The real hero of the story is Anton
+Wohlfahrt, who begins his commercial career as a youth in the house of
+T.O. Schröter, and ends, after some vicissitudes, as a member of the
+firm. Mercantile life has nowhere been better described in its
+monotony, its interests, and its aspirations, as the story is
+developed; and although at first sight no field could be more barren
+in literary interest, there is in reality no lack of incident and
+action, whose inevitable sequence makes the plot. Anton's career in
+the house of Schröter is interrupted by his connection with the Baron
+von Rothsattel, who has, through his want of a business training and
+his lack of a knowledge of men, fallen into the hands of a Jew
+money-lender; by whom he is persuaded to mortgage his land in order to
+embark in a business undertaking which it is presumed will increase
+his fortune. His mill fails, however, and he is involved in
+difficulties from which he is unable to extricate himself. Anton, the
+intimate friend of the family, is therefore persuaded by the Baroness
+to undertake the management of matters, and after vainly endeavoring
+to induce his principal to interest himself in the affair, sacrifices
+his position to accompany the family to their dilapidated estate in a
+distant province. The Baron will tolerate no interference, however,
+and Anton finally returns to the house of Schröter and is reinstated
+in the business. Lenore, the Baron's daughter, the first cause of
+Anton's interest, meantime becomes engaged to the young nobleman Fink;
+who has been an associate of Anton's in the office of T. O. Schröter,
+has but recently returned from the United States, and who first
+advances funds for the improvement of the estate and ultimately
+purchases it.
+
+Fink acts his part in the author's philosophy as a contrast to the
+Baron von Rothsattel. Although a nobleman, he has adapted himself to
+the conditions of the century, and is free from any hallucinations of
+his hereditary rank, even while he is perfectly awake to its
+traditions. He has entered upon a commercial career not from choice,
+but from necessity; but he has accepted his fate and has made
+successful use of his opportunities. Anton marries the sister of T. O.
+Schröter, and becomes a partner in the business. Fink is however
+really the one who gains the princess in this modern tale, and is
+plainly to have the more important share as an actual social force in
+the future. The old feudal nobility has played its part on the stage
+of the world; and being so picturesque, and full of romantic
+opportunity, its loss is doubtless to be regretted. The tamer
+realities of the modern industrial state have succeeded it. As Freytag
+solves the problem in 'Soll und Haben,' it is the man who works, the
+man of the industrial classes alone, to whom the victory belongs in
+the modern social struggle, be his antecedents bourgeois or
+aristocratic.
+
+Freytag's second great novel, 'Die Verlorene Handschrift' (The Lost
+Manuscript), which appeared in 1864, concerns itself with another
+phase of the same problem. This time, however, instead of the merchant
+and man of affairs, it is the scholar about whom the action centres.
+Felix Werner, professor of philology, has come upon unmistakable
+traces of the lost books of Tacitus, whose recovery is the object of
+his life. In his search for the manuscript in an old house in the
+country he finds his future wife Ilse, one of the finest types in all
+German literature of the true German woman, both while at home a maid
+in her father's house and subsequently as the professor's wife in the
+university town. Werner, in his scholarly absorption, unwittingly
+neglects his wife, whose beauty has attracted the attention of the
+prince; and there is a series of intrigues which threaten seriously to
+involve the innocent Ilse, until the prince's evil intentions become
+evident even to the unsuspecting Werner. The covers of the lost
+manuscript are actually discovered at last, but the book itself has
+vanished. In this second novel Freytag displays a most genial humor,
+unsuspected in the author of 'Debit and Credit,' but apparent enough
+in 'The Journalists.' The professorial life is admirably drawn with
+all its lights and shadows; and its motives and ambitions, its
+peculiar struggles and strivings, have never been more understandingly
+treated. The story, however, even more than 'Debit and Credit,'
+displays the author's weaknesses of construction. The plot is so
+confused by digressions that the main thread is sometimes lost sight
+of, and the tendency to philosophical generalization, which as a
+German is to some extent the author's birthright, reaches in these
+pages an appalling exemplification. What had been an extraordinary
+novel pruned of these defects, is still not an ordinary novel with
+them; and as a picture of German university life from the point of
+view of the professor, 'The Lost Manuscript' stands unrivaled in
+literature. Again the thesis in this second novel is the dignity of
+labor, and the nobleman fares no better at the author's hands than in
+the mercantile environment of the first.
+
+These two novels, which outside of Germany are Freytag's best claim to
+attention, were followed by the four volumes of 'Bilder aus der
+Deutschen Vergangenheit' (Pictures from the German Past: 1859-62), a
+series of studies of German life from different epochs of its history,
+intended to illustrate the evolution of modern conditions through
+their successive stages from the remote past. Freytag's early work as
+a university _docent_ had particularly fitted him for this sort of
+writing, and some of his best is contained in these books.
+
+More important still, however, was his next great work, the long
+series of historical novels 'Die Ahnen' (The Ancestors: 1872-80), an
+ambitious plan, born of the stirring events of the Franco-Prussian War
+and the resultant awakening of the new spirit of nationality, to trace
+the development of the German people from the earliest time down to
+the present day. To carry out this purpose he accordingly selects a
+typical German family, which he describes under the characteristic
+conditions of each period, with the most conscientious attention to
+manners and customs and social environment. The same family thus
+appears from generation to generation under the changing conditions of
+the different epochs of German history, and the whole forms together
+the consecutive _Culturgeschichte_ of the nation.
+
+This whole long series of 'The Ancestors' stands as a monument of
+careful research into the most minute factors of German life in their
+time of action. Freytag's antiquarianism is not of the dilettante kind
+that is content to masquerade modern motives in ancient garb and
+setting. He was fully conscious of all the elements of his problem,
+and he sought to reproduce the intellectual point of view of his
+actors, and to account for their motives of action, as well as to
+picture accurately their material environment. It is in his
+super-conscientiousness in these directions that the inherent
+weakness of the novels of this series lies. They are too palpably
+reconstructions with a purpose. Their didacticism is wrapped around
+them like a garment; and much of the time, that is all that is visible
+upon the surface. As the series advances this fault grows upon them.
+They are in reality of very unequal interest. 'Ingo' and 'Ingraban'
+are the sprightliest in action, and have been as a consequence the
+most widely read of these later works, many of which are, in part at
+least, far too serious of purpose to play their part conspicuously
+well as novels.
+
+The novels of 'The Ancestors' are a culmination of Freytag's literary
+evolution. As a playwright he will no doubt be forgotten except for
+'The Journalists'; in which he has, however, left an imperishable play
+which German critics have not hesitated to call the best comedy of the
+century. The two novels of modern life from his middle period form
+together his greatest work, although here, and particularly in 'The
+Lost Manuscript,' he has overweighted his material with abstract
+discussion, in which his perspective has sometimes all but
+disappeared. Subsequently, both the 'Bilder' and 'Die Ahnen' show his
+decided predilection for historical studies. The struggle in his own
+case was between the scholar and the man of letters, in which the
+scholar eventually won possession of the field.
+
+Freytag's other work includes--'Die Technik des Dramas' (The Technique
+of the Drama: 1863), a consideration of the principles of dramatic
+construction; the life of his friend Karl Malthy, 1870; and 'Der
+Kronprinz und die Deutsche Kaiserkrone' (The Crown Prince and the
+German Imperial Crown: 1889), written after the death of Frederick
+III., with whom Freytag had had personal relations. To accompany
+the collected edition of his works (1887-88), he wrote a short
+autobiography, 'Erinnerungen aus Meinem Leben' (Recollections from
+My Life).
+
+
+
+
+THE GERMAN PROFESSOR
+
+From 'The Lost Manuscript'
+
+
+Professors' wives also have trouble with their husbands. Sometimes
+when Ilse was seated in company with her intimate friends--with Madame
+Raschke, Madame Struvelius, or little Madame Günther--at one of those
+confidential coffee parties which they did not altogether despise,
+many things would come to light.
+
+The conversation with these intellectual women was certainly very
+interesting. It is true the talk sometimes passed lightly over the
+heads of the servants, and sometimes housekeeping troubles ventured
+out of the pond of pleasant talk like croaking frogs. To Ilse's
+surprise, she found that even Flaminia Struvelius could discourse
+seriously about preserving little gherkins, and that she sought
+closely for the marks of youth in a plucked goose. The merry Madame
+Günther aroused horror and laughter in more experienced married women,
+when she asserted that she could not endure the crying of little
+children, and that from the very first she would force her child
+(which she had not yet got) to proper silence by chastisement. Thus
+conversation sometimes left greater subjects to stray into this
+domain. And when unimportant subjects were reviewed, it naturally came
+about that the men were honored by a quiet discussion. At such times
+it was evident that although the subject under consideration was men
+in general, each of the wives was thinking of her own husband, and
+that each silently carried about a secret bundle of cares, and
+justified the conclusion of her hearers that that husband too must be
+difficult to manage.
+
+Madame Raschke's troubles could not be concealed; the whole town knew
+them. It was notorious that one market day her husband had gone to the
+university in his dressing-gown--in a brilliant dressing-gown, blue
+and orange, with a Turkish pattern. His students, who loved him dearly
+and were well aware of his habits, could not succeed in suppressing a
+loud laugh; and Raschke had calmly hung the dressing-gown over his
+pulpit, held his lecture in his shirt-sleeves, and returned home in
+one of the students' overcoats. Since that time Madame Raschke never
+let her husband go out without herself inspecting him. It also
+appeared that all these ten years he had not been able to learn his
+way about the town, and she dared not change her residence, because
+she was quite sure that her professor would never remember it, and
+always return to his old home. Struvelius also occasioned much
+anxiety. Ilse knew about the last and greatest cause; but it also came
+to light that he expected his wife to read Latin proof-sheets, as she
+knew something of that language. Besides, he was quite incapable of
+refusing commissions to amiable wine merchants. At her marriage Madame
+Struvelius had found a whole cellar full of large and small wine
+casks, none of which had been drawn off, while he complained bitterly
+that no wine was ever brought into his cellar. Even little Madame
+Günther related that her husband could not give up night work; and
+that once, when he wandered with a lamp among his books, he came too
+near the curtain, which caught fire. He tore it off, and in so doing
+burnt his hands, and burst into the bedroom with blackened fingers in
+great alarm, and resembling Othello more than a mineralogist....
+
+Raschke was wandering about in the ante-room. Here too was confusion.
+Gabriel had not yet returned from his distant errand; the cook had
+left the remains of the meal standing on a side-table till his return;
+and Raschke had to find his greatcoat by himself. He rummaged among
+the clothes, and seized hold of a coat and a hat. As he was not so
+absent-minded as usual to-day, a glance at the despised supper
+reminded him just in time that he was to eat a fowl; so he seized hold
+of the newspaper which Gabriel had laid ready for his master, hastily
+took one of the chickens out of the dish, wrapped it in the journal,
+and thrust it in his pocket, agreeably surprised at the depth and
+capaciousness it revealed. Then he rushed past the astonished cook,
+and out of the house. When he opened the door of the _étage_ he
+stumbled against something that was crouching on the threshold. He
+heard a horrible growling behind him, and stormed down the stairs and
+out of doors.
+
+The words of the friend whom he had left now came into his mind.
+Werner's whole bearing was very characteristic; and there was
+something fine about it. It was strange that in a moment of anger
+Werner's face had acquired a sudden resemblance to a bull-dog's. Here
+the direct chain of the philosopher's contemplations was crossed by
+the remembrance of the conversation on animals' souls.
+
+"It is really a pity that it is still so difficult to determine an
+animal's expression of soul. If we could succeed in that, science
+would gain. For if we could compare in all their minutiæ the
+expression and gestures of human beings and higher animals, we might
+make most interesting deductions from their common peculiarities and
+their particular differences. In this way the natural origin of their
+dramatic movements, and perhaps some new laws, would be discovered."
+
+While the philosopher was pondering thus, he felt a continued pulling
+at his coat-tails. As his wife was in the habit of giving him a gentle
+pull when he was walking next her absorbed in thought and they met
+some acquaintance, he took no further notice of it, but took off his
+hat, and bowing politely towards the railing of the bridge, said
+"Good-evening."
+
+"These common and original elements in the mimic expression of human
+beings and higher animals might, if rightly understood, even open out
+new vistas into the great mystery of life." Another pull. Raschke
+mechanically took off his hat. Another pull. "Thank you, dear Aurelia,
+I did bow." As he spoke, the thought crossed his mind that his wife
+would not pull at his coat so low down. It was not she, but his little
+daughter Bertha who was pulling; for she often walked gravely next
+him, and like her mother, pulled at the bell for bows. "That will do,
+my dear," said he, as Bertha continued to snatch and pull at his
+coat-tails. "Come here, you little rogue!" and he absently put his
+hand behind him to seize the little tease. He seized hold of something
+round and shaggy; he felt sharp teeth on his fingers, and turned with
+a start. There he saw in the lamplight a reddish monster with a big
+head, shaggy hair, and a little tassel that fell back into its hind
+legs in lieu of a tail. His wife and daughter were horribly
+transformed; and he gazed in surprise on this indistinct creature
+which seated itself before him, and glared at him in silence.
+
+"A strange adventure!" exclaimed Raschke. "What are you, unknown
+creature? Presumably a dog. Away with you!" The animal retreated a few
+steps. Raschke continued his meditations: "If we trace back the
+expression and gestures of the affections to their original forms in
+this manner, one of the most active laws would certainly prove to be
+the endeavor to attract or repel the extraneous. It would be
+instructive to distinguish, by means of these involuntary movements of
+men and animals, what is essential and what conventional. Away, dog!
+Do me a favor and go home. What does he want with me? Evidently he
+belongs to Werner's domain. The poor creature will assuredly lose
+itself in the town under the dominion of an _idée fixe_."
+
+Meantime Speihahn's attacks were becoming more violent; and now he was
+marching in a quite unnatural and purely conventional manner on his
+hind legs, while his fore paws were leaning against the professor's
+back, and his teeth were actually biting into the coat.
+
+A belated shoemaker's boy stood still and beat his leathern apron. "Is
+not the master ashamed to let his poor apprentice push him along like
+that?" In truth, the dog behind the man looked like a dwarf pushing a
+giant along the ice.
+
+Raschke's interest in the dog's thoughts increased. He stood still
+near a lantern, examined and felt his coat. This coat had developed a
+velvet collar and very long sleeves, advantages that the philosopher
+had never yet remarked in his greatcoat. Now the matter became clear
+to him: absorbed in thought, he had chosen a wrong coat, and the
+worthy dog insisted on saving his master's garment, and making the
+thief aware that there was something wrong. Raschke was so pleased
+with this sagacity that he turned round, addressed some kind words to
+Speihahn, and made an attempt to stroke his shaggy hair. The dog again
+snapped at his hand. "You are quite right to be angry with me,"
+replied Raschke; "I will prove to you that I acknowledge my fault." He
+took off the coat and hung it over his arm. "Yes, it is much heavier
+than my own." He walked on cheerfully in his thin coat, and observed
+with satisfaction that the dog abandoned the attacks on his back. But
+instead, Speihahn sprang upon his side, and again bit at the coat and
+the hand, and growled unpleasantly.
+
+The professor got angry with the dog, and when he came to a bench on
+the promenade he laid down the coat, intending to face the dog
+seriously and drive him home. In this manner he got rid of the dog,
+but also of the coat. For Speihahn sprang upon the bench with a mighty
+bound, placed himself astride the coat, and met the professor, who
+tried to drive him away, with hideous growling and snarling.
+
+"It is Werner's coat," said the professor, "and it is Werner's dog: it
+would be wrong to beat the poor creature because it is becoming
+violent in its fidelity, and it would be wrong to leave the dog and
+the coat." So he remained standing before the dog and speaking kindly
+to him: but Speihahn no longer took any notice of the professor; he
+turned against the coat itself, which he scratched, rummaged, and bit.
+Raschke saw that the coat could not long endure such rage. "He is
+frantic or mad," said he suspiciously. "I shall have to use force
+against you after all, poor creature;" and he considered whether he
+should also jump upon the seat and push the mad creature by a violent
+kick into the water, or whether it would be better to open the
+inevitable attack from below. He resolved on the latter course, and
+looked round to see whether he could anywhere discover a stone or
+stick to throw at the raging beast. As he looked, he observed the
+trees and the dark sky above him, and the place seemed quite
+unfamiliar. "Has magic been at work here?" he exclaimed, with
+amusement. He turned politely to a solitary wanderer who was passing
+that way: "Would you kindly tell me in what part of the town we are?
+And could you perhaps lend me your stick for a moment?"
+
+"Indeed," angrily replied the person addressed, "those are very
+suspicious questions. I want my stick myself at night. Who are you,
+sir?" The stranger approached the professor menacingly.
+
+"I am peaceable," replied Raschke, "and by no means inclined to
+violent attacks. A quarrel has arisen between me and the animal on
+this seat for the possession of a coat, and I should be much obliged
+to you if you would drive the dog away from the coat. But I beg you
+not to hurt the animal any more than is absolutely necessary."
+
+"Is that your coat there?" asked the man.
+
+"Unfortunately I cannot give you an affirmative answer," replied
+Raschke conscientiously.
+
+"There must be something wrong here," exclaimed the stranger, again
+eyeing the professor suspiciously.
+
+"There is, indeed," replied Raschke. "The dog is out of his mind; the
+coat is exchanged, and I do not know where we are."
+
+"Close to the valley gate, Professor Raschke," answered the voice of
+Gabriel, who hastily joined the group. "Excuse me, but what brings you
+here?"
+
+"Capital!" exclaimed Raschke joyously. "Pray take charge of this coat
+and this dog."
+
+Gabriel gazed in amazement at Speihahn, who was now lying on the coat
+and bending his head before his friend. Gabriel threw down the dog and
+seized the coat. "Why, that is our greatcoat!" exclaimed he.
+
+"Yes, Gabriel," said the professor, "that was my mistake, and the dog
+has shown marvelous fidelity to the coat."
+
+"Fidelity!" exclaimed Gabriel indignantly, as he drew a parcel out of
+the coat pocket. "It was greedy selfishness, sir; there must be some
+food in this pocket."
+
+"Yes, true," exclaimed Raschke; "it is all the chicken's fault. Give
+me the parcel, Gabriel; I must eat the fowl myself; and we might bid
+each other good-night now with mutual satisfaction, if you would just
+show me my way a little among these trees."
+
+"But you must not go home in the night air without an overcoat,"
+said Gabriel considerately. "We are not far from our house; the best
+way would really be for you to come back with me, sir."
+
+Raschke considered and laughed.
+
+"You are right, Gabriel; my departure was awkward; and to-day an
+animal's soul has restored a man's soul to order."
+
+"If you mean this dog," said Gabriel, "it would be the first time he
+ever did anything good. I see he must have followed you from our door;
+for I put little bones there for him of an evening."
+
+"Just now he seemed not to be quite in his right mind," said the
+professor.
+
+"He is cunning enough when he pleases," continued Gabriel
+mysteriously; "but if I were to speak of my experiences with this
+dog--"
+
+"Do speak, Gabriel," eagerly exclaimed the philosopher. "There is
+nothing so valuable concerning animals as a truthful statement from
+those who have carefully observed them."
+
+"I may say that I have done so," confirmed Gabriel, with satisfaction;
+"and if you want to know exactly what he is, I can assure you that he
+is possessed of the devil, he is a thief, he is embittered, and he
+hates all mankind."
+
+"Ah, indeed!" replied the professor, somewhat disconcerted. "I see it
+is much more difficult to look into a dog's heart than into a
+professor's."
+
+Speihahn crept along silent and suppressed, and listened to the
+praises that fell to his lot; while Professor Raschke, conducted by
+Gabriel, returned to the house by the park. Gabriel opened the
+sitting-room door, and announced:--
+
+"Professor Raschke."
+
+Ilse extended both her hands to him.
+
+"Welcome, welcome, dear Professor Raschke!" and led him to her
+husband's study.
+
+"Here I am again," said Raschke cheerfully, "after wandering as in a
+fairy tale. What has brought me back were two animals, who showed me
+the right way,--a roast fowl and an embittered dog."
+
+Felix sprang up; the men greeted one another warmly, shaking hands,
+and after all misadventures, spent a happy evening.
+
+When Raschke had gone home late, Gabriel said sadly to his mistress,
+"This was the new coat; the fowl and the dog have put it in a horrible
+plight."
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH FROEBEL
+
+(1782-1852)
+
+BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH
+
+[Illustration: FRIEDRICH FROEBEL]
+
+
+It was Froebel who said, "The clearer the thread that runs through our
+lives backward to our childhood, the clearer will be our onward glance
+to the goal;" and in the fragment of autobiography he has left us, he
+illustrates forcibly the truth of his own saying. The motherless baby
+who plays alone in the village pastor's quiet house, the dreamy child
+who wanders solitary in the high-walled garden; the thoughtful lad,
+neglected, misunderstood, who forgets the harsh realities of life in
+pondering the mysteries of the flowers, the contradictions of
+existence, and the dogmas of orthodox theology; who decides in early
+boyhood that the pleasures of the senses are without enduring
+influence and therefore on no account to be eagerly pursued;--these
+presentments of himself, which he summons up for us from the past,
+show the vividness of his early recollections and indicate the course
+which the stream of his life is to run.
+
+The coldness and injustice of the new mother who assumed control of
+the household when he was four years old, his isolation from other
+children, the merely casual notice he received from the busy father
+absorbed in his parish work, all tended to turn inward the tide of his
+mental and spiritual life. He studied himself, not only because it was
+the bent of his nature, but because he lacked outside objects of
+interest; and to this early habit of introspection we owe many of the
+valuable features of his educational philosophy. Whoever has learned
+thoroughly to understand one child, has conquered a spot of firm
+ground on which to rest while he studies the world of children; and
+because the great teacher realized this truth, because he longed to
+give to others the means of development denied to himself, he turns
+for us the heart-leaves of his boyhood.
+
+It would appear that Froebel's characteristics were strongly marked
+and unusual from the beginning. Called by every one "a moon-struck
+child" in Oberweissbach, the village of his birth, he was just as
+unanimously considered "an old fool" when, crowned with the experience
+of seventy years, he played with the village children on the green
+hills of Thuringia. The intensity of his inward life, the white heat
+of his convictions, his absolute blindness to any selfish idea or aim,
+his enthusiasm, the exaltation of his spiritual nature, all furnish so
+many cogent reasons why the people of any day or of any community
+should have failed to understand him, and scorned what they could not
+comprehend. It is the old story of the seers and the prophets repeated
+as many times as they appear; for "these colossal souls," as Emerson
+said, "require a long focal distance to be seen."
+
+At ten years old the sensitive boy was fortunately removed from the
+uncongenial atmosphere of the parental household; and in his uncle's
+home he spent five free and happy years, being apprenticed at the end
+of this time to a forester in his native Thuringian woods. Then
+followed a year's course in the University of Jena, and four years
+spent in the study of farming, in clerical work of various kinds, and
+in land-surveying. All these employments, however, Froebel himself
+felt to be merely provisional; for like the hazel wand in the
+diviner's hand, his instinct was blindly seeking through these
+restless years the well-spring of his life.
+
+In Frankfort, where he had gone intending to study architecture,
+Destiny touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and knew her.
+Through a curious combination of circumstances he gained employment in
+Herr Gruner's Model School, and it was found at once that he was what
+the Germans love to call "a teacher by the grace of God." The first
+time he met his class of boys he tells us that he felt inexpressibly
+happy; the hazel wand had found the waters and was fixed at last. From
+this time on, all the events of his life were connected with his
+experience as a teacher. Impelled as soon as he had begun his work by
+a desire for more effective methods, he visited Yverdon, then the
+centre of educational thought, and studied with Pestalozzi. He went
+again in 1808, accompanied by three pupils, and spent two years there,
+alternately studying and teaching.
+
+There was a year of lectures at Göttingen after this, and one at the
+University of Berlin, accompanied by unceasing study and research both
+in literary and scientific lines; but in the fateful year 1813 this
+quiet student life was broken in upon, for impelled by strong moral
+conviction, Froebel joined Baron von Lützow's famous volunteer corps,
+formed to harass the French by constant skirmishes and to encourage
+the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.
+
+No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of
+the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing
+arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he
+had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils
+to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and
+unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and
+contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon
+the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became
+master of his fate.
+
+After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in
+the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being
+the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus
+by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so
+perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so
+complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look
+into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly
+the purpose it was intended to work out.
+
+In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of
+his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life
+work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a
+"Universal German Educational Institute." He was without money, of
+course, as he had always been and always would be,--his hands were
+made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of
+straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward
+things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the
+spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The
+school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later
+established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all
+were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to
+say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.
+
+Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in
+lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction
+with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for
+the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until
+1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a "definite truth." This definite
+truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten;
+and from this time until the end, all other work was laid aside, and
+his entire strength given to the consummate flower of his educational
+thought.
+
+The first kindergarten was opened in 1837 at Blankenburg (where a
+memorial school is now conducted), and in 1850 the institution at
+Marienthal for the training of kindergartners was founded, Froebel
+remaining at its head until his death two years after.
+
+With the exception of that remarkable book 'The Education of Man'
+(1826), his most important literary work was done after 1836;
+'Pedagogics of the Kindergarten,' the first great European
+contribution to the subject of child-study, appearing from 1837 to
+1840 in the form of separate essays, and the 'Mutter-und-Kose Lieder'
+(Mother-Play) in 1843. Many of his educational aphorisms and
+occasional speeches were preserved by his great disciple the Baroness
+von Marenholtz-Bülow in her 'Reminiscences of Froebel'; and though two
+most interesting volumes of his correspondence have been published,
+there remain a number of letters, as well as essays and educational
+sketches, not yet rendered into English.
+
+Froebel's literary style is often stiff and involved, its phrases
+somewhat labored, and its substance exceedingly difficult to translate
+with spirit and fidelity; yet after all, his mannerisms are of a kind
+to which one easily becomes accustomed, and the kernel of his thought
+when reached is found well worth the trouble of removing a layer of
+husk. He had always an infinitude of things to say, and they were all
+things of purpose and of meaning; but in writing, as well as in formal
+speaking, the language to clothe the thought came to him slowly and
+with difficulty. Yet it appears that in friendly private intercourse
+he spoke fluently, and one of his students reports that in his classes
+he was often "overpowering and sublime, the stream of his words
+pouring forth like fiery rain."
+
+It is probable that in daily life Froebel was not always an agreeable
+house-mate; for he was a genius, a reformer, and an unworldly
+enthusiast, believing in himself and in his mission with all the ardor
+of a heart centred in one fixed purpose. He was quite intolerant of
+those who doubted or disbelieved in his theories, as well as of those
+who, believing, did not carry their faith into works. The people who
+stood nearest him and devoted themselves to the furthering of his
+ideas slept on no bed of roses, certainly; but although he sometimes
+sacrificed their private interests to his cause, it must not be
+forgotten that he first laid himself and all that he had upon the same
+altar. His nature was one that naturally inspired reverence and
+loyalty, and drew from his associates the most extraordinary devotion
+and self-sacrifice. Then, as now, women were peculiarly attracted by
+his burning enthusiasm, his prophetic utterances, and his lofty views
+of their sex and its mission; and then, as now, the almost fanatical
+zeal of his followers is perhaps to be explained by the fact that he
+gives a new world-view to his students,--one that produces much the
+same effect upon the character as the spiritual exaltation called
+"experiencing religion."
+
+He was twice married, in each case to a superior woman of great gifts
+of mind and character, and both helpmates joyfully took up a life of
+privation and care that they might be associated with him and with his
+work. Those memorable words spoken of our Washington,--"Heaven left
+him childless that a nation might call him father," are even more
+applicable to Froebel, for his wise and tender fatherhood extends to
+all the children of the world. When he passed through the village
+streets of his own country, little ones came running from every
+doorstep; the babies clinging to his knees and the older ones hanging
+about his neck and refusing to leave the dear play-master, as they
+called him. So the kindergartners love to think of him to-day,--the
+tall spare figure, the long hair, the wise, plain, strong-featured
+face, the shining eyes, and the little ones clustering about him as
+they clustered about another Teacher in Galilee, centuries ago.
+
+Froebel's educational creed cannot here be cited at length, but some
+of its fundamental articles are:--
+
+The education of the child should begin with its birth, and should be
+threefold, addressing the mental, spiritual, and physical natures.
+
+It should be continued as it has begun, by appealing to the heart and
+the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.
+
+There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous
+purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten
+to university.
+
+Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a
+free, spontaneous growth,--a development from within, never a
+prescription from without.
+
+The training of the child should be conducted by means of the
+activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common
+heritage of childhood.
+
+The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life
+thrills through every manifestation of the universe, and that he is a
+part of all that is.
+
+The object of education is the development of the human being in the
+totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a
+child of God.
+
+These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own
+mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has
+but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they
+have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work
+greater magic in the future. The great teacher's place in history may
+be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he
+gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of
+child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day.
+
+Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful
+one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His
+death-blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens
+in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His
+strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing
+misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne
+to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to
+symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of
+the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of
+mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.
+
+In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens,
+his best memorials, cluster thickly now; and on the face of the cliffs
+that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner mountain may be seen
+in great letters the single word _Froebel_, hewn deep into the solid
+rock.
+
+                                 [Signature: Nora Archibald Smith]
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD
+
+From 'Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel,' by Baroness B. von
+Marenholtz-Bülow. Copyright 1877, by Mary Mann. Reprinted by
+permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston.
+
+
+All that does not grow out of one's inner being, all that is not one's
+own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken
+that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of
+calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we
+never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to
+overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of
+letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of
+life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear
+the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?...
+
+This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of
+human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the
+child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of
+self-seeking _egoism_ is the most important task of education; for
+selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the
+life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education
+is to teach to love, to break up the egoism of the individual, and to
+lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all
+the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the
+highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity....
+
+Women are to recognize that childhood and womanliness (the care of
+childhood and the life of women) are inseparably connected; that they
+form a unit; and that God and nature have placed the protection of the
+human plant in their hands. Hitherto the female sex could take only a
+more or less passive part in human history, because great battles and
+the political organization of nations were not suited to their powers.
+But at the present stage of culture, nothing is more pressingly
+required than the cultivation of every human power for the arts of
+peace and the work of higher civilization. The culture of individuals,
+and therefore of the whole nation, depends in great part upon the
+earliest care of childhood. On that account women, as one half of
+mankind, have to undertake the most important part of the problems of
+the time, problems that men are not able to solve. If but one half of
+the work be accomplished, then our epoch, like all others, will fail
+to reach the appointed goal. As educators of mankind, the women of the
+present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they
+have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings....
+
+But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier
+generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom
+and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time.
+I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may
+grow of itself, out of its own individuality. But where shall I find
+allies and helpers if not in women, who as mothers and teachers may
+put my idea in execution? Only intellectually active women can and
+will do it. But if these are to be loaded with the ballast of dead
+knowledge that can take no root in the unprepared ground, if the
+fountains of their own original life are to be choked up with it, they
+will not follow my direction nor understand the call of the time for
+the new task of their sex, but will seek satisfaction in empty
+superficiality.
+
+To learn to comprehend nature in the child,--is not that to comprehend
+one's own nature and the nature of mankind? And in this comprehension
+is there not involved a certain degree of comprehension of all things
+else? Women cannot learn and take into themselves anything higher and
+more comprehensive. It should therefore at least be the beginning,
+and the love of childhood should be awakened in the mind (and in a
+wider sense, this is the love of humanity), so that a new, free
+generation of men can grow up by right care.
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+From 'The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother-Play.' Copyright 1895, by
+D. Appleton & Co.
+
+
+What shall we learn from our yearning look into the heart of the
+flower and the eye of the child? This truth: Whatever develops, be it
+into flower or tree or man, is from the beginning implicitly that
+which it has the power to become. The possibility of perfect manhood
+is what you read in your child's eye, just as the perfect flower is
+prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A
+presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams,
+stirs in your unconscious infant--this it is, O mother, which
+transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself
+what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely,
+as _your_ child--or in other words, as child of man--he is destined to
+live in the past and future as well as in the present. His earthly
+being implies a past heaven; his birth makes a present heaven; in his
+soul he holds a future heaven. This threefold heaven, which you also
+bear within you, shines out on you through your child's eyes.
+
+The beast lives only in the present. Of past and future he knows
+naught. But to man belong not only the present, but also the future
+and the past. His thought pierces the heaven of the future, and hope
+is born. He learns that all human life is one life; that all human
+joys and sorrows are his joys and sorrows, and through participation
+enters the present heaven--the heaven of love. He turns his mind
+towards the past, and out of retrospection wrests a vigorous faith.
+What soul could fail to conquer an invincible trust in the pure, the
+good, the holy, the ideally human, the truly Divine, if it would look
+with single eye into its own past, into the past of history? Could
+there be a man in whose soul such a contemplation of the past would
+fail to blossom into devout insight, into self-conscious and
+self-comprehending faith? Must not such a retrospect unveil the truth?
+Must not the beauty of the unveiled truth allure him to Divine doing,
+Divine living? All that is high and holy in human life meets in that
+faith which is born of the unveiling of a heaven that has always been;
+in that hope born of a vision of the heaven that shall be; in that
+love which creates a heaven in the eternal Now. These three heavens
+shine out upon you through your child's eye. The presentiment that he
+carries these three heavens within him transfigures your countenance
+as you gaze upon him. Cherish this premonition, for thereby you will
+help him to make his life a musical chord wherein are blended the
+three notes of faith, hope, and love. These celestial virtues will
+link his life with the Divine life through which all life is one--with
+the God who is the supernal fountain of life, light, and love....
+
+Higher and more important than the cultivation of man's outer ear, is
+the culture of that inner sense of harmony whereby the soul learns to
+perceive sweet accord in soundless things, and to discern within
+itself harmonies and discords. The importance of wakening the inner
+ear to this music of the soul can scarcely be exaggerated. Learning to
+hear it within, the child will strive to give it outer form and
+expression; and even if in such effort he is only partially
+successful, he will gain thereby the power to appreciate the more
+successful effort of others. Thus enriching his own life by the life
+of others, he solves the problem of development. How else were it
+possible within the quickly fleeting hours of mortal life to develop
+our being in all directions, to fathom its depths, scale its heights,
+measure its boundaries? What we are, what we would be, we must learn
+to recognize in the mirror of all other lives. By the effort of each,
+and the recognition of all, the Divine man is revealed in humanity....
+
+Against the bright light which shines on the smooth white wall is
+thrust a dark object, and straightway appears the form which so
+delights the child. This is the outward fact; what is the truth which
+through this fact is dimly hinted to the prophetic mind? Is it not the
+creative and transforming power of light, that power which brings form
+and color out of chaos, and makes the beauty which gladdens our
+hearts? Is it not more than this,--a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the
+spiritual fact that our darkest experiences may project themselves in
+forms that will delight and bless, if in our hearts shines the light
+of God? The sternest crags, the most forbidding chasms, are beautiful
+in the mellow sunshine; while the fairest landscape loses all charm,
+and indeed ceases to be, when the light which created it is
+withdrawn. Is it not thus also with our lives? Yesterday, touched by
+the light of enthusiastic emotion, all our relationships seemed
+beautiful and blessed; to-day, when the glow of enthusiasm has faded,
+they oppress and repulse us. Only the conviction that it is the
+darkness within us which makes the darkness without, can restore the
+lost peace of our souls. Be it therefore, O mother, your sacred duty
+to make your darling early feel the working both of the outer and
+inner light. Let him see in one the symbol of the other, and tracing
+light and color to their source in the sun, may he learn to trace the
+beauty and meaning of his life to their source in God.
+
+                                       Translation of Susan E. Blow.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAWS OF THE MIND
+
+From 'The Letters of Froebel'
+
+
+I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child-world, those
+which delight us as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed
+laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system, and the
+operations of nature; and it is therefore possible to discover them
+and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws,
+we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty
+tendencies in the children, and to encourage, at the same time, all
+that is good and virtuous.
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE CHILDREN
+
+From 'The Letters of Froebel'
+
+
+I wish you could have been here this evening, and seen the many
+beautiful and varied forms and lovely patterns which freely and
+spontaneously developed themselves from some systematic variations of
+a simple ground form, in stick-playing. No one would believe, without
+seeing it, how the child soul, the child life, develops when treated
+as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected
+life of the world, by some skilled kindergarten teacher--nay, even by
+one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it
+blooms into delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh,
+if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth
+that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a
+hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what
+a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what
+dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what
+calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children!
+
+How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be
+so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their
+children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has
+passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for
+educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay,
+and showed how it could be satisfied.
+
+If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped
+lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and
+cry aloud to all men:--"Set to work at once for your children's sake
+on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose,
+and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A
+Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it
+their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly
+corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say
+I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so
+silly as I,--amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a
+right to enjoy life,--I who perpetually call to these parents in tones
+of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children!'" (Kommt,
+laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!)
+
+
+
+
+MOTIVES
+
+From 'The Education of Man.' By permission of Josephine Jarvis, the
+translator, and A. Lovell & Co., publishers
+
+
+Only in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure,
+spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in
+the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge
+and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do
+we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning
+of our whole being is thereby satisfied,--at least receives its whole
+meaning, and is changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an
+immediately rewarded effort....
+
+How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how
+we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an
+inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in
+another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the
+most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the
+inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure
+humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature.
+
+But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in
+boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on
+his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner,
+spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied
+condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this
+observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of
+man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes
+into his life.
+
+
+
+
+APHORISMS
+
+
+I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.
+
+The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.
+
+The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.
+
+Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.
+
+From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.
+
+Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.
+
+The first groundwork of religious life is love--love to God and
+man--in the bosom of the family.
+
+Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man
+and of humanity.
+
+Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.
+
+Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create
+life.
+
+Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no
+union with God is possible for men.
+
+The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the
+human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not
+therefore humanity born anew in each child?
+
+In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.
+
+The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed
+human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like
+one.
+
+In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things
+proceeds from one God.
+
+Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and
+joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.
+
+What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a
+beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and
+lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to
+verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.
+
+This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the
+beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national
+order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must
+first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of
+freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not
+even in that of the nursling.
+
+The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.
+
+A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,--what is it but a
+true sense of our close filial union with God?
+
+Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he
+must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.
+
+My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their
+innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I
+follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.
+
+A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.
+
+I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in
+God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose
+hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the
+purity and peace of heaven,--God's earth and God's heaven.
+
+    [Illustration: _THE MENAGERIE._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland.
+
+    "What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become
+    by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they
+    expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on
+    every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of
+    their inmost souls."--_Froebel._]
+
+
+
+
+FROISSART
+
+(1337-1410?)
+
+BY GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER
+
+[Illustration: FROISSART]
+
+
+Froissart is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with
+immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings,
+tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French
+knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he
+says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history
+and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and
+noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the
+wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in
+perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage
+them in well-doing."
+
+Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of
+feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was
+artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human
+qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no
+less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of
+fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding
+large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, and
+over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. The works of
+civilized communities--agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning,
+religion--were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad
+barbarians.
+
+This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years'
+War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the
+real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing
+efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in
+England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly admits,
+and not the knights, who won the battle of Poitiers. Gunpowder and
+cannon, a few years later, doomed the man-at-arms, and the rise of
+strong monarchies crowded out the feudal system. The thunder of
+artillery which echoes faintly in the last pages of Froissart is like
+a parting salvo to all the pageantry the volume holds. From
+cannon-ball and musket-shot the glittering procession has found refuge
+there. Into the safe retreat of these illuminated parchments, all the
+banners and pennons, lances, crests, and tapestries, knights and
+horses under clanking mail, had time--and but just time--to withdraw.
+We find them there, fresh as when they hurried in, the colors bright,
+the trumpets blowing.
+
+Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes in Hainault, in 1337, the year
+of his birth almost coinciding with Chaucer's. He tells us in his long
+autobiographical poem, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' that he was fond of
+play when a boy, and delighted in dances, carols, and poems, and had a
+liking for all those who loved dogs and birds. In the school where he
+was sent, he says, there were little girls whom he tried to please by
+giving them rings of glass, and pins, and apples, and pears. It seemed
+to him a most worthy thing to acquire their favor, and he wondered
+when it would be his turn to fall really in love. Much of this poem,
+which narrates tediously the love affair that was not long in coming,
+is probably fictitious; but there is no doubt of the accuracy of his
+description of himself in the opening lines, as fond of pleasure,
+prone to gallantry, and susceptible to all the bright faces of
+romance. From love and arms, he says, we are often told that all joy
+and every honor flow. He informs us elsewhere that he was no sooner
+out of school than he began to write, putting into verse the wars of
+his time.
+
+In 1361 he went to England, where Edward III was reigning with
+Philippa his queen, a daughter of the Count of Hainault. His passport
+to the favor of his great countrywoman was a book, the result of these
+rhymings, covering the period from the battle of Poitiers, 1356, to
+the time of his voyage. This volume is not known to exist, nor any
+copy of it. The Queen made him a clerk of her chamber. He had abundant
+opportunity in England to gratify his curiosity and fill his
+note-book, for the court was full of French noblemen, lately come over
+as hostages for King Jean of France, who was captured at the battle of
+Poitiers.
+
+In 1365 he took letters of recommendation from the Queen to David
+Bruce, King of Scotland, whom he followed for three months in his
+progress through that realm; spending a fortnight at the castle of
+William Douglas and making everywhere diligent inquiry about the
+recent war of 1345. In his delightful little poem 'The Debate between
+the Horse and the Greyhound,' beginning, "Froissart from Scotland was
+returning," we have a lifelike figure of the inquisitive young
+chronicler, pushing unweariedly from inn to inn on a tired horse and
+leading a footsore dog.
+
+Between his thirtieth and his thirty-fourth year he was sometimes in
+England and sometimes in various parts of the Continent. In August
+1369, while he was abroad, his patroness Queen Philippa died. She had
+encouraged him to continue his researches and writings, and he had
+presented her with a second volume, in prose, which has come down to
+us as a part of the chronicle. He admits that his work was an
+expansion of the chronicle of Jean le Bel, Canon of Saint Lambert at
+Liège, for he says:--"As all great rivers are made by the gathering
+together of many streams and springs, so the sciences also are
+extracted and compiled by many clerks: what one knows, the other does
+not."
+
+On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country
+of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by
+giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By
+the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a
+living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and
+correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A
+little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his
+chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been
+favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable
+to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his
+writings are all in the French language, which was of course his
+native tongue.
+
+About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at
+Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he
+observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them
+immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were
+however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388,
+hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man
+likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and
+Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book
+of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to
+travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of
+the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various
+towns upon their route had suffered.
+
+    "At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they
+    pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as
+    soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road
+    which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as
+    in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to
+    come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing."
+
+Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months'
+sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many
+towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much
+of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except
+with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which
+enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last
+in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than
+1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.
+
+It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat
+worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest
+of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and
+at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person
+dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the
+castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He
+is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his
+own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not
+regret the time thus spent, nor the money,--several fortunes, by his
+own count,--for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is
+always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of
+trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill
+sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from
+province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize
+the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local
+customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two
+French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each
+other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.
+
+    "And I tell you for a truth," we read, "that to make these
+    chronicles I have gone in my time much through the world,
+    both to fulfill my pleasure by seeing the wonders of the
+    earth, and to inquire about the arms and adventures that are
+    written in this book."
+
+So to horse, good Canon of Chimay! Throw aside books; there is news of
+fighting in the South; after the battle, soldiers will talk. There
+have been deeds of courage and romance. Hasten thither, while the tale
+of them is new!
+
+If he were not so celebrated as a chronicler, Froissart would be known
+as one of the last of the wandering minstrels. He had the roving foot;
+he lived by charming the rich into generosity with his recitals. And
+he wrote much poetry, which is little read, except where it has some
+autobiographical interest. We possess the long poems, 'L'Espinette
+Amoureuse,' 'Le Buisson de Jeunesse,' 'Le Dit du Florin,' and several
+shorter pieces, with fragments of his once famous versified romance
+'Méliador.'
+
+His great prose work, while professing to be a history, in distinction
+from the chronicles of previous writers, is however not an orderly
+narration, nor is it a philosophical treatment of political causes and
+effects. It is a collection of pictures and stories, without much
+unity except the constant purpose of exhibiting the prowess of
+knighthood. There is not much indication even of partisanship or
+patriotic feeling. Froissart generally gives due meed of praise to the
+best knight in every bout, the best battalion in every encounter,
+regardless of sides.
+
+The subjects treated are so numerous and disparate that no general
+idea of them can be given. They cover the time from 1326 to 1394, and
+lead us through England, Scotland, Flanders, Hainault, France, Italy,
+Spain, and Northern Africa. Among the most interesting passages are
+the story of King Edward's campaign against the Scots; his march
+through France; the battle of Crécy; the siege of Calais; Wat Tyler's
+Rebellion, which Froissart the well-fed parasite treats with an odd
+and inconsistent mingling of horror and contempt; the Jacquerie, which
+he says was the work of peasant dogs, the scum of the earth; the
+battle of Poitiers, with a fine description of the Black Prince
+waiting at table on poor captured King Jean; and the rise and fall of
+Philip van Artevelde.
+
+Froissart's chronicle used to be regarded as authoritative history.
+But as might have been expected from his mode of inquiry, it is full
+of geographical, chronological, and other errors. Getting his
+information by ear, he wrote proper names phonetically, or turned them
+into something resembling French. Thus Worcester becomes "Vaucestre,"
+Seymour "Simon," Sutherland "Surlant," Walter Tyler "Vautre Tuilier,"
+Edinburgh "Hedaimbourch," Stirling "Eturmelin." The persons from whom
+he got his material were generally partisans either of France or of
+England, and often told him their stories years after the events; so
+that although he tried to be impartial himself, and to offset one
+witness by another, he seldom heard a judicial account of a battle or
+a quarrel. He seems to have consulted few written records, though he
+might easily have seen the State papers of England and Hainault.
+
+It is useless to blame him, however; for the writing of mere history
+was not his purpose. With all his fine devotion to his life work,--a
+devotion which is the more admirable when we consider his
+pleasure-loving nature,--with all his attention to fairness, his great
+concern was not so much to instruct as to delight, first himself,
+secondly the great people of his age, and lastly posterity, on whom he
+ever and anon cast a shrewd and longing glance. To please his
+contemporaries, he several times revised his work. Posterity has
+nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which
+is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.
+
+But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian
+which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great
+authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century.
+Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt
+correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed
+virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely
+professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully
+practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck,
+for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which
+permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on
+prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled
+with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes
+himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by
+his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his
+unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet,
+and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it
+is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and
+squires and men-at-arms about him.
+
+There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to
+remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age.
+It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned
+village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved
+children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and
+agonizing foot-soldiers,--all these consequences of war he sees and
+occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever
+mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss.
+Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find
+ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune
+by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was
+a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.
+
+Froissart's merit, then, is not that he is a great political
+historian, nor even a great historian of the culture of his time. He
+did not see accurately enough to be the first, nor broadly and deeply
+and independently enough to be the second. But kindly Nature made him
+something else, and enabled him to win that name "which honoreth most
+and most endureth." She gave him the painter's eye, the poet's fancy,
+and it is as the artist of chivalry he lives to-day. His chronicle may
+be often false to historical fact, it may not display a broad and
+sympathetic intelligence or a generous impatience of conventionality,
+but it does please, it does enthrall. It is one of those books without
+moral intent, like the Arabian Nights, which the boys of all ages will
+persist in reading, and which men delight in if they love good
+pictures and good story-telling. No more lasting colors have come down
+to us from Venetian painters than those which rush out from the words
+on his pages. His scenes do not take shape in our minds as etchings or
+engravings, but smile themselves into being, like oil-paintings.
+Sunlight, the glint of steel, red and yellow banners waving, white
+horses galloping over the sand, flashing armor, glittering spurs, the
+shining faces of eager men, fill with glory this great pictorial
+wonder-book of the Middle Ages.
+
+                                    [Signature: Geo McLean Harper]
+
+
+
+
+THE INVASION OF FRANCE BY KING EDWARD III., AND THE BATTLE OF CRÉCY
+
+From the 'Chronicles': Translation of John Bourchier, Lord Berners
+
+
+HOW THE KING OF ENGLAND RODE THROUGH NORMANDY
+
+When the King of England arrived in the Hogue Saint-Vaast, the King
+issued out of his ship, and the first foot that he set on the ground
+he fell so rudely that the blood brast out of his nose. The knights
+that were about him took him up and said, "Sir, for God's sake enter
+again into your ship, and come not aland this day, for this is but an
+evil sign for us." Then the King answered quickly and said,
+"Wherefore? This is a good token for me, for the land desireth to have
+me." Of the which answer all his men were right joyful. So that day
+and night the King lodged on the sands, and in the mean time
+discharged the ships of their horses and other baggages; there the
+King made two marshals of his host, the one the Lord Godfrey of
+Harcourt and the other the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Arundel
+constable. And he ordained that the Earl of Huntingdon should keep the
+fleet of ships with a hundred men of arms and four hundred archers;
+and also he ordained three battles, one to go on his right hand,
+closing to the seaside, and the other on his left hand, and the King
+himself in the midst, and every night to lodge all in one field.
+
+Thus they set forth as they were ordained, and they that went by the
+sea took all the ships that they found in their ways; and so long they
+went forth, what by sea and what by land, that they came to a good
+port and to a good town called Barfleur, the which incontinent was
+won, for they within gave up for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that,
+the town was robbed, and much gold and silver there found, and rich
+jewels; there was found so much riches, that the boys and villains of
+the host set nothing by good furred gowns; they made all the men of
+the town to issue out and to go into the ships, because they would not
+suffer them to be behind them for fear of rebelling again. After the
+town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed without brenning, then they
+spread abroad in the country and did what they list, for there was not
+to resist them. At last they came to a great and a rich town called
+Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent part thereof,
+but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong and well
+furnished with men of war.
+
+
+OF THE GREAT ASSEMBLY THAT THE FRENCH KING MADE TO RESIST THE KING OF
+ENGLAND
+
+Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled, robbed, wasted, and pilled
+the good plentiful country of Normandy. Then the French King sent for
+the Lord John of Hainault, who came to him with a great number; also
+the King sent for other men of arms, dukes, earls, barons, knights,
+and squires, and assembled together the greatest number of people that
+had been seen in France a hundred year before. He sent for men into so
+far countries, that it was long or they came together, wherefore the
+King of England did what him list in the mean season. The French King
+heard well what he did, and sware and said how they should never
+return again unfought withal, and that such hurts and damages as they
+had done should be dearly revenged; wherefore he had sent letters to
+his friends in the Empire, to such as were farthest off, and also to
+the gentle King of Bohemia and to the Lord Charles his son, who from
+thenceforth was called King of Almaine; he was made King by the aid of
+his father and the French King, and had taken on him the arms of the
+Empire: the French King desired them to come to him with all their
+powers, to the intent to fight with the King of England, who brent and
+wasted his country. These Princes and Lords made them ready with great
+number of men of arms, of Almains, Bohemians, and Luxemburgers, and so
+came to the French King. Also King Philip sent to the Duke of
+Lorraine, who came to serve him with three hundred spears; also there
+came the Earl [of] Salm in Saumois, the Earl of Sarrebruck, the Earl
+of Flanders, the Earl William of Namur, every man with a fair company.
+
+Ye have heard herebefore of the order of the Englishmen; how they went
+in three battles, the marshals on the right hand and on the left, the
+King and the Prince of Wales his son in the midst. They rode but small
+journeys, and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of
+the clock, and found the country so fruitful that they needed not to
+make no provision for their host, but all only for wine; and yet they
+found reasonably sufficient thereof. It was no marvel, though, they of
+the country were afraid; for before that time they had never seen men
+of war, nor they wist not what war or battle meant. They fled away as
+far as they might hear speaking of the Englishmen, and left their
+houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn; they wist not how to
+save and keep it. The King of England and the Prince had in their
+battle a three thousand men of arms and six thousand archers, and a
+ten thousand men afoot, beside them that rode with the marshals....
+
+Then the King went toward Caen, the which was a greater town and full
+of drapery and other merchandise, and rich burgesses, noble ladies and
+damosels, and fair churches, and specially two great and rich abbeys,
+one of the Trinity, another of Saint Stephen; and on the one side of
+the town one of the fairest castles of all Normandy, and captain
+therein was Robert of Wargny, with three hundred Genoways, and in the
+town was the Earl of Eu and of Guines, Constable of France, and the
+Earl of Tancarville, with a good number of men of war. The King of
+England rode that day in good order and lodged all his battles
+together that night, a two leagues from Caen, in a town with a little
+haven called Austrehem, and thither came also all his navy of ships
+with the Earl of Huntingdon, who was governour of them.
+
+The constable and other lords of France that night watched well the
+town of Caen, and in the morning armed them with all them of the town:
+then the constable ordained that none should issue out, but keep their
+defenses on the walls, gate, bridge, and river; and left the suburbs
+void, because they were not closed; for they thought they should have
+enough to do to defend the town, because it was not closed but with
+the river. They of the town said how they would issue out, for they
+were strong enough to fight with the King of England. When the
+constable saw their good wills, he said, "In the name of God be it,
+ye shall not fight without me." Then they issued out in good order,
+and made good face to fight and to defend them and to put their lives
+in adventure.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF CAEN, AND HOW THE ENGLISHMEN TOOK THE TOWN
+
+The same day the Englishmen rose early and appareled them ready to go
+to Caen.[A] The King heard mass before the sun-rising, and then took
+his horse, and the Prince his son, with Sir Godfrey of Harcourt,
+marshal and leader of the host, whose counsel the King much followed.
+Then they drew toward Caen with their battles in good array, and so
+approached the good town of Caen. When they of the town, who were
+ready in the field, saw these three battles coming in good order, with
+their banners and standards waving in the wind, and the archers, the
+which they had not been accustomed to see, they were sore afraid and
+fled away toward the town without any order or good array, for all
+that the constable could do; then the Englishmen pursued them eagerly.
+When the constable and the Earl Tancarville saw that, they took a gate
+at the entry and saved themselves and certain with them, for the
+Englishmen were entered into the town. Some of the knights and squires
+of France, such as knew the way to the castle, went thither, and the
+captain there received them all, for the castle was large. The
+Englishmen in the chase slew many, for they took none to mercy.
+
+Then the constable and the Earl of Tancarville, being in the little
+tower at the bridge foot, looked along the street and saw their men
+slain without mercy; they doubted to fall in their hands. At last they
+saw an English knight with one eye, called Sir Thomas Holland, and a
+five or six other knights with him; they knew them, for they had seen
+them before in Pruce, in Granade, and in other viages. Then they
+called to Sir Thomas and said how they would yield themselves
+prisoners. Then Sir Thomas came thither with his company and mounted
+up into the gate, and there found the said lords with twenty-five
+knights with them, who yielded them to Sir Thomas; and he took them
+for his prisoners and left company to keep them, and then mounted
+again on his horse and rode into the streets, and saved many lives of
+ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,--for the soldiers
+were without mercy. It fell so well the same season for the
+Englishmen, that the river, which was able to bear ships, at that time
+was so low that men went in and out beside the bridge. They of the
+town were entered into their houses, and cast down into the street
+stones, timber, and iron, and slew and hurt more than five hundred
+Englishmen; wherewith the King was sore displeased. At night when he
+heard thereof, he commanded that the next day all should be put to the
+sword and the town brent; but then Sir Godfrey of Harcourt
+said:--"Dear sir, for God's sake assuage somewhat your courage, and
+let it suffice you that ye have done. Ye have yet a great voyage to do
+or ye come before Calais, whither ye purpose to go: and sir, in this
+town there is much people who will defend their houses, and it will
+cost many of your men their lives, or ye have all at your will;
+whereby peradventure ye shall not keep your purpose to Calais, the
+which should redound to your rack. Sir, save your people, for ye shall
+have need of them or this month pass; for I think verily your
+adversary King Philip will meet with you to fight, and ye shall find
+many strait passages and rencounters; wherefore your men, an ye had
+more, shall stand you in good stead: and sir, without any further
+slaying ye shall be lord of this town; men and women will put all that
+they have to your pleasure." Then the King said, "Sir Godfrey, you are
+our marshal; ordain everything as ye will." Then Sir Godfrey with his
+banner rode from street to street, and commanded in the King's name
+none to be so hardy to put fire in any house, to slay any person, nor
+to violate any woman. When they of the town heard that cry, they
+received the Englishmen into their houses and made them good cheer,
+and some opened their coffers and bade them take what them list, so
+they might be assured of their lives; howbeit there were done in the
+town many evil deeds, murders, and robberies. Thus the Englishmen were
+lords of the town three days and won great riches, the which they sent
+by barks and barges to Saint-Saviour by the river of Austrehem, a two
+leagues thence, whereas all their navy lay. Then the King sent the
+Earl of Huntingdon with two hundred men of arms and four hundred
+archers, with his navy and prisoners and riches that they had got,
+back again into England. And the King bought of Sir Thomas Holland
+the Constable of France and the Earl of Tancarville, and paid for
+them twenty thousand nobles....
+
+The next day the King departed, brenning and wasting all before him,
+and at night lodged in a good village called Grandvilliers. The next
+day the King passed by Dargies; there was none to defend the castle,
+wherefore it was soon taken and brent. Then they went forth destroying
+the country all about, and so came to the castle of Poix, where there
+was a good town and two castles. There was nobody in them but two fair
+damosels, daughters to the Lord of Poix; they were soon taken, and had
+been violated, an two English knights had not been, Sir John Chandos
+and Sir Basset; they defended them and brought them to the King, who
+for his honor made them good cheer and demanded of them whither they
+would fainest go. They said, "To Corbie," and the King caused them to
+be brought thither without peril. That night the King lodged in the
+town of Poix. They of the town and of the castles spake that night
+with the marshals of the host, to save them and their town from
+brenning, and they to pay a certain sum of florins the next day as
+soon as the host was departed. This was granted them, and in the
+morning the King departed with all his host, except a certain that
+were left there to receive the money that they of the town had
+promised to pay. When they of the town saw the host depart and but a
+few left behind, then they said they would pay never a penny, and so
+ran out and set on the Englishmen, who defended themselves as well as
+they might and sent after the host for succor. When Sir Raynold Cobham
+and Sir Thomas Holland, who had the rule of the rear guard, heard
+thereof, they returned and cried, "Treason, treason!" and so came
+again to Poix-ward and found their companions still fighting with them
+of the town. Then anon they of the town were nigh all slain, and the
+town brent, and the two castles beaten down. Then they returned to the
+King's host, who was as then at Airaines and there lodged, and had
+commanded all manner of men on pain of death to do no hurt to no town
+of Arsyn,[B] for there the King was minded to lie a day or two to take
+advice how he might pass the river of Somme; for it was necessary for
+him to pass the river, as ye shall hear after.
+
+    [A] This was 26th July, 1346. Edward arrived at Poissy on
+    12th August; Philip of Valois left Paris on the 14th; the
+    English crossed the Seine at Poissy on the 16th, and the
+    Somme at Blanche-taque on the 24th.
+
+    [B] Probably a misunderstanding by Froissart of the English
+    word "arson": the king's command being not to burn the towns
+    on the Somme, as he wanted them for shelter.
+
+
+HOW THE FRENCH KING FOLLOWED THE KING OF ENGLAND IN BEAUVOISINOIS
+
+Now let us speak of King Philip, who was at Saint-Denis and his people
+about him, and daily increased. Then on a day he departed and rode so
+long that he came to Coppegueule, a three leagues from Amiens, and
+there he tarried. The King of England, being at Airaines, wist not
+where for to pass the river of Somme, the which was large and deep,
+and all bridges were broken and the passages well kept. Then at the
+King's commandment his two marshals with a thousand men of arms and
+two thousand archers went along the river to find some passage, and
+passed by Longpré, and came to the bridge of Remy, the which was well
+kept with a great number of knights and squires and men of the
+country. The Englishmen alighted afoot and assailed the Frenchmen from
+the morning till it was noon; but the bridge was so well fortified and
+defended that the Englishmen departed without winning of anything.
+Then they went to a great town called Fountains, on the river of
+Somme, the which was clean robbed and brent, for it was not closed.
+Then they went to another town called Long-en-Ponthieu; they could not
+win the bridge, it was so well kept and defended. Then they departed
+and went to Picquigny, and found the town, the bridge, and the castle
+so well fortified that it was not likely to pass there; the French
+King had so well defended the passages, to the intent that the King of
+England should not pass the river of Somme, to fight with him at his
+advantage or else to famish him there.
+
+When these two marshals had assayed in all places to find passage and
+could find none, they returned again to the King, and shewed how they
+could find no passage in no place. The same night the French King came
+to Amiens with more than a hundred thousand men. The King of England
+was right pensive, and the next morning heard mass before the
+sun-rising and then dislodged; and every man followed the marshals'
+banners, and so rode in the country of Vimeu approaching to the good
+town of Abbeville, and found a town thereby, whereunto was come much
+people of the country in trust of a little defense that was there; but
+the Englishmen anon won it, and all they that were within slain, and
+many taken of the town and of the country. The King took his lodging
+in a great hospital[C] that was there. The same day the French King
+departed from Amiens and came to Airaines about noon; and the
+Englishmen were departed thence in the morning. The Frenchmen found
+there great provision that the Englishmen had left behind them,
+because they departed in haste. There they found flesh ready on the
+broaches, bread and pasties in the ovens, wine in tuns and barrels,
+and the tables ready laid. There the French King lodged and tarried
+for his lords.
+
+That night the King of England was lodged at Oisemont. At night when
+the two marshals were returned, who had that day overrun the country
+to the gates of Abbeville and to Saint-Valery and made a great
+skirmish there, then the King assembled together his council and made
+to be brought before him certain prisoners of the country of Ponthieu
+and of Vimeu. The King right courteously demanded of them if there
+were any among them that knew any passage beneath Abbeville, that he
+and his host might pass over the river of Somme: if he would shew him
+thereof, he should be quit of his ransom, and twenty of his company
+for his love. There was a varlet called Gobin Agace, who stepped forth
+and said to the King:--"Sir, I promise you on the jeopardy of my head
+I shall bring you to such a place, whereas ye and all your host shall
+pass the river of Somme without peril. There be certain places in the
+passage that ye shall pass twelve men afront two times between day and
+night; ye shall not go in the water to the knees. But when the flood
+cometh, the river then waxeth so great that no man can pass; but when
+the flood is gone, the which is two times between day and night, then
+the river is so low that it may be passed without danger both
+a-horseback and afoot. The passage is hard in the bottom, with white
+stones, so that all your carriage may go surely; therefore the passage
+is called Blanche-Taque. An ye make ready to depart betimes, ye may be
+there by the sun-rising." The King said, "If this be true that ye
+say, I quit thee thy ransom and all thy company, and moreover shall
+give thee a hundred nobles." Then the King commanded every man to be
+ready at the sound of the trumpet to depart.
+
+    [C] That is, a house of the Knights of St. John.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF BLANCHE-TAQUE
+
+The King of England slept not much that night, for at midnight he
+arose and sowned his trumpet; then incontinent they made ready
+carriages and all things, and at the breaking of the day they departed
+from the town of Oisemont and rode after the guiding of Gobin Agace,
+so that they came by the sun-rising to Blanche-Taque: but as then the
+flood was up, so that they might not pass, so the King tarried there
+till it was prime; then the ebb came.
+
+The French King had his currours in the country, who brought him word
+of the demeanor of the Englishmen. Then he thought to close the King
+of England between Abbeville and the river of Somme, and so to fight
+with him at his pleasure. And when he was at Amiens he had ordained a
+great baron of Normandy, called Sir Godemar du Fay, to go and keep the
+passage of Blanche-Taque, where the Englishmen must pass or else in
+none other place. He had with him a thousand men of arms and six
+thousand afoot, with the Genoways; so they went by Saint-Riquier in
+Ponthieu and from thence to Crotoy, whereas the passage lay: and also
+he had with him a great number of men of the country, and also a great
+number of them of Montreuil, so that they were a twelve thousand men
+one and other.
+
+When the English host was come thither, Sir Godemar du Fay arranged
+all his company to defend the passage. The King of England let not for
+all that; but when the flood was gone, he commanded his marshals to
+enter into the water in the name of God and St. George. Then they that
+were hardy and courageous entered on both parties, and many a man
+reversed. There were some of the Frenchmen of Artois and Picardy that
+were as glad to joust in the water as on the dry land.
+
+The Frenchmen defended so well the passage at the issuing out of the
+water, that they had much to do. The Genoways did them great trouble
+with their cross-bows; on the other side the archers of England shot
+so wholly together, that the Frenchmen were fain to give place to the
+Englishmen. There was a sore battle, and many a noble feat of arms
+done on both sides. Finally the Englishmen passed over and assembled
+together in the field. The King and the Prince passed, and all the
+lords; then the Frenchmen kept none array, but departed, he that
+might best. When Sir Godemar saw that discomfiture, he fled and saved
+himself; some fled to Abbeville and some to Saint-Riquiers. They that
+were there afoot could not flee, so that there were slain a great
+number of them of Abbeville, Montreuil, Rue, and of Saint-Riquiers;
+the chase endured more than a great league. And as yet all the
+Englishmen were not passed the river, and certain currours of the King
+of Bohemia and of Sir John of Hainault came on them that were behind,
+and took certain horses and carriages and slew divers, or they could
+take the passage.
+
+The French King the same morning was departed from Airaines, trusting
+to have found the Englishmen between him and the river of Somme; but
+when he heard how that Sir Godemar du Fay and his company were
+discomfited, he tarried in the field and demanded of his marshals what
+was best to do. They said, "Sir, ye cannot pass the river but at the
+bridge of Abbeville, for the flood is come in at Blanche-Taque;" then
+he returned and lodged at Abbeville.
+
+The King of England, when he was past the river, he thanked God, and
+so rode forth in like manner as he did before. Then he called Gobin
+Agace and did quit him his ransom and all his company, and gave him a
+hundred nobles and a good horse. And so the King rode forth fair and
+easily, and thought to have lodged in a great town called Noyelles;
+but when he knew that the town pertained to the Countess d'Aumale,
+sister to the Lord Robert of Artois,[D] the King assured the town and
+country as much as pertained to her, and so went forth: and his
+marshals rode to Crotoy on the seaside and brent the town, and found
+in the haven many ships and barks charged with wines of Poitou,
+pertaining to the merchants of Saintonge and of Rochelle; they brought
+the best thereof to the King's host. Then one of the marshals rode to
+the gates of Abbeville and from thence to Saint-Riquiers, and after to
+the town of Rue-Saint-Esprit. This was on a Friday, and both battles
+of the marshals returned to the King's host about noon and so lodged
+all together near to Cressy in Ponthieu.
+
+The King of England was well informed how the French King followed
+after him to fight. Then he said to his company, "Let us take here
+some plot of ground, for we will go no farther till we have seen our
+enemies. I have good cause here to abide them, for I am on the right
+heritage of the Queen my mother, the which land was given at her
+marriage: I will challenge it of mine adversary Philip of Valois." And
+because that he had not the eighth part in number of men as the French
+King had, therefore he commanded his marshals to chose a plot of
+ground somewhat for his advantage; and so they did, and thither the
+King and his host went. Then he sent his currours to Abbeville, to see
+if the French King drew that day into the field or not. They went
+forth and returned again, and said how they could see none appearance
+of his coming; then every man took their lodging for that day, and to
+be ready in the morning at the sound of the trumpet in the same place.
+This Friday the French King tarried still in Abbeville abiding for his
+company, and sent his two marshals to ride out to see the dealing of
+the Englishmen; and at night they returned, and said how the
+Englishmen were lodged in the fields. That night the French King made
+a supper to all the chief lords that were there with him, and after
+supper the King desired them to be friends each to other. The King
+looked for the Earl of Savoy, who should come to him with a thousand
+spears, for he had received wages for a three months of them at Troyes
+in Champagne.
+
+    [D] She was in fact his daughter.
+
+
+OF THE ORDER OF THE ENGLISHMEN AT CRESSY
+
+On the Friday, as I said before, the King of England lay in the
+fields, for the country was plentiful of wines and other victual, and
+if need had been, they had provision following in carts and other
+carriages. That night the King made a supper to all his chief lords of
+his host and made them good cheer; and when they were all departed to
+take their rest, then the King entered into his oratory and kneeled
+down before the altar, praying God devoutly that if he fought the next
+day, that he might achieve the journey to His honor; then about
+midnight he laid him down to rest, and in the morning he rose betimes
+and heard mass, and the Prince his son with him, and the most part of
+his company, were confessed and houseled; and after the mass said, he
+commanded every man to be armed and to draw to the field to the same
+place before appointed. Then the King caused a park to be made by the
+wood-side behind his host, and there was set all carts and carriages,
+and within the park were all their horses, for every man was afoot;
+and into this park there was but one entry. Then he ordained three
+battles: In the first was the young Prince of Wales, with him the Earl
+of Warwick and Oxford, the Lord Godfrey of Harcourt, Sir Raynold
+Cobham, Sir Thomas Holland, the Lord Stafford, the Lord of Mohun, the
+Lord Delaware, Sir John Chandos, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, Sir
+Robert Nevill, the Lord Thomas Clifford, the Lord Bourchier, the Lord
+de Latimer, and divers other knights and squires that I cannot name;
+they were an eight hundred men of arms and two thousand archers, and a
+thousand of other with the Welshmen; every lord drew to the field
+appointed under his own banner and pennon. In the second battle was
+the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Ros, the Lord
+Lucy, the Lord Willoughby, the Lord Basset, the Lord of Saint-Aubin,
+Sir Louis Tufton, the Lord of Multon, the Lord Lascelles and divers
+other, about an eight hundred men of arms and twelve hundred archers.
+The third battle had the King; he had seven hundred men of arms and
+two thousand archers. Then the King leapt on a hobby, with a white rod
+in his hand, one of his marshals on the one hand and the other on the
+other hand: he rode from rank to rank desiring every man to take heed
+that day to his right and honor. He spake it so sweetly and with so
+good countenance and merry cheer, that all such as were discomfited
+took courage in the seeing and hearing of him. And when he had thus
+visited all his battles, it was then nine of the day; then he caused
+every man to eat and drink a little, and so they did at their leisure.
+And afterward they ordered again their battles; then every man lay
+down on the earth and by him his salet and bow, to be the more fresher
+when their enemies should come.
+
+
+THE ORDER OF THE FRENCHMEN AT CRESSY, AND HOW THEY BEHELD THE DEMEANOR
+OF THE ENGLISHMEN
+
+This Saturday the French King rose betimes and heard mass in Abbeville
+in his lodging in the abbey of St. Peter, and he departed after the
+sun-rising. When he was out of the town two leagues, approaching
+towards his enemies, some of his lords said to him, "Sir, it were good
+that ye ordered your battles, and let all your footmen pass somewhat
+on before, that they be not troubled with the horsemen." Then the King
+sent four knights, the Moine [of] Bazeilles, the Lord of Noyers, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord d'Aubigny, to ride to aview the English
+host; and so they rode so near that they might well see part of their
+dealing. The Englishmen saw them well and knew well how they were come
+thither to aview them; they let them alone and made no countenance
+toward them, and let them return as they came. And when the French
+King saw these four knights return again, he tarried till they came to
+him and said, "Sirs, what tidings?" These four knights each of them
+looked on other, for there was none would speak before his companion;
+finally the King said to [the] Moine, who pertained to the King of
+Bohemia and had done in his days so much that he was reputed for one
+of the valiantest knights of the world, "Sir, speak you." Then he
+said:--"Sir, I shall speak, sith it pleaseth you, under the correction
+of my fellows. Sir, we have ridden and seen the behaving of your
+enemies: know ye for truth they are rested in three battles abiding
+for you. Sir, I will counsel you as for my part, saving your
+displeasure, that you and all your company rest here and lodge for
+this night; for or they that be behind of your company be come hither,
+and or your battles be set in good order, it will be very late, and
+your people be weary and out of array, and ye shall find your enemies
+fresh and ready to receive you. Early in the morning ye may order your
+battles at more leisure and advise your enemies at more deliberation,
+and to regard well what way ye will assail them; for, sir, surely they
+will abide you."
+
+Then the King commanded that it should be so done. Then his two
+marshals one rode before, another behind, saying to every banner,
+"Tarry and abide here in the name of God and St. Denis." They that
+were foremost tarried, but they that were behind would not tarry, but
+rode forth, and said how they would in no wise abide till they were as
+far forward as the foremost; and when they before saw them come on
+behind, then they rode forward again, so that the King nor his
+marshals could not rule them. So they rode without order or good
+array, till they came in sight of their enemies; and as soon as the
+foremost saw them they reculed then aback without good array, whereof
+they behind had marvel and were abashed, and thought that the foremost
+company had been fighting. Then they might have had leisure and room
+to have gone forward, if they had list; some went forth, and some
+abode still. The commons, of whom all the ways between Abbeville and
+Cressy were full, when they saw that they were near to their enemies,
+they took their swords and cried, "Down with them! let us slay them
+all." There is no man, though he were present at the journey, that
+could imagine or shew the truth of the evil order that was among the
+French party, and yet they were a marvelous great number. That I write
+in this book I learned it specially of the Englishmen, who well beheld
+their dealing; and also certain knights of Sir John of Hainault's, who
+was always about King Philip, shewed me as they knew.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF CRESSY, AUGUST 26TH, 1346
+
+The Englishmen, who were in three battles lying on the ground to rest
+them, as soon as they saw the Frenchmen approach, they rose upon their
+feet fair and easily without any haste, and arranged their battles.
+The first, which was the Prince's battle, the archers there stood in
+manner of a herse and the men of arms in the bottom of the battle. The
+Earl of Northampton and the Earl of Arundel with the second battle
+were on a wing in good order, ready to comfort the Prince's battle, if
+need were.
+
+The lords and knights of France came not to the assembly together in
+good order, for some came before and some came after, in such haste
+and evil order that one of them did trouble another. When the French
+King saw the Englishmen his blood changed, and said to his marshals,
+"Make the Genoways go on before, and begin the battle, in the name of
+God and St. Denis." There were of the Genoways' cross-bows about a
+fifteen thousand, but they were so weary of going afoot that day a six
+leagues armed with their cross-bows, that they said to their
+constables, "We be not well ordered to fight this day, for we be not
+in the case to do any great deed of arms: we have more need of rest."
+These words came to the Earl of Alençon, who said, "A man is well at
+ease to be charged with such a sort of rascals, to be faint and fail
+now at most need." Also the same season there fell a great rain and a
+clipse with a terrible thunder, and before the rain there came flying
+over both battles a great number of crows for fear of the tempest
+coming. Then anon the air began to wax clear, and the sun to shine
+fair and bright, the which was right in the Frenchmen's eyen and on
+the Englishmen's backs. When the Genoways were assembled together and
+began to approach, they made a great leap and cry to abash the
+Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that; then
+the Genoways again the second time made another leap and a fell cry,
+and stept forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot;
+thirdly, again they leapt and cried, and went forth till they came
+within shot; then they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the
+English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so
+wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow. When the Genoways
+felt the arrows piercing through heads, arms, and breasts, many of
+them cast down their cross-bows, and did cut their strings and
+returned discomfited. When the French King saw them fly away, he said,
+"Slay these rascals, for they shall let and trouble us without
+reason." Then ye should have seen the men of arms dash in among them
+and killed a great number of them; and ever still the Englishmen shot
+whereas they saw thickest press: the sharp arrows ran into the men of
+arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men, among the
+Genoways, and when they were down, they could not relieve again; the
+press was so thick that one overthrew another. And also among the
+Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great
+knives, and they went in among the men of arms and slew and murdered
+many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights, and
+squires; whereof the King of England was after displeased, for he had
+rather they had been taken prisoners.
+
+The valiant King of Bohemia called Charles of Luxembourg, son to the
+noble Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, for all that he was nigh blind,
+when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him,
+"Where is the Lord Charles my son?" His men said, "Sir, we cannot
+tell; we think he be fighting." Then he said, "Sirs, ye are my men, my
+companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far
+forward that I may strike one stroke with my sword." They said they
+would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose
+him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to
+other and set the King before to accomplish his desire, and so they
+went on their enemies. The Lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote
+himself King of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to
+the battle; but when he saw that the matter went awry on their party,
+he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The King his father was so
+far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea, and more than
+four, and fought valiantly, and so did his company; and they
+adventured themselves so forward that they were there all slain, and
+the next day they were found in the place about the King, and all
+their horses tied each to other.
+
+The Earl of Alençon came to the battle right ordinately and fought
+with the Englishmen, and the Earl of Flanders also on his part. These
+two lords with their companies coasted the English archers and came to
+the Prince's battle, and there fought valiantly long. The French King
+would fain have come thither, when he saw their banners, but there was
+a great hedge of archers before him. The same day the French King had
+given a great black courser to Sir John of Hainault, and he made the
+Lord Thierry of Senzeille to ride on him and to bear his banner. The
+same horse took the bridle in the teeth and brought him through all
+the currours of the Englishmen, and as he would have returned again,
+he fell in a great dike and was sore hurt, and had been there dead, an
+his page had not been, who followed him through all the battles and
+saw where his master lay in the dike, and had none other let but for
+his horse; for the Englishmen would not issue out of their battle for
+taking of any prisoner. Then the page alighted and relieved his
+master: then he went not back again the same way that they came; there
+was too many in his way.
+
+This battle between Broye and Cressy this Saturday was right cruel and
+fell, and many a feat of arms done that came not to my knowledge. In
+the night divers knights and squires lost their masters, and sometime
+came on the Englishmen, who received them in such wise that they were
+ever nigh slain; for there was none taken to mercy nor to ransom, for
+so the Englishmen were determined.
+
+In the morning the day of the battle certain Frenchmen and Almains
+perforce opened the archers of the Prince's battle, and came and
+fought with the men of arms hand to hand. Then the second battle of
+the Englishmen came to succor the Prince's battle, the which was time,
+for they had as then much ado; and they with the Prince sent a
+messenger to the King, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the
+knight said to the King, "Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of
+Oxford, Sir Raynold Cobham and other, such as be about the Prince
+your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore
+they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them; for
+if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they
+shall have much ado." Then the King said, "Is my son dead, or hurt, or
+on the earth felled?" "No, sir," quoth the knight, "but he is hardly
+matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid." "Well," said the King,
+"return to him and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that
+they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my
+son is alive: and also say to them that they suffer him this day to
+win his spurs; for if God be pleased, I will this journey be his and
+the honor thereof, and to them that be about him." Then the knight
+returned again to them and shewed the King's words, the which greatly
+encouraged them, and repoined in that they had sent to the King as
+they did.
+
+Sir Godfrey of Harcourt would gladly that the Earl of Harcourt, his
+brother, might have been saved; for he heard say by them that saw his
+banner how that he was there in the field on the French party: but Sir
+Godfrey could not come to him betimes, for he was slain or he could
+come at him, and so was also the Earl of Aumale his nephew. In another
+place the Earl of Alençon and the Earl of Flanders fought valiantly,
+every lord under his own banner; but finally they could not resist
+against the puissance of the Englishmen, and so there they were also
+slain, and divers other knights and squires. Also the Earl Louis of
+Blois, nephew to the French King, and the Duke of Lorraine, fought
+under their banners; but at last they were closed in among a company
+of Englishmen and Welshmen, and there were slain for all their
+prowess. Also there was slain the Earl of Auxerre, the Earl of
+Saint-Pol, and many other.
+
+In the evening the French King, who had left about him no more than a
+threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was
+one, who had remounted once the King, for his horse was slain with an
+arrow, then he said to the King, "Sir, depart hence, for it is time;
+lose not yourself willfully: if ye have loss at this time, ye shall
+recover it again another season." And so he took the King's horse by
+the bridle and led him away in a manner perforce. Then the King rode
+till he came to the castle of Broye. The gate was closed, because it
+was by that time dark: then the King called the captain, who came to
+the walls and said, "Who is that calleth there this time of night?"
+Then the King said, "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune
+of France." The captain knew then it was the King, and opened the gate
+and let down the bridge. Then the King entered, and he had with him
+but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, the Lord d'Aubigny, and the Lord of Montsault. The
+King would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about
+midnight, and so rode by such guides as knew the country till he came
+in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested.
+
+This Saturday the Englishmen never departed from their battles for
+chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended
+themselves against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended
+about evensong time.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+
+(1818-1894)
+
+BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON
+
+[Illustration: J. A. FROUDE]
+
+
+James Anthony Froude, English historian and essayist, was born April
+23d, 1818, and died October 20th, 1894. His father was a clergyman,
+and the son was sent to Westminster School and to Oriel College,
+Oxford. In 1842 he became a fellow of Exeter, and two years later he
+was ordained a deacon; an office which he did not formally lay down
+until many years later, although his earliest publications, 'Shadows
+of the Clouds' and 'Nemesis of Faith,' showed that he had come to
+hold--and what perhaps is more to the point, dared to express,--views
+hardly compatible with the character of a docile and unreasoning
+neophyte.
+
+These books were severely censured by the authorities, and cost
+him--to the great benefit of the world--an appointment he had received
+of teacher in Tasmania. He resigned his fellowship and took up the
+profession of letters, writing much for Fraser and the Westminster,
+and becoming for a short period the editor of the former. His _magnum
+opus_ is his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat
+of the Spanish Armada,' in twelve volumes, from 1856 to 1870. His
+other principal publications are--'The English in Ireland in the
+Eighteenth Century' (1874); 'Cæsar' (1879); 'Bunyan' (1880); 'Thomas
+Carlyle (first forty years of his life)' (1882); 'Life in London'
+(1884); 'Short Studies on Great Subjects' (1882, four series); 'The
+Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889); 'The English in the West Indies' (1889);
+'The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon' (1892); 'The Life and Letters of
+Erasmus' (1892); 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century' (1892); and
+'The Council of Trent.' 'Shadows of the Clouds,' 'The Nemesis of
+Faith,' and 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' are in the form of fiction; and
+though they--especially the last--contain some charming descriptive
+passages, and evince some of Froude's power of character sketching,
+they serve on the whole to prove that he was not a novelist. The
+fortunes of his group of people are of less absorbing interest to him
+than questions of social and racial ethics. There is nothing more
+annoying than to have an essayist stand behind a story-teller and
+interrupt him from time to time with acute philosophical comments on
+ultimate causes. The characters of Morty and Sylvester Sullivan are
+admirably contrasted Celtic types, but both they and the English
+Colonel Goring are a trifle stagy and stiff in their joints. The
+murders of the two chiefs, Morty Sullivan and Colonel Goring, are
+dramatically told; but Froude's deficient sense of humor, at least of
+that quality of humor which gives a subtle sense of congruity, results
+in an attempt to combine the elements of the tale and the didactic
+society in impossible proportions. He is an essayist and historian,
+not a novel-writer.
+
+Froude stands before the English-reading public prominent in three
+characteristics: First, as a technical prose artist, in which regard
+he is entitled to be classed with Ruskin, Newman, and Pater; less
+enthusiastic and elaborately ornamental than the first, less musically
+and delicately fallacious than the second, and less self-conscious and
+phrase-caressing than the third, but carrying a solider burden of
+thought than all three. Second, as a historian of the modern school,
+which aims by reading the original records to produce an independent
+view of historical periods. Third, as the most clear-sighted and
+broad-minded of those whose position near the centre of the Oxford
+movement and intimacy with the principal actors gave them an insight
+into its inner nature.
+
+There can be but one opinion of Froude as a master of English. In some
+of his early work there are traces of the manner of Macaulay in the
+succession of short assertive sentences, most of which an ordinary
+writer would group as limiting clauses about the main assertion. This
+method gives a false appearance of vigor and definiteness; it makes
+easy reading by relieving the mind from the necessity of weighing the
+modifying propositions: but it is entirely unadapted to nice
+modulations of thought. Froude very soon avoided the vices of
+Macaulayism, and attained a narrative style which must be regarded as
+the best in an age which has paid more attention than any other to the
+art of telling a story. In descriptive historical narrative he is
+unrivaled, because he is profoundly impressed not only with the
+dramatic qualities but with the real significance of a scene; unlike
+Macaulay, to whom the superficial theatrical elements appeal. A
+reading of Macaulay's description of the trial of Warren Hastings, and
+Froude's narrative of the killing of Thomas Becket or of the execution
+of Mary Queen of Scots, will bring out at once Froude's radical
+superiority in both conception and execution.
+
+This is not the place to debate the question of Froude's historical
+accuracy, further than to remark that he was an industrious reader of
+historical documents, and by nature a seeker after the truth. If a
+profound conviction of the harmfulness of ecclesiasticism colored the
+light with which he illuminated the records of the past, we must
+remember that history is at best largely the impressions of
+historians; and that if it be true that Froude does present one side,
+it is the side on which the warnings to posterity are most distinctly
+inscribed. A reading of the controversy between Froude and Freeman in
+the calmer light of the present leads to the conclusion that the
+_suppressio veri_ with which Froude was charged is not a _suggestio
+falsi_, but an artistic selection of the characteristic. He felt a
+certain contempt for the minute and meaningless fidelity to the
+record, which is not writing history but editing documents. He
+possessed, too, among his other literary powers, the rare one of being
+able to individualize the man whose life he studies and of presenting
+the character so as to be consistent and human. This power fills his
+history and sketch with rare personalities. Thomas Becket, Henry III.,
+Henry VIII., Queen Catharine, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, are
+more than historical portraits in the ordinary sense: they are
+conceptions of individuals, vivified by the artistic sense. Whether or
+not they are true to the originals as reflected in the contemporary
+documents, they are at least human possibilities, and therefore truer
+than the distorted automata that lie in state on the pages of some
+historians. A human character is so exceedingly complex and so
+delicately balanced with contradictory elements, that it is probable
+that no two persons ever estimate it exactly alike. Besides, prominent
+historical personages become in the popular imagination invested with
+exaggerated attributes, and it is not likely that men will ever agree
+even as to which of them was the hero and which the villain of the
+drama. It was to be expected that Froude should be violently assailed
+by those who accepted a traditional view of Henry VIII. and of Mary.
+It was inevitable that he should differ from them, because he had more
+than a view: he had a conception. His historical personages are
+certainly possibilities, because they are human, and the traditional
+figures are either monsters or saints; and humanity--at least Teutonic
+humanity--does not produce unadulterated saints nor unrelieved
+monsters.
+
+While Froude's historical work has been criticized for lack of minute
+accuracy in details, his books on Carlyle have been criticized for the
+opposite fault of quoting too fully and literally; from letters and
+journals, matter never intended for the public, and of a nature not
+only to wound living persons but to create an erroneous impression of
+the writer. The habit of expressing himself in pithy and pungent
+personalities seems to have been with Carlyle a sort of intellectual
+exercise, and should not necessarily be taken as an index of morose
+ill-temper. A very delicate literary tact was necessary to his
+literary executor, in selecting from the matter put in his hands that
+which would combine to make a true picture of a crude and powerful
+genius without making him appear to the ordinary reader a selfish,
+willful man. Froude's idea of the duty of an editor of contemporary
+biography seems to have been that it was limited to careful
+publication of all the available material as _mémoires pour servir_.
+Such miscellaneous printing may in the end serve truth, but at the
+time it arouses resentment. It resulted, however, in the production of
+a book far preferable to the non-committal, evasive, destructively
+laudatory biography of a public man, of which every year brings a new
+specimen. It is at least honest, if not tactful.
+
+Froude's early connection with the Oxford movement and his work on the
+Lives of the Saints first called his attention to the study of
+historical documents, and to the large amount of fiction with which
+truth is diluted in them. His further researches among the authorities
+recently made accessible, for the history of the destruction of the
+monasteries, impressed on him the fact that an assumption of spiritual
+authority is as dangerous to those who assume it as to those over whom
+it is assumed, exactly as physical slavery is in the end as harmful to
+the masters as it is to the slaves. He saw that ecclesiasticism had
+been profoundly hostile to morals, and he judged the present by the
+past till he really believed that the precious fruits of the
+Reformation would be lost if the ritualists obtained control of the
+Church. He persuaded himself that under such influence--
+
+  "Civilization would ebb, the great moral lights be extinguished,
+  Over the world would creep an unintelligent darkness
+  Under which men would be portioned anew 'twixt the priest and the
+          soldier."
+
+It is perhaps too much to expect of a man of the imaginative
+temperament of Froude, to whom the abominations of the Church from the
+twelfth to the sixteenth century were as real as if he had witnessed
+them, to retain judicial calmness under the vituperation with which he
+was assailed; but his profound distrust of the mediæval Church
+certainly does give an air of partisanship to his strictures on its
+modern ineffectual revival. He forgot that great principles of justice
+and toleration are now so embodied in law and fixed in the hearts of
+the English-speaking people that society is protected, and the evils
+of spiritual tyranny are restricted to the few who are willing to
+abase their intellects to it; that the corroding evil of conventual
+life is minimized by healthy outside influences; and that the most
+advanced modern ritualist would prove too good a Christian to light an
+_auto da fé_. It was but natural that he should forget this, for he
+was a strong man in the centre of the conflict, and independence was
+the core of his being.
+
+This strength of independence is shown by the fact that though young,
+and profoundly sensitive to the attraction of a character like
+Newman's, he was from the first able to resist the fascination which
+that remarkable man exerted over all with whom he came in contact. The
+pure spiritual nature possesses a mysterious power over young men, so
+great that they often yield to its counterfeit. Newman was the true
+priest, and Froude recognized his genius and that his soul was "an
+adumbration of the Divine." But he felt instinctively the radical
+unsoundness of Newman's thought, and "would not follow, though an
+angel led." Others fell off for prudential reasons; but Froude was
+indifferent to these, and obedient to a conviction the strength of
+which must be estimated by the depth of his feeling for character.
+
+Froude was sometimes criticized for writing history under the
+influence of personal feeling. It is difficult to see how a readable
+history can be written except by one who at least takes an interest in
+the story; but whether capacity for feeling makes a man a less
+trustworthy historian, depends upon how far this emotional
+susceptibility is controlled by intellectual insight and just views of
+the laws under which society develops. That Froude was an absolutely
+perfect historian, no one would claim: he was too intensely human to
+be perfect. It is safe to say that the perfect historian will not
+exist until Shakespeare and Bacon reappear combined in one man. For
+the great historian must be both scholar and artist. As scholar he
+must possess, too, both the acquisitive and the organizing intellect.
+He must both gather facts and interpret them. He must have the
+artistic sense which selects from the vast mass of fact that which is
+significant. This power of artistic selection is of course influenced
+by his unconscious ideals, by his conception of the relative
+importance of the forces which move mankind, and of the ultimate goal
+of progress. His philosophy directs his art, and his art interprets in
+the light of his philosophy.
+
+It may be admitted that Froude possesses a larger share of the
+artistic than of the philosophic qualities necessary to the great
+historian. At times his hatred of ecclesiasticism becomes almost a
+prejudice. In his writings on Irish and colonial questions he evinces
+the Englishman's love of the right, but sometimes, unfortunately, the
+Englishman's inability to do justice to other races in points which
+distinguish them from his own. In some expressions he seems to
+distrust democracy in much the same unreasoning way in which Mr.
+Ruskin distrusts machinery. He had imbibed something of Mr. Carlyle's
+belief in the "strong man"; though he, no more than Carlyle, can show
+how the strong, just ruler can be produced or selected. But a more
+serious deficiency in Froude's philosophy arises from his imperfect
+conception of the method of evolution which governs all organizations,
+civil and religious, so that they continually throw off short-lived
+varieties and history becomes a continual giving way of the old order
+to the new. To fear, as Froude seems to, lest a survival may become a
+governing type, is as unreasonable as to fear that old men will live
+forever. Certainly he would have taken a juster, saner view of the
+English Reformation, had he been convinced that all the collisions
+between the moral laws and the rebellious wills of men, which are the
+burden of the years, are in the end obliterated in the slow onward
+movement of the race; but then perhaps his history would have lost in
+interest what it might have gained in philosophic breadth and balance.
+For it cannot be denied that feeling has given his narrative that most
+valuable quality--life.
+
+The general recognition of Froude's power, and the growing conviction
+that he was far nearer right than the theological school he so
+cordially detested, was vindicated by his appointment as Professor of
+History at Oxford to succeed Freeman, one of the severest critics of
+his historical fairness. He lived to deliver but three courses of
+lectures, one of which has been published in that delightful volume
+'The Life and Letters of Erasmus.' The others, 'English Seamen of the
+XVIth Century,' 'Lectures on the Council of Trent,' and the very able
+paper on Job in 'Short Studies on Great Subjects,' even if taken by
+themselves, would cause us to form a high opinion of the scope and
+range of Froude's powers. Those to whom brilliancy is synonymous with
+unsoundness may perhaps continue to call him merely a "brilliant
+writer"; but the general verdict will be that his brilliancy is the
+structural adornment of a well-fitted framework of thought.
+
+                                   [Signature: Charles F. Johnson]
+
+
+
+
+THE GROWTH OF ENGLAND'S NAVY
+
+From 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century'
+
+
+Jean Paul the German poet said that God had given to France the empire
+of the land, to England the empire of the sea, and to his own country
+the empire of the air. The world has changed since Jean Paul's days.
+The wings of France have been clipped: the German Empire has become a
+solid thing: but England still holds her watery dominion; Britannia
+does still rule the waves, and in this proud position she has spread
+the English race over the globe; she is peopling new Englands at the
+Antipodes; she has made her Queen Empress of India; and is in fact the
+very considerable phenomenon in the social and political world which
+all acknowledge her to be. And all this she has achieved in the course
+of three centuries, entirely in consequence of her predominance as an
+ocean power. Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that
+guards them,--her empire will come to an end, her colonies will fall
+off like leaves from a withered tree, and Britain will become once
+more an insignificant island in the North Sea, for the future students
+in Australian and New Zealand universities to discuss the fate of in
+their debating societies.
+
+How the English navy came to hold so extraordinary a position is worth
+reflecting on. Much has been written on it, but little, as it seems to
+me, which touches the heart of the matter. We are shown the power of
+our country growing and expanding. But how it grew; why, after a sleep
+of so many hundred years, the genius of our Scandinavian forefathers
+suddenly sprang again into life,--of this we are left without
+explanation.
+
+The beginning was undoubtedly the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
+1588. Down to that time the sea sovereignty belonged to the Spaniards,
+and had been fairly won by them. The conquest of Granada had
+stimulated and elevated the Spanish character. The subjects of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and Philip II., were
+extraordinary men and accomplished extraordinary things. They
+stretched the limits of the known world; they conquered Mexico and
+Peru; they planted their colonies over the South-American continent;
+they took possession of the great West-Indian islands, and with so
+firm a grasp that Cuba at least will never lose the mark of the hand
+which seized it. They built their cities as if for eternity. They
+spread to the Indian Ocean, and gave their monarch's name to the
+Philippines. All this they accomplished in half a century, and as it
+were, they did it with a single hand; with the other they were
+fighting Moors and Turks, and protecting the coasts of the
+Mediterranean from the corsairs of Tunis and Constantinople.
+
+They had risen on the crest of the wave, and with their proud _Non
+Sufficit Orbis_ were looking for new worlds to conquer, at a time when
+the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond
+their own fishing grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing
+from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting
+collier. And yet within the space of a single ordinary life these
+insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards'
+grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign.
+How did it come about? What Cadmus had sown dragons' teeth in the
+furrows of the sea, for the race to spring from who manned the ships
+of Queen Elizabeth, who carried the flag of their own country round
+the globe, and challenged and fought the Spaniards on their own coasts
+and in their own harbors?
+
+The English sea power was the legitimate child of the Reformation. It
+grew, as I shall show you, directly out of the new despised
+Protestantism. Matthew Parker and Bishop Jewell, the judicious Hooker
+himself, excellent men as they were, would have written and preached
+to small purpose without Sir Francis Drake's cannon to play an
+accompaniment to their teaching. And again, Drake's cannon would not
+have roared so loudly and so widely, without seamen already trained in
+heart and hand to work his ships and level his artillery. It was to
+the superior seamanship, the superior quality of English ships and
+crews, that the Spaniards attributed their defeat. Where did these
+ships come from? Where and how did these mariners learn their trade?
+Historians talk enthusiastically of the national spirit of a people
+rising with a united heart to repel the invader, and so on. But
+national spirit could not extemporize a fleet, or produce trained
+officers and sailors to match the conquerors of Lepanto. One slight
+observation I must make here at starting, and certainly with no
+invidious purpose. It has been said confidently,--it has been
+repeated, I believe, by all modern writers,--that the Spanish invasion
+suspended in England the quarrels of creed, and united Protestants and
+Roman Catholics in defense of their Queen and country. They remind us
+especially that Lord Howard of Effingham, who was Elizabeth's admiral,
+was himself a Roman Catholic. But was it so? The Earl of Arundel, the
+head of the House of Howard, was a Roman Catholic, and he was in the
+Tower praying for the success of Medina Sidonia. Lord Howard of
+Effingham was no more a Roman Catholic than--I hope I am not taking
+away their character--than the present Archbishop of Canterbury or the
+Bishop of London. He was a Catholic, but an English Catholic, as those
+reverend prelates are. Roman Catholic he could not possibly have been,
+nor any one who on that great occasion was found on the side of
+Elizabeth. A Roman Catholic is one who acknowledges the Roman Bishop's
+authority. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, had pronounced her
+deposed, had absolved her subjects from their allegiance and forbidden
+them to fight for her. No Englishman who fought on that great occasion
+for English liberty was, or could have been, in communion with Rome.
+Loose statements of this kind, lightly made, fall in with the modern
+humor. They are caught up, applauded, repeated, and pass unquestioned
+into history. It is time to correct them a little.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF COLONEL GORING
+
+From 'Two Chiefs of Dunboy'
+
+
+Fatally mistaking what was intended for a friendly warning, the
+colonel conceived that there was some one in the forge whom the smith
+wanted to conceal.
+
+"I may return or not," he said; "but I must first have a word with
+these strangers of yours. We can meet as friends for once, with
+nothing to dispute over."
+
+Minahan made no further attempt to prevent him from going in. If
+gentlemen chose to have their quarrels, he muttered between his teeth,
+it was no business of his.
+
+Goring pushed open the door and entered. By the dim light--for the
+shutter that had been thrown back had been closed again, and the only
+light came from a window in the roof--he made out three figures
+standing together at the further end of the forge, in one of whom,
+though he tried to conceal himself, he instantly recognized his
+visitor of the previous evening.
+
+"You here, my man?" he said. "You left my house two hours ago. Why are
+you not on your way home?"
+
+Sylvester, seeing he was discovered, turned his face full round, and
+in a voice quietly insolent, replied, "I fell in with some friends of
+mine on the road. We had a little business together, and it is good
+luck that has brought your honor to us while we are talking, for the
+jintlemen here have a word or two they would like to be saying to ye,
+colonel, before ye leave them."
+
+"To me!" said Goring, turning from Sylvester to the two figures, whose
+faces were still covered by their cloaks. "If these gentlemen are what
+I suppose them to be, I am glad to meet them, and will hear willingly
+what they may have to say."
+
+"Perhaps less willingly than you think, Colonel Goring," said the
+taller of the two, who rose and stepped behind him to the door, which
+he closed and barred. Goring, looking at him with some surprise, saw
+that he was the person whom he had met on the mountains, and had
+afterwards seen at the funeral at Derreen. The third man rose from a
+bench on which he had been leaning, lifted his cap, and said:--
+
+"There is an old proverb, sir, that short accounts make long friends.
+There can be no friendship between you and me, but the account between
+us is of very old standing. I have returned to Ireland, only for a
+short stay; I am about to leave it, never to come back. A gentleman
+and a soldier, like yourself, cannot wish that I should go while that
+account is still unsettled. Our fortunate meeting here this morning
+provides us with an opportunity."
+
+It was Morty's voice that he heard, and Morty's face that he saw as he
+became accustomed to the gloom. He looked again at the pretended
+messenger from the carded curate, and he then remembered the old
+Sylvester who had brought the note from Lord Fitzmaurice to the agent
+from Kenmare. In an instant the meaning of the whole situation flashed
+across him. It was no casual re-encounter. He had been enticed into
+the place where he found himself, with some sinister and perhaps
+deadly purpose. A strange fatality had forced him again and again into
+collision with the man of whose ancestral lands he had come into
+possession. Once more, by a deliberate and treacherous contrivance, he
+and the chief of the O'Sullivans had been brought face to face
+together, and he was alone, without a friend within call of him;
+unless his tenant, who as he could now see had intended to give him
+warning, would interfere further in his defense. And of this he knew
+Ireland well enough to be aware that there was little hope.
+
+He supposed that they intended to murder him. The door, at which he
+involuntarily glanced, was fastened by this time with iron bolts. He
+was a man of great personal strength and activity, but in such a
+situation neither would be likely to avail him. Long inured to danger,
+and ready at all moments to meet whatever peril might threaten him, he
+calmly faced his adversary and said:--
+
+"This meeting is not accidental, as you would have me believe. You
+have contrived it. Explain yourself further."
+
+"Colonel Goring," said Morty Sullivan, "you will recall the
+circumstances under which we last parted. Enemy as you are and always
+have been to me and mine, I will do you the justice to say that on
+that occasion you behaved like a gentleman and a man of courage. But
+our quarrel was not fought out. Persons present interfered between us.
+We are now alone, and can complete what was then left unfinished."
+
+"Whether I did well or ill, sir," the colonel answered, "in giving you
+the satisfaction which you demanded of me at the time you speak of, I
+will not now say. But I tell you that the only relations which can
+exist between us at present are those between a magistrate and a
+criminal who has forfeited his life. If you mean to murder me, you can
+do it; you have me at advantage. You can thus add one more to the list
+of villainies with which you have stained an honorable name. If you
+mean that I owe you a reparation for personal injuries, such as the
+customs of Ireland allow one gentleman to require from another, this,
+as you well know, is not the way to ask for it. But I acknowledge no
+such right. When I last encountered you I but partly knew you. I now
+know you altogether. You have been a pirate on the high seas. Your
+letters of marque do not cover you, for you are a subject of the King,
+and have broken your allegiance. Such as you are, you stand outside
+the pale of honorable men, and I should degrade the uniform I wear if
+I were to stoop to measure arms with you."
+
+The sallow olive of Morty's cheek turned livid. He clutched the bench
+before him, till the muscles of his hands stood out like knots of
+rope.
+
+"You are in my power, colonel," he said: "do not tempt me too far. If
+my sins have been many, my wrongs are more. It must be this or worse.
+One word from me, and you are a dead man."
+
+He laid four pistols on the smith's tool-chest. "Take a pair of them,"
+he said. "They are loaded alike. Take which you please. Let us stand
+on the opposite sides of this hovel, and so make an end. If I fall, I
+swear on my soul you shall have no hurt from any of my people. My
+friend Connell is an officer of mine, but he holds a commission
+besides in the Irish Brigade. There is no better-born gentleman in
+Kerry. His presence here is your sufficient security. You shall return
+to Dunboy as safe from harm as if you had the Viceroy's body-guard
+about you, or your own boat's crew that shot down my poor fellows at
+Glengariff. To this I pledge you my honor."
+
+"Your honor!" said Goring; "your honor! And you tempted me here by a
+lying tale, sent by the lips of yonder skulking rascal. That alone,
+sir, were there nothing else, would have sufficed to show what you
+are."
+
+A significant click caught the ear of both the speakers. Looking
+round, they saw Sylvester had cocked a pistol.
+
+"Drop that," said Morty, "or by God! kinsman of mine though you be, I
+will drive a bullet through the brain of you. Enough of this, sir," he
+said, turning to Goring. "Time passes, and this scene must end. I
+would have arranged it otherwise, but you yourself know that by this
+way alone I could have brought you to the meeting. Take the pistols, I
+say, or by the bones of my ancestors that lie buried under Dunboy
+Castle yonder, I will call in my men from outside, and they shall
+strip you bare, and score such marks on you as the quartermaster
+leaves on the slaves that you hire to fight your battles. Prince
+Charles will laugh when I tell him in Paris how I served one at least
+of the hounds that chased him at Culloden."
+
+The forge in which this scene was going on was perfectly familiar to
+Goring, for he had himself designed it and built it. There was the
+ordinary broad open front to the road, constructed of timber, which
+was completely shut. The rest of the building was of stone, and in the
+wall at the back there was a small door leading into a field, and
+thence into the country. Could this door be opened, there was a
+chance, though but a faint one, of escape. A bar lay across, but of no
+great thickness. The staple into which it ran was slight. A vigorous
+blow might shatter both.
+
+Sylvester caught the direction of Goring's eye, caught its meaning,
+and threw himself in the way. The colonel snatched a heavy hammer
+which stood against the wall. With the suddenness of an electric flash
+he struck Sylvester on the shoulder, broke his collar-bone, and hurled
+him back senseless, doubled over the anvil. A second stroke, catching
+the bar in the middle, shattered it in two, and the door hung upon the
+latch. Morty and Connell, neither of whom had intended foul play,
+hesitated, and in another moment Goring would have been free and away.
+Connell, recovering himself, sprang forward and closed with him. The
+colonel, who had been the most accomplished wrestler of his regiment,
+whirled him round, flung him with a heavy fall on the floor, and had
+his hand on the latch when, half stunned as he was, Connell recovered
+his feet, drew a skene, and rushed at Colonel Goring again. So sudden
+it all was, so swift the struggle, and so dim the light, that from the
+other end it was hard to see what was happening. Wrenching the skene
+out of Connell's hands, and with the hot spirit of battle in him,
+Colonel Goring was on the point of driving it into his assailant's
+side.
+
+"Shoot, Morty! shoot, or I am a dead man!" Connell cried.
+
+Morty, startled and uncertain what to do, had mechanically snatched up
+a pistol when Sylvester was struck down. He raised his hand at
+Connell's cry. It shook from excitement, and locked together as the
+two figures were, he was as likely to hit friend as foe. Again Connell
+called, and Morty fired and missed; and the mark of the bullet is
+still shown in the wall of the smithy as a sacred reminiscence of a
+fight for Irish liberty. The second shot went true to its mark.
+Connell had been beaten down, though unwounded, and Goring's tall form
+stood out above him in clear view. This time Morty's hand did not fail
+him. A shiver passed through Goring's limbs. His arms dropped. He
+staggered back against the door, and the door yielded, and he fell
+upon the ground outside. But it was not to rise and fly. The ball had
+struck him clean above the ear, and buried itself in the brain. He was
+dead.
+
+
+
+
+SCIENTIFIC METHOD APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+Historical facts can only be verified by the skeptical and the
+inquiring, and skepticism and inquiry nip like a black frost the eager
+credulity in which legendary biographies took their rise. You can
+watch such stories as they grew in the congenial soil of belief. The
+great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted
+Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true,
+genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for
+themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their
+fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural
+powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them
+personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and
+portents vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St.
+Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He
+told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel
+to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor
+becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the
+county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely
+the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was
+feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us
+that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his
+message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august
+visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are
+imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid
+enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus
+and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and
+we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St.
+Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he
+comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope
+Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a
+wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen
+him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty
+times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate
+towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of
+them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick
+which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least
+as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very
+little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith
+and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of
+probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a
+story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of
+carelessness, credulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which
+we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that
+evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or
+superstition. To the mediæval writer, the more stupendous the miracle
+the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he
+could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but
+inherent fitness.
+
+So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the
+first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the
+next or heroic we have accounts of real persons, but handed down to
+us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight
+was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old
+times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the
+figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as
+apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in
+stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental
+condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real
+life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring
+imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with
+certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain,
+prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation;
+they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or
+transferred from owner to owner,--manipulated to suit or decorate a
+preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry,
+where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles,
+and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no
+less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship,
+though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they
+resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one
+another.
+
+At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper.
+The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape
+out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is
+a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological
+string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is
+not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he
+means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that
+ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what part
+of the world we please,--take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in
+Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,--he is but a step in advance
+of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never
+bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never
+speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He
+takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his
+hand,--the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He
+transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more
+picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down,
+though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic.
+Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf; Curtius jumping into the gulf;
+our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of
+the spider,--stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity
+with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish
+village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the
+sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however
+charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated
+into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth
+of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into
+the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of
+historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy,
+Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own
+departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet
+entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as
+our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest.
+The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,--a people so
+pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character
+indelibly into the constitution of Europe,--these Romans, at the very
+time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed
+themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by
+a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the
+entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is
+likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things
+which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato
+tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face
+without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the
+world betray sometimes analogous misgivings.
+
+In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably
+harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first
+great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers.
+Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time,
+he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis
+and Platæa. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time
+thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was
+not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager,
+cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were
+qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most
+delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot;
+and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy
+was like Shakespeare's,--a calm, intelligent insight into human
+things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or
+other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he
+saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world;
+and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard
+and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather
+believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be
+critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what
+he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his
+judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain
+evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same
+space so much important truth,--truth which survives the sharpest test
+that modern discoveries can apply to it.
+
+The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best
+of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the
+same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what
+philosophers call subjectivity,--the projection into the narrative of
+the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories.
+Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the
+representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps
+consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a
+statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate
+supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account
+of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome.
+The boldest fabricator would not venture to introduce an entire and
+complete invention. This was not the case with the older authors.
+Thucydides tells us frankly that the speeches which he interweaves
+with his narrative were his own composition. They were intended as
+dramatic representations of the opinions of the factions and parties
+with which Greece was divided, and they were assigned to this person
+or to that, as he supposed them to be internally suitable. Herodotus
+had set Thucydides the example, and it was universally followed. No
+speech given by any old historian can be accepted as literally true
+unless there is a specific intimation to that effect. Deception was
+neither practiced nor pretended. It was a convenient method of
+exhibiting characters and situations, and it was therefore adopted
+without hesitation or reserve.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF THOMAS BECKET
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+The knights were introduced. They advanced. The archbishop neither
+spoke nor looked at them, but continued talking to a monk who was next
+him. He himself was sitting on a bed. The rest of the party present
+were on the floor. The knights seated themselves in the same manner,
+and for a few moments there was silence. Then Becket's black, restless
+eye glanced from one to the other. He slightly noticed Tracy; and
+Fitzurse said a few unrecorded sentences to him, which ended with "God
+help you!" To Becket's friends the words sounded like insolence. They
+may have meant no more than pity for the deliberate fool who was
+forcing destruction upon himself.
+
+Becket's face flushed. Fitzurse went on, "We bring you the commands of
+the King beyond the sea; will you hear us in public or in private?"
+Becket said he cared not. "In private, then," said Fitzurse. The monks
+thought afterwards that Fitzurse had meant to kill the archbishop
+where he sat. If the knights had entered the palace, thronged as it
+was with men, with any such intention, they would scarcely have left
+their swords behind them. The room was cleared, and a short
+altercation followed, of which nothing is known save that it ended
+speedily in high words on both sides. Becket called in his clergy
+again, his lay servants being excluded, and bade Fitzurse go on. "Be
+it so," Sir Reginald said. "Listen, then, to what the King says. When
+the peace was made, he put aside all his complaints against you. He
+allowed you to return, as you desired, free to your see. You have now
+added contempt to your other offenses. You have broken the treaty. You
+have allowed your pride to tempt you to defy your lord and master to
+your own sorrow. You have censured the bishops by whose administration
+the Prince was crowned. You have pronounced an anathema against the
+King's ministers, by whose advice he is guided in the management of
+the empire. You have made it plain that if you could you would take
+the Prince's crown from him. Your plots and contrivances to attain
+your ends are notorious to all men. Say, then, will you attend us to
+the King's presence, and there answer for yourself? For this we are
+sent."
+
+The archbishop declared that he had never wished any hurt to the
+Prince. The King had no occasion to be displeased if crowds came
+about him in the towns and cities, after having been so long deprived
+of his presence. If he had done any wrong he would make satisfaction,
+but he protested against being suspected of intentions which had never
+entered his mind.
+
+Fitzurse did not enter into an altercation with him, but
+continued:--"The King commands further that you and your clerks repair
+without delay to the young King's presence, and swear allegiance, and
+promise to amend your faults."
+
+The archbishop's temper was fast rising. "I will do whatever may be
+reasonable," he said, "but I tell you plainly, the King shall have no
+oaths from me, nor from any one of my clergy. There has been too much
+perjury already. I have absolved many, with God's help, who had
+perjured themselves. I will absolve the rest when he permits."
+
+"I understand you to say that you will not obey," said Fitzurse, and
+went on in the same tone:--"The King commands you to absolve the
+bishops whom you have excommunicated without his permission" (_absque
+licentiâ suâ_).
+
+"The Pope sentenced the bishops," the archbishop said. "If you are not
+pleased, you must go to him. The affair is none of mine."
+
+Fitzurse said it had been done at his instigation, which he did not
+deny; but he proceeded to reassert that the King had given his
+permission. He had complained at the time of the peace of the injury
+which he had suffered in the coronation, and the King had told him
+that he might obtain from the Pope any satisfaction for which he liked
+to ask.
+
+If this was all the consent which the King had given, the pretense of
+his authority was inexcusable. Fitzurse could scarce hear the
+archbishop out with patience. "Ay, ay!" said he; "will you make the
+King out to be a traitor, then? The King gave you leave to
+excommunicate the bishops when they were acting by his own order! It
+is more than we can bear to listen to such monstrous accusations."
+
+John of Salisbury tried to check the archbishop's imprudent tongue,
+and whispered to him to speak to the knights in private; but when the
+passion was on him, no mule was more ungovernable than Becket. Drawing
+to a conclusion, Fitzurse said to him:--"Since you refuse to do any
+one of those things which the King requires of you, his final commands
+are that you and your clergy shall forthwith depart out of this realm
+and out of his dominions, never more to return. You have broken the
+peace, and the King cannot trust you again."
+
+Becket answered wildly that he would not go--never again would he
+leave England. Nothing but death should now part him from his church.
+Stung by the reproach of ill-faith, he poured out the catalogue of his
+own injuries. He had been promised restoration, and instead of
+restoration he had been robbed and insulted. Ranulf de Broc had laid
+an embargo on his wine. Robert de Broc had cut off his mule's tail;
+and now the knights had come to menace him.
+
+De Morville said that if he had suffered any wrong he had only to
+appeal to the Council, and justice would be done.
+
+Becket did not wish for the Council's justice. "I have complained
+enough," he said; "so many wrongs are daily heaped upon me that I
+could not find messengers to carry the tale of them. I am refused
+access to the court. Neither one king nor the other will do me right.
+I will endure it no more. I will use my own powers as archbishop, and
+no child of man shall prevent me."
+
+"You will lay the realm under interdict, then, and excommunicate the
+whole of us?" said Fitzurse.
+
+"So God help me," said one of the others, "he shall not do that. He
+has excommunicated over-many already. We have borne too long with
+him."
+
+The knights sprang to their feet, twisting their gloves and swinging
+their arms. The archbishop rose. In the general noise words could no
+longer be accurately heard. At length the knights moved to leave the
+room, and addressing the archbishop's attendants, said, "In the King's
+name we command you to see that this man does not escape."
+
+"Do you think I shall fly, then?" cried the archbishop. "Neither for
+the King nor for any living man will I fly. You cannot be more ready
+to kill me than I am to die.... Here you will find me," he shouted,
+following them to the door as they went out, and calling after them.
+Some of his friends thought that he had asked De Morville to come back
+and speak quietly with him, but it was not so. He returned to his
+seat, still excited and complaining.
+
+"My lord," said John of Salisbury to him, "it is strange that you will
+never be advised. What occasion was there for you to go after these
+men and exasperate them with your bitter speeches? You would have
+done better, surely, by being quiet and giving them a milder answer.
+They mean no good, and you only commit yourself."
+
+The archbishop sighed, and said, "I have done with advice. I know what
+I have before me."
+
+It was four o'clock when the knights entered. It was now nearly five;
+and unless there were lights the room must have been almost dark.
+Beyond the archbishop's chamber was an ante-room, beyond the ante-room
+the hall. The knights, passing through the hall into the quadrangle,
+and thence to the lodge, called their men to arms. The great gate was
+closed. A mounted guard was stationed outside, with orders to allow no
+one to go out or in. The knights threw off their cloaks and buckled on
+their swords. This was the work of a few minutes. From the cathedral
+tower the vesper bell was beginning to sound. The archbishop had
+seated himself to recover from the agitation of the preceding scene,
+when a breathless monk rushed in to say that the knights were arming.
+"Who cares? Let them arm," was all that the archbishop said. His
+clergy was less indifferent. If the archbishop was ready for death,
+they were not. The door from the hall into the court was closed and
+barred, and a short respite was thus secured. The intention of the
+knights, it may be presumed, was to seize the archbishop and carry him
+off to Saltwood or to De Morville's castle at Knaresborough, or
+perhaps to Normandy. Coming back to execute their purpose, they found
+themselves stopped by the hall door. To burst it open would require
+time; the ante-room between the hall and the archbishop's apartments
+opened by an oriel window and an outside stair into a garden. Robert
+de Broc, who knew the house well, led the way to it in the dark. The
+steps were broken, but a ladder was standing against the window, by
+which the knights mounted, and the crash of the falling casement told
+the fluttered group about the archbishop that their enemies were upon
+them. There was still a moment. The party who entered by the window,
+instead of turning into the archbishop's room, first went into the
+hall to open the door and admit their comrades. From the archbishop's
+room a second passage, little used, opened into the northwest corner
+of the cloister, and from the cloister there was a way into the north
+transept of the cathedral. The cry was "To the church! To the church!"
+There at least there would be immediate safety.
+
+The archbishop had told the knights that they would find him where
+they left him. He did not choose to show fear; or he was afraid, as
+some thought, of losing his martyrdom. He would not move. The bell had
+ceased. They reminded him that vespers had begun, and that he ought to
+be in the cathedral. Half yielding, half resisting, his friends swept
+him down the passage into the cloister. His cross had been forgotten
+in the haste. He refused to stir till it was fetched and carried
+before him as usual. Then only, himself incapable of fear, and
+rebuking the terror of the rest, he advanced deliberately to the door
+into the south transept. His train was scattered behind him, all along
+the cloister from the passage leading out of the palace. As he entered
+the church, cries were heard, from which it became plain that the
+knights had broken into the archbishop's room, had found the passage,
+and were following him. Almost immediately Fitzurse, Tracy, De
+Morville, and Le Breton were discerned in the dim light, coming
+through the cloister in their armor, with drawn swords, and axes in
+their left hands. A company of men-at-arms was behind them. In front
+they were driving before them a frightened flock of monks.
+
+From the middle of the transept in which the archbishop was standing,
+a single pillar rose into the roof. On the eastern side of it opened a
+chapel of St. Benedict, in which were the tombs of several of the old
+primates. On the west, running of course parallel to the nave, was a
+Lady chapel. Behind the pillar, steps led up into the choir, where
+voices were already singing vespers. A faint light may have been
+reflected into the transept from the choir tapers, and candles may
+perhaps have been burning before the altars in the two chapels; of
+light from without through the windows at that hour there could have
+been none. Seeing the knights coming on, the clergy who had entered
+with the archbishop closed the door and barred it. "What do you fear?"
+he cried in a clear, loud voice. "Out of the way, you coward! the
+Church of God must not be made a fortress." He stepped back and
+reopened the door with his own hands, to let in the trembling wretches
+who had been shut out among the wolves. They rushed past him, and
+scattered in the hiding-places of the vast sanctuary, in the crypt, in
+the galleries, or behind the tombs. All, or almost all, even of his
+closest friends,--William of Canterbury, Benedict, John of Salisbury
+himself,--forsook him to shift for themselves, admitting frankly that
+they were unworthy of martyrdom. The archbishop was left alone with
+his chaplain Fitzstephen, Robert of Merton his old master, and Edward
+Grim, the stranger from Cambridge,--or perhaps with Grim only, who
+says that he was the only one who stayed, and was the only one
+certainly who showed any sign of courage. A cry had been raised in the
+choir that armed men were breaking into the cathedral. The vespers
+ceased; the few monks assembled left their seats and rushed to the
+edge of the transept, looking wildly into the darkness.
+
+The archbishop was on the fourth step beyond the central pillar
+ascending into the choir, when the knights came in. The outline of his
+figure may have been just visible to them, if light fell upon it from
+candles in the Lady chapel. Fitzurse passed to the right of the
+pillar, De Morville, Tracy, and Le Breton to the left. Robert de Broc,
+and Hugh Mauclerc, another apostate priest, remained at the door by
+which they entered. A voice cried, "Where is the traitor? Where is
+Thomas Becket?" There was silence; such a name could not be
+acknowledged. "Where is the archbishop?" Fitzurse shouted. "I am
+here," the archbishop replied, descending the steps, and meeting the
+knights full in the face. "What do you want with me? I am not afraid
+of your swords. I will not do what is unjust." The knights closed
+round him. "Absolve the persons whom you have excommunicated,"
+they said, "and take off the suspensions." "They have made no
+satisfaction," he answered; "I will not." "Then you shall die as
+you have deserved," they said.
+
+They had not meant to kill him--certainly not at that time and in that
+place. One of them touched him on the shoulder with the flat of his
+sword, and hissed in his ears, "Fly, or you are a dead man." There was
+still time; with a few steps he would have been lost in the gloom of
+the cathedral, and could have concealed him in any one of a hundred
+hiding-places. But he was careless of life, and he felt that his time
+was come. "I am ready to die," he said. "May the Church through my
+blood obtain peace and liberty! I charge you in the name of God that
+you hurt no one here but me."
+
+The people from the town were now pouring into the cathedral; De
+Morville was keeping them back with difficulty at the head of the
+steps from the choir, and there was danger of a rescue. Fitzurse
+seized him, meaning to drag him off as a prisoner. He had been calm so
+far; his pride rose at the indignity of an arrest. "Touch me not,
+thou abominable wretch!" he said, wrenching his cloak out of
+Fitzurse's grasp. "Off, thou pander, thou!" Le Breton and Fitzurse
+grasped him again, and tried to force him upon Tracy's back. He
+grappled with Tracy and flung him to the ground, and then stood with
+his back against the pillar, Edward Grim supporting him. Fitzurse,
+stung by the foul epithet which Becket had thrown at him, swept his
+sword over him and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the
+pavement, struck direct at his head. Grim raised his arm and caught
+the blow. The arm fell broken, and the one friend found faithful sank
+back disabled against the wall. The sword with its remaining force
+wounded the archbishop above the forehead, and the blood trickled down
+his face. Standing firmly, with his hands clasped, he bent his neck
+for the death-stroke, saying in a low voice, "I am prepared to die for
+Christ and for his Church." These were his last words. Tracy again
+struck him. He fell forward upon his knees and hands. In that position
+Le Breton dealt him a blow which severed the scalp from the head and
+broke the sword against the stone, saying, "Take that for my Lord
+William." De Broc or Mauclerc--the needless ferocity was attributed to
+both of them--strode forward from the cloister door, set his foot on
+the neck of the dead lion, and spread the brains upon the pavement
+with his sword's point. "We may go," he said; "the traitor is dead,
+and will trouble us no more."
+
+Such was the murder of Becket, the echoes of which are still heard
+across seven centuries of time, and which, be the final judgment upon
+it what it may, has its place among the most enduring incidents of
+English history. Was Becket a martyr, or was he justly executed as a
+traitor to his sovereign? Even in that supreme moment of terror and
+wonder, opinions were divided among his own monks. That very night
+Grim heard one of them say, "He is no martyr, he is justly served."
+Another said--scarcely feeling, perhaps, the meaning of the
+words,--"He wished to be king and more than king. Let him be king, let
+him be king." Whether the cause for which he died was to prevail, or
+whether the sacrifice had been in vain, hung on the answer which would
+be given to this momentous question. In a few days or weeks an answer
+came in a form to which in that age no rejoinder was possible; and the
+only uncertainty which remained at Canterbury was whether it was
+lawful to use the ordinary prayers for the repose of the dead man's
+soul, or whether, in consequence of the astounding miracles which
+were instantly worked by his remains, the Pope's judgment ought not to
+be anticipated, and the archbishop ought not to be at once adored as a
+saint in heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII.
+
+From the 'History of England'
+
+
+Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which
+both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was
+assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records,
+I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither
+any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found
+that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other
+fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to
+deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy,
+statesmen whose beneficent legislature survives among the most valued
+of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the
+English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable
+atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the
+Roman Senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.
+
+Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the
+narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of
+unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the
+conditions, internal and external, under which his task was allotted
+to him, he, like every other man, ought to be judged. He was
+inconsistent: he can bear the reproach of it. He ended by accepting
+and approving what he had commenced with persecuting; yet it was with
+the honest inconsistency which distinguishes the conduct of most men
+of practical ability in times of change, and even by virtue of which
+they obtain their success. If at the commencement of the movement he
+had regarded the eucharist as a "remembrance," he must either have
+concealed his convictions or he would have forfeited his throne; if he
+had been a stationary bigot, the Reformation might have waited for a
+century, and would have been conquered only by an internecine war.
+
+But as the nation moved the King moved, leading it, but not outrunning
+it; checking those who went too fast, dragging forward those who
+lagged behind. The conservatives, all that was sound and good among
+them, trusted him because he so long continued to share their
+conservatism; when he threw it aside he was not reproached with breach
+of confidence, because his own advance had accompanied theirs.
+
+Protestants have exclaimed against the Six Articles Bill; Romanists
+against the Act of Supremacy. Philosophers complain that the
+prejudices of the people were needlessly violated, that opinions
+should have been allowed to be free, and the reform of religion have
+been left to be accomplished by reason. Yet, however cruel was the Six
+Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were
+unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden
+miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his
+eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably,
+had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles
+of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was
+itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared
+Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of
+enforcing it by violence. His personal exertions were ever to mitigate
+the action of the law, while its letter was sustained; and England at
+its worst was a harbor of refuge to the Protestants, compared to the
+Netherlands, to France, to Spain, or even to Scotland.
+
+That the Romanists should have regarded him as a tyrant is natural;
+and were it true that English subjects owed fealty to the Pope, their
+feeling was just. But however desirable it may be to leave religious
+opinion unfettered, it is certain that if England was legitimately
+free, she could tolerate no difference of opinion on a question of
+allegiance, so long as Europe was conspiring to bring her back into
+slavery. So long as the English Romanists refused to admit without
+mental reservation that, if foreign enemies invaded this country in
+the Pope's name, their place must be at the side of their own
+sovereign, "religion" might palliate the moral guilt of their treason,
+but it could not exempt them from its punishment.
+
+But these matters have been discussed in the details of this history,
+where alone they can be understood.
+
+Beyond and besides the Reformation, the constitution of these islands
+now rests in large measure on foundations laid in this reign. Henry
+brought Ireland within the reach of English civilization. He absorbed
+Wales and the Palatinates into the general English system. He it was
+who raised the House of Commons from the narrow duty of voting
+supplies, and of passing without discussion the measures of the Privy
+Council, and converted them into the first power in the State under
+the Crown. When he ascended the throne, so little did the Commons care
+for their privileges that their attendance at the sessions of
+Parliament was enforced by a law. They woke into life in 1529, and
+they became the right hand of the King to subdue the resistance of the
+House of Lords, and to force upon them a course of legislation which
+from their hearts they detested. Other kings in times of difficulty
+summoned their "great councils," composed of peers, or prelates, or
+municipal officials, or any persons whom they pleased to nominate.
+Henry VIII. broke through the ancient practice, and ever threw himself
+on the representatives of the people. By the Reformation and by the
+power which he forced upon them, he had so interwoven the House of
+Commons with the highest business of the State that the peers
+thenceforward sunk to be their shadow.
+
+Something, too, ought to be said of his individual exertions in the
+details of State administration. In his earlier life, though active
+and assiduous, he found leisure for elegant accomplishments, for
+splendid amusements, for relaxations careless, extravagant, sometimes
+questionable. As his life drew onwards, his lighter tastes
+disappeared, and the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into
+the business of the commonwealth. Those who have examined the printed
+State papers may form some impression of his industry from the
+documents which are his own composition, and the letters which he
+wrote and received: but only persons who have seen the original
+manuscripts, who have observed the traces of his pen in side-notes and
+corrections, and the handwritings of his secretaries in diplomatic
+commissions, in drafts of Acts of Parliament, in expositions and
+formularies, in articles of faith, in proclamations, in the countless
+multitude of documents of all sorts, secular or ecclesiastical, which
+contain the real history of this extraordinary reign,--only they can
+realize the extent of labor to which he sacrificed himself, and which
+brought his life to a premature close. His personal faults were great,
+and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper
+blemishes would be but as scars upon the features of a sovereign who
+in trying times sustained nobly the honor of the English name, and
+carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its
+history.
+
+
+
+
+ON A SIDING AT A RAILWAY STATION
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+Some years ago I was traveling by railway, no matter whence or
+whither. I was in a second-class carriage. We had been long on the
+road, and had still some distance before us, when one evening our
+journey was brought unexpectedly to an end by the train running into a
+siding. The guards opened the doors, we were told that we could
+proceed no further, and were required to alight. The passengers were
+numerous, and of all ranks and sorts. There were third class, second,
+first, with saloon carriages for several great persons of high
+distinction. We had ministers of State, judges on circuit, directors,
+leading men of business, idle young men of family who were out amusing
+themselves, an archbishop, several ladies, and a duke and duchess with
+their suite. These favored travelers had Pullman cars to themselves,
+and occupied as much room as was allotted to scores of plebeians. I
+had amused myself for several days in observing the luxurious
+appurtenances by which they were protected against discomfort,--the
+piles of cushions and cloaks, the baskets of dainties, the novels and
+magazines to pass away the time, and the profound attention which they
+met with from the conductors and station-masters on the line. The rest
+of us were a miscellaneous crowd,--commercial people, lawyers,
+artists, men of letters, tourists moving about for pleasure or because
+they had nothing to do; and in third-class carriages, artisans and
+laborers in search of work, women looking for husbands or for service,
+or beggars flying from starvation in one part of the world to find it
+follow them like their shadows, let them go where they pleased. All
+these were huddled together, feeding hardly on such poor provisions as
+they carried with them or could pick up at the stopping-places. No
+more consideration was shown them than if they had been so many
+cattle. But they were merry enough: songs and sounds of laughter came
+from their windows, and notwithstanding all their conveniences, the
+languid-looking fine people in the large compartments seemed to me to
+get through their journey with less enjoyment after all than their
+poor fellow travelers. These last appeared to be of tougher texture,
+to care less for being jolted and shaken, to be better humored and
+kinder to one another. They had found life go hard with them wherever
+they had been, and not being accustomed to have everything which they
+wished for, they were less selfish and more considerate.
+
+The intimation that our journey was for the present at an end came on
+most of us as an unpleasant surprise. The grandees got out in a high
+state of indignation. They called for their servants, but their
+servants did not hear them, or laughed and passed on. The conductors
+had forgotten to be obsequious. All classes on the platform were
+suddenly on a level. A beggar woman hustled the duchess, as she was
+standing astonished because her maid had left her to carry her own
+bag. The patricians were pushed about among the crowd with no more
+concern than if they had been common mortals. They demanded loudly to
+see the station-master. The minister complained angrily of the delay;
+an important negotiation would be imperiled by his detention, and he
+threatened the company with the displeasure of his department. A
+consequential youth who had just heard of the death of his elder
+brother was flying home to take his inheritance. A great lady had
+secured, as she had hoped, a brilliant match for her daughter; her
+work over, she had been at the baths to recover from the dissipation
+of the season; difficulty had arisen unlooked for, and unless she was
+at hand to remove it the worst consequences might be feared. A banker
+declared that the credit of a leading commercial house might fail,
+unless he could be at home on the day fixed for his return; he alone
+could save it. A solicitor had the evidence in his portmanteau which
+would determine the succession to the lands and title of an ancient
+family. An elderly gentleman was in despair about his young wife, whom
+he had left at home; he had made a will by which she was to lose his
+fortune if she married again after his death, but the will was lying
+in his desk unsigned. The archbishop was on his way to a synod, where
+the great question was to be discussed whether gas might be used at
+the altar instead of candles. The altar candles were blessed before
+they were used, and the doubt was whether gas could be blessed. The
+right reverend prelate conceived that if the gas tubes were made in
+the shape of candles the difficulty could be got over, but he feared
+that without his moderating influence the majority might come to a
+rash decision.
+
+All these persons were clamoring over their various anxieties with the
+most naïve frankness, the truth coming freely out, whatever it might
+be. One distinguished-looking lady in deep mourning, with a sad,
+gentle face, alone was resigned and hopeful. It seemed that her
+husband had been stopped not long before at the same station. She
+thought it possible that she might meet him again.
+
+The station-master listened to the complaints with composed
+indifference. He told the loudest that they need not alarm themselves.
+The State would survive the absence of the minister. The minister, in
+fact, was not thinking of the State at all, but of the party triumph
+which he expected; and the peerage which was to be his reward, the
+station-master said, would now be of no use to him. The youth had a
+second brother who would succeed instead of him, and the tenants would
+not be inconvenienced by the change. The fine lady's daughter would
+marry to her own liking instead of her mother's, and would be all the
+happier for it. The commercial house was already insolvent, and the
+longer it lasted the more innocent people would be ruined by it. The
+boy whom the lawyer intended to make into a rich baronet was now
+working industriously at school, and would grow up a useful man. If a
+great estate fell in to him he would be idle and dissolute. The old
+man might congratulate himself that he had escaped so soon from the
+scrape into which he had fallen. His wife would marry an adventurer,
+and would suffer worse from inheriting his fortune. The archbishop was
+commended for his anxiety. His solution of the candle problem was no
+doubt an excellent one; but his clergy were now provided with a
+harmless subject to quarrel over, and if it was adopted they might
+fall out over something else which might be seriously mischievous.
+
+"Do you mean, then, that you are not going to send us forward at all?"
+the minister inquired sternly.
+
+"You will see," the station-master answered with a curious short
+laugh. I observed that he looked more gently at the lady in mourning.
+She had said nothing, but he knew what was in her mind, and though he
+held out no hope in words that her wish would be gratified, he smiled
+sadly, and the irony passed out of his face.
+
+The crowd meanwhile were standing about the platform, whistling tunes
+or amusing themselves, not ill-naturedly at the distress of their
+grand companions. Something considerable was happening. But they had
+so long experienced the ups and downs of things that they were
+prepared for what fortune might send. They had not expected to find a
+Paradise where they were going, and one place might be as good as
+another. They had nothing belonging to them except the clothes they
+stood in and their bits of skill in their different trades. Wherever
+men were, there would be need of cobblers, and tailors, and smiths,
+and carpenters. If not, they might fall on their feet somehow, if
+there was work to be done of any sort.
+
+Presently a bell rang, a door was flung open, and we were ordered into
+a waiting-room, where we were told that our luggage was to be
+examined. It was a large, barely furnished apartment, like the _salle
+d'attente_ at the Northern Railway Station at Paris. A rail ran
+across, behind which we were all penned; opposite to us was the usual
+long table, on which were piled boxes, bags, and portmanteaus, and
+behind them stood a row of officials, in a plain uniform with gold
+bands round their caps, and the dry peremptory manner which passengers
+accustomed to deference so particularly dislike. At their backs was a
+screen extending across the room, reaching half-way to the ceiling; in
+the rear of it there was apparently an office.
+
+We each looked to see that our particular belongings were safe, but we
+were surprised to find that we could recognize none of them. Packages
+there were in plenty, alleged to be the property of the passengers who
+had come in by the train. They were arranged in the three
+classes,--first, second, and third,--but the proportions were
+inverted: most of it was labeled as the luggage of the travelers in
+fustian, who had brought nothing with them but what they carried in
+their hands; a moderate heap stood where the second-class luggage
+should have been, and some of superior quality; but none of us could
+make out the shapes of our own trunks. As to the grand ladies and
+gentlemen, the innumerable articles which I had seen put as theirs
+into the van were nowhere to be found. A few shawls and cloaks lay
+upon the planks, and that was all. There was a loud outcry; but the
+officials were accustomed to it, and took no notice. The
+station-master, who was still in charge of us, said briefly that the
+saloon luggage would be sent forward in the next train. The late
+owners would have no more use for it, and it would be delivered to
+their friends.
+
+The late owners! Were we no longer actual owners, then? My individual
+loss was not great, and besides, it might be made up to me; for I saw
+my name on a strange box on the table, and being of curious
+disposition, the singularity of the adventure made it interesting to
+me. The consternation of the rest was indescribable. The minister
+supposed that he had fallen among communists, who disbelieved in
+property, and was beginning a speech on the elementary conditions of
+society; when silence was called, and the third-class passengers were
+ordered to advance, that their boxes might be opened. Each man had his
+own carefully docketed. The lids flew off, and within, instead of
+clothes, and shoes, and dressing apparatus, and money, and jewels, and
+such-like, were simply samples of the work which he had done in his
+life. There was an account-book also, in which were entered the number
+of days which he had worked, the number and size of the fields, etc.,
+which he had drained and inclosed and plowed, the crops which he had
+reaped, the walls which he had built, the metal which he had dug out
+and smelted and fashioned into articles of use to mankind, the leather
+which he had tanned, the clothes which he had woven,--all entered with
+punctual exactness; and on the opposite page, the wages which he had
+received, and the share which had been allotted to him of the good
+things which he had helped to create.
+
+Besides his work, so specifically called, there were his actions,--his
+affection for his parents or his wife and children, his self-denials,
+his charities, his purity, his truth, his honesty; or it might be ugly
+catalogues of sins and oaths and drunkenness and brutality. But
+inquiry into action was reserved for a second investigation before a
+higher commissioner. The first examination was confined to the literal
+work done by each man for the general good,--how much he had
+contributed, and how much society had done for him in return; and no
+one, it seemed, could be allowed to go any further without a
+certificate of having passed this test satisfactorily. With the
+workmen, the balance in most instances was found enormously in their
+favor. The state of the case was so clear that the scrutiny was
+rapidly got over, and they and their luggage were passed in to the
+higher court. A few were found whose boxes were empty, who had done
+nothing useful all their lives, and had subsisted by begging and
+stealing. These were ordered to stand aside till the rest of us had
+been disposed of.
+
+The saloon passengers were taken next. Most of them, who had nothing
+at all to show, were called up together and were asked what they had
+to say for themselves. A well-dressed gentleman, who spoke for the
+rest, said that the whole investigation was a mystery to him. He and
+his friends had been born to good fortunes, and had found themselves,
+on entering upon life, amply provided for. They had never been told
+that work was required of them, either work with their hands or work
+with their heads,--in fact, work of any kind. It was right of course
+for the poor to work, because they could not honestly live otherwise.
+For themselves, they had spent their time in amusements, generally
+innocent. They had paid for everything which they had consumed. They
+had stolen nothing, taken nothing from any man by violence or fraud.
+They had kept the Commandments, all ten of them, from the time when
+they were old enough to understand them. The speaker, at least,
+declared that he had no breach of any Commandment on his own
+conscience, and he believed that he might say as much of his
+companions. They were superior people, who had been always looked up
+to and well spoken of; and to call upon them to show what they had
+done was against reason and equity.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the chief official, "we have heard this many times;
+yet as often as it is repeated we feel fresh astonishment. You have
+been in a world where work is the condition of life. Not a meal can be
+had by any man that some one has not worked to produce. Those who work
+deserve to eat; those who do not work deserve to starve. There are but
+three ways of living: by working, by stealing, or by begging. Those
+who have not lived by the first have lived by one of the other two.
+And no matter how superior you think yourselves, you will not pass
+here till you have something of your own to produce. You have had your
+wages beforehand--ample wages, as you acknowledge yourselves. What
+have you to show?"
+
+"Wages!" the speaker said: "we are not hired servants; we received no
+wages. What we spent was our own. All the orders we received were that
+we were not to do wrong. We have done no wrong. I appeal to the higher
+court."
+
+But the appeal could not be received. To all who presented themselves
+with empty boxes, no matter who they were, or how excellent their
+characters appeared to one another, there was the irrevocable
+answer--"No admittance, till you come better furnished." All who were
+in this condition, the duke and duchess among them, were ordered to
+stand aside with the thieves. The duchess declared that she had given
+the finest parties in the season, and as it was universally agreed
+that they had been the most tedious, and that no one had found any
+pleasure there, a momentary doubt rose whether they might not have
+answered some useful purpose in disgusting people with such modes of
+entertainment; but no evidence of this was forthcoming: the world had
+attended them because the world had nothing else to do, and she and
+her guests had been alike unprofitable. Thus the large majority of the
+saloon passengers was disposed of. The minister, the archbishop, the
+lawyer, the banker, and others who although they had no material work
+credited to them had yet been active and laborious in their different
+callings, were passed to the superior judges.
+
+Our turn came next,--ours of the second class,--and a motley gathering
+we were. Busy we must all have been, from the multitude of articles
+which we found assigned to us: manufacturers with their wares,
+solicitors with their law-suits, doctors and clergymen with the bodies
+and souls which they had saved or lost, authors with their books,
+painters and sculptors with their pictures and statues. But the hard
+test was applied to all that we had produced,--the wages which we had
+received on one side, and the value of our exertions to mankind on the
+other,--and imposing as our performances looked when laid out to be
+examined, we had been paid, most of us, out of all proportion to what
+we were found to have deserved. I was reminded of a large compartment
+in the Paris Exhibition, where an active gentleman, wishing to show
+the state of English literature, had collected copies of every book,
+review, pamphlet, or newspaper which had been published in a single
+year. The bulk was overwhelming, but the figures were only decimal
+points, and the worth of the whole was a fraction above zero. A few of
+us were turned back summarily among the thieves and the fine gentlemen
+and ladies: speculators who had done nothing but handle money which
+had clung to their fingers in passing through them, divines who had
+preached a morality which they did not practice, and fluent orators
+who had made speeches which they knew to be nonsense; philosophers who
+had spun out of moonshine systems of the universe, distinguished
+pleaders who had defeated justice while they established points of
+law, writers of books upon subjects of which they knew enough to
+mislead their readers, purveyors of luxuries which had added nothing
+to human health or strength, physicians and apothecaries who had
+pretended to knowledge which they knew that they did not
+possess,--these all, as the contents of their boxes bore witness
+against them, were thrust back into the rejected herd.
+
+There were some whose account stood better, as having at least
+produced something of real merit, but they were cast on the point of
+wages: modest excellence had come badly off; the plausible and
+unscrupulous had thriven and grown rich. It was tragical, and
+evidently a surprise to most of us, to see how mendacious we had been:
+how we had sanded our sugar, watered our milk, scamped our
+carpentering and mason's work, literally and metaphorically; how in
+all things we had been thinking less of producing good work than of
+the profit which we could make out of it; how we had sold ourselves to
+tell lies and act them, because the public found lies pleasant and
+truth expensive and troublesome. Some of us were manifest rogues, who
+had bought cheap and sold dear, had used false measures and weights,
+had made cotton pass for wool, and hemp for silk, and tin for silver.
+The American peddler happened to be in the party, who had put a rind
+upon a grindstone and had sold it as a cheese. These were promptly
+sifted out and placed with their fellows; only persons whose services
+were on the whole greater than the pay which they had received were
+allowed their certificates. When my own box was opened, I perceived
+that though the wages had been small, the work done seemed smaller
+still; and I was surprised to find myself among those who had passed.
+
+The whistle of a train was heard at this moment, coming in upon the
+main line. It was to go in half an hour, and those who had been turned
+back were told that they were to proceed by it to the place where they
+had been originally going. They looked infinitely relieved at the
+news; but before they started, a few questions had to be put to them,
+and a few alterations made which were to affect their future. They
+were asked to explain how they had come to be such worthless
+creatures. They gave many answers, which came mainly to the same
+thing. Circumstances had been against them. It was all owing to
+circumstances. They had been badly brought up. They had been placed in
+situations where it had been impossible for them to do better. The
+rich people repeated that they had never been informed that any work
+was expected of them. Their wants had all been provided for, and it
+was unfair to expect that they should have exerted themselves of their
+own accord when they had no motive for working. If they had only been
+born poor, all would have gone well with them. The cheating tradesman
+declared that the first duty of a shopkeeper, according to all
+received principles, was to make money and better his condition. It
+was the buyer's business to see to the quality of the articles which
+he purchased; the shopkeeper was entitled to sell his wares at the
+highest price which he could get for them. So, at least, it was
+believed and taught by the recognized authorities on the subject. The
+orators, preachers, newspaper writers, novel-writers, etc., etc., of
+whom there were a great many, appealed to the crowds who came to
+listen to them, or bought and read their productions. _Tout le monde_,
+it was said, was wiser than the wisest single sage. They had given the
+world what the world wished for and approved; they had worked at
+supplying it with all their might, and it was extremely hard to blame
+them for guiding themselves by the world's judgment. The thieves and
+vagabonds argued that they had been brought into existence without
+their consent being asked: they had not wished for it; although they
+had not been without their pleasures, they regarded existence on the
+whole as a nuisance which they would gladly have been spared. Being
+alive, however, they had to keep alive; and for all that they could
+see, they had as full a right to the good things which the world
+contained as anybody else, provided they could get them. They were
+called thieves. Law and language were made by the property-owners, who
+were their natural enemies. If society had given them the means of
+living honestly they would have found it easy to be honest. Society
+had done nothing for them--why should they do anything for society?
+
+So, in their various ways, those who had been "plucked" defended
+themselves. They were all delighted to hear that they were to have
+another chance; and I was amused to observe that though some of them
+had pretended that they had not wished to be born, and had rather not
+have been born, not one of them protested against being sent back. All
+they asked was that they should be put in a new position, and that the
+adverse influences should be taken off. I expected that among these
+adverse influences they would have mentioned the faults of their
+own dispositions. My own opinion had been that half the misdoings
+of men came from congenital defects of character which they had
+brought with them into the world, and that constitutional courage,
+right-mindedness, and practical ability were as much gifts of nature
+or circumstance as the accidents of fortune. A change in this respect
+was of more consequence than in any other. But with themselves they
+were all apparently satisfied, and they required only an improvement
+in their surroundings. The alterations were rapidly made. The duchess
+was sent to begin her life again in a laborer's cottage. She was to
+attend the village school and rise thence into a housemaid. The fine
+gentleman was made a plowboy. The authors and preachers were to become
+mechanics, and bound apprentices to carpenters and blacksmiths. A
+philosopher who, having had a good fortune and unbroken health, had
+insisted that the world was as good as it could be made, was to be
+born blind and paralytic, and to find his way through life under the
+new conditions. The thieves and cheats, who pretended that their
+misdemeanors were due to poverty, were to find themselves, when they
+arrived in the world again, in palaces surrounded with luxury. The cup
+of Lethe was sent round. The past became a blank. They were hurried
+into the train; the engine screamed and flew away with them.
+
+"They will be all here again in a few years," the station-master said,
+"and it will be the same story over again. I have had these very
+people in my hands a dozen times. They have been tried in all
+positions, and there is still nothing to show, and nothing but
+complaints of circumstances. For my part, I would put them out
+altogether." "How long is it to last?" I asked. "Well," he said, "it
+does not depend on me. No one passes here who cannot prove that he has
+lived to some purpose. Some of the worst I have known made at last
+into pigs and geese, to be fatted up and eaten, and made of use that
+way. Others have become asses, condemned to carry burdens, to be
+beaten with sticks, and to breed asses like themselves for a hundred
+generations. All animated creatures tend to take the shape at last
+which suits their character."
+
+The train was scarcely out of sight when again the bell rang. The
+scene changed as at a theatre. The screen was rolled back, and we who
+were left found ourselves in the presence of four grave-looking
+persons, like the board of examiners whom we remembered at college. We
+were called up one by one. The work which had passed the first ordeal
+was again looked into, and the quality of it compared with the talent
+or faculty of the producer, to see how far he had done his
+best,--whether anywhere he had done worse than he might have done and
+knew how to have done; while besides, in a separate collection, were
+the vices, the sins, the selfishnesses and ill-humors, with--in the
+other scale--the acts of personal duty, of love and kindness and
+charity, which had increased the happiness or lightened the sorrows of
+those connected with him. These last, I observed, had generally been
+forgotten by the owner, who saw them appear with surprise, and even
+repudiated them with protest. In the work, of course, both material
+and moral, there was every gradation both of kind and merit. But while
+nothing was absolutely worthless, everything, even the highest
+achievements of the greatest artist or the greatest saint, fell short
+of absolute perfection. Each of us saw our own performances, from our
+first ignorant beginnings to what we regarded as our greatest triumph;
+and it was easy to trace how much of our faults were due to natural
+deficiencies and the necessary failures of inexperience, and how much
+to self-will or vanity or idleness. Some taint of mean motives,
+too,--some desire of reward, desire of praise or honor or wealth, some
+foolish self-satisfaction, when satisfaction ought not to have been
+felt,--was to be seen infecting everything, even the very best which
+was presented for scrutiny.
+
+So plain was this that one of us, an earnest, impressive-looking
+person, whose own work bore inspection better than that of most of us,
+exclaimed passionately that so far as he was concerned the examiners
+might spare their labor. From his earliest years he had known what he
+ought to do, and in no instance had he ever completely done it. He had
+struggled; he had conquered his grosser faults: but the farther he had
+gone, and the better he had been able to do, his knowledge had still
+grown faster than his power of acting upon it; and every additional
+day that he had lived, his shortcomings had become more miserably
+plain to him. Even if he could have reached perfection at last, he
+could not undo the past, and the faults of his youth would bear
+witness against him and call for his condemnation. Therefore, he said,
+he abhorred himself. He had no merit which could entitle him to look
+for favor. He had labored on to the end, but he had labored with a
+full knowledge that the best which he could offer would be unworthy of
+acceptance. He had been told, and he believed, that a high Spirit not
+subject to infirmity had done his work for him, and done it perfectly,
+and that if he abandoned all claim on his own account, he might be
+accepted for the sake of what another had done. This, he trusted, was
+true, and it was his sole dependence. In the so-called good actions
+with which he seemed to be credited, there was nothing that was really
+good; there was not one which was altogether what it ought to have
+been.
+
+He was evidently sincere, and what he said was undoubtedly true--true
+of him and true of every one. Even in the vehemence of his
+self-abandonment a trace lingered of the taint which he was
+confessing, for he was a polemical divine; he had spent his life and
+gained a reputation in maintaining this particular doctrine. He
+believed it, but he had not forgotten that he had been himself its
+champion.
+
+The examiner looked kindly at him, but answered:--
+
+"We do not expect impossibilities; and we do not blame you when you
+have not accomplished what is beyond your strength. Only those who are
+themselves perfect can do anything perfectly. Human beings are born
+ignorant and helpless. They bring into the world with them a
+disposition to seek what is pleasant to themselves, and what is
+pleasant is not always right. They learn to live as they learn
+everything else. At first they cannot do rightly at all. They improve
+under teaching and practice. The best only arrive at excellence. We do
+not find fault with the painter on account of his first bad copies, if
+they were as good as could be looked for at his age. Every craftsman
+acquires his art by degrees. He begins badly; he cannot help it; and
+it is the same with life. You learn to walk by falling down. You learn
+to live by going wrong and experiencing the consequences of it. We do
+not record against a man 'the sins of his youth' if he has been
+honestly trying to improve himself. We do not require the same
+self-control in a child as in a man. We do not require the same
+attainments from all. Some are well taught, some are ill taught, some
+are not taught at all. Some have naturally good dispositions, some
+have naturally bad dispositions. Not one has had power 'to fulfill the
+law,' as you call it, completely. Therefore it is no crime in him if
+he fails. We reckon as faults those only which arise from idleness,
+willfulness, selfishness, and deliberate preference of evil to good.
+Each is judged according to what he has received."
+
+I was amused to observe how pleased the archbishop looked while the
+examiner was speaking. He had himself been engaged in controversy with
+this gentleman on the share of "good works" in justifying a man; and
+if the examiner had not taken his side in the discussion, he had at
+least demolished his adversary. The archbishop had been the more
+disinterested in the line which he had taken, as his own "works,"
+though in several large folios, weighed extremely little; and indeed,
+had it not been for passages in his early life,--he had starved
+himself at college that he might not be a burden upon his widowed
+mother,--I do not know but that he might have been sent back into the
+world to serve as a parish clerk.
+
+For myself, there were questions which I was longing to ask, and I was
+trying to collect my courage to speak. I wanted chiefly to know what
+the examiner meant by "natural disposition." Was it that a man might
+be born with a natural capacity for becoming a saint, as another man
+with a capacity to become a great artist or musician, and that each of
+us could only grow to the limits of his natural powers? And again,
+were idleness, willfulness, selfishness, etc., etc., natural
+dispositions? for in that case--
+
+But at the moment the bell rang again, and my own name was called.
+There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity
+of the person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said
+or done, was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need
+for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably
+impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, the few good
+actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In
+the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and
+other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was
+poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely
+every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition
+grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it.
+Alas! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as
+if no compositor had ever labored in setting type for it. Pale and
+illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly
+prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at
+long intervals. They were those on which I had labored least, and had
+almost forgotten; or those, as I observed in one or two instances,
+which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly
+journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge, of
+willfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be
+true, was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness;
+sins of infirmity,--culpable indeed, but not culpable in the last
+degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual
+sentiments--these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my
+heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I
+should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was
+reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was
+flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance
+would be in my favor: so many years of labor--such and such cheques
+received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I
+was in good hope that I might scrape through.
+
+The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been
+listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when
+suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there
+appeared an interminable vista of creatures--creatures of all kinds
+from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They
+were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in
+part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood
+in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,--oxen and calves, sheep
+and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants,
+grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds
+which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them
+had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and
+river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling
+and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the
+oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally
+to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These
+had been my wages. At this enormous cost had my existence been
+maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were
+sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to
+produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has
+to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in
+air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the
+pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We
+were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the
+person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value
+in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were
+sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so
+pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the
+judgment, though we shall withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves
+we say freely that we have long watched him,--him and his
+fellows,--and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the
+human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most
+destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous
+beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied,
+he kills us for his mere amusement."
+
+The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the
+fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and
+self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on
+the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of
+condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became
+indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound
+of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the
+railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take
+our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus
+for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were
+waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and
+duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously
+bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right
+honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with
+which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop
+before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a
+very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me."
+The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the
+honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have
+dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this
+world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of
+imagination."
+
+
+
+
+HENRY B. FULLER
+
+(1859-)
+
+
+New England blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago
+even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of
+prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret
+Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind
+of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking
+for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the
+Great West.
+
+Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited
+place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for
+predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a
+musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he
+was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged
+at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted
+little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor
+Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This
+fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the
+book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and
+widely read. 'The Chatelaine of La Trinité,' his next venture,
+appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year.
+Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain
+remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in
+common with this workaday world.
+
+To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book--published as a
+serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and
+called 'The Cliff-Dwellers'--pictured Chicago in its most sordid and
+utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole
+community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence,
+the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the
+book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain
+whether to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his
+mercilessness.
+
+In 1895 appeared 'With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago
+social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still
+delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more
+sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is
+carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This
+theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an
+old-fashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience
+to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process
+is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic
+lightness of touch. 'With the Procession' is such a story as might
+happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis
+are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's
+Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking
+himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of
+the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his
+readers that they too shall fall to thinking.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE HEAD OF THE MARCH
+
+From 'With the Procession.' Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and
+reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers, New York
+
+
+"Well, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest
+of the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous
+pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a
+sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter
+of a vast and variegated façade; and higher still, the morning sun
+shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering
+chimneys.
+
+"It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the
+wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the
+inner ones.
+
+"Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
+searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo
+in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
+splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in
+for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most
+fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the
+beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.
+
+"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
+further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"
+
+The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates--" she began.
+
+The door opened half-way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his
+chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of
+those conscientious portraits of the olden time.
+
+"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself.
+
+She dropped her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that
+the man wore knee-breeches and black-silk stockings.
+
+"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
+I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
+never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
+town!"
+
+She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
+began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.
+
+The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as
+it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
+master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but
+there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all.
+Some of these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought
+polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in
+appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy;
+few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at
+the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.
+
+"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
+eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will: she
+acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him
+into the concession that she herself was nothing less.
+
+The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
+discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that
+he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
+permitted to pass the gate.
+
+She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
+partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of
+forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted
+upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow
+door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with
+the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led
+with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.
+
+"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
+speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse of all this
+luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
+eight hundred feet from the Monument!"
+
+Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
+she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected
+in an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity
+of the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more
+amply, than she could have imagined possible through the passage of
+one person merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow
+and somewhat ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning-gown
+with a broad plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous
+material in the sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and
+her voluminous gray hair was tossed and fretted about the temples
+after the fashion of a marquise of the old régime. Jane set her jaw
+and clamped her knotty fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable
+chair.
+
+"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous, and
+so fashionable, and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."
+
+The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
+carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps
+was silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide
+and roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she
+was to deal: with one of the big, the broad, the great, the
+triumphant; with one of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian
+keenness and sagacity, an American ambition and determination; with
+one who baffles circumstance and almost masters fate--with one of the
+conquerors, in short.
+
+"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
+"but all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
+door before--yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"
+
+Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
+Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
+She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on
+Jane with an expression of rather cold questioning.
+
+"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
+advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing
+there....
+
+"My father," Jane began again, in the same tone, "is David Marshall.
+He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have lived here a
+great many years. It seems to me that there ought to--"
+
+"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I _do_ know David
+Marshall--yes," she said; "or did--a good many years ago." She looked
+up into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her
+glance was curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are
+David Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst
+of spunk. "Really--David Marshall's daughter?"
+
+"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to
+be placated yet.
+
+"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so
+in the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else
+you could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is
+he, anyway? I haven't seen him--to really speak to him--for fifteen
+years. It may be even more."
+
+She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
+its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be
+inviting Jane to advance without let or hindrance.
+
+But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
+laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants
+to; she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."
+
+All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
+citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
+memory. The portcullis was dropped, and the late enemy was invited to
+advance as a friend.
+
+Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
+gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
+within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and
+looked into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that
+temper once myself," she said.
+
+The sluice gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams
+of tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their
+course.
+
+"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place?
+Oh, this terrible town! You can't keep your old friends; you can
+hardly know your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it
+is the same as if it were a hundred."
+
+Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
+herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
+permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place.
+And in the same old way," she added--in the spirit of concession.
+
+Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him--like your
+father?"
+
+"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of
+the family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And
+another drop fell.
+
+"Don't slander yourself." She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.
+
+Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
+seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't
+meaning to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also
+shrugged her shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and
+patted.
+
+"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially.
+She motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the
+roomier sofa. "Or no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day;
+it's so hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should.
+Come, it ought to be warmer in the music-room."
+
+"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
+have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
+music teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You
+shall have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your
+plans; I dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane
+Marshall."
+
+"Her music teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor
+so far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from
+searching out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of
+fifty-five want to be taking music lessons for?"
+
+The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
+hard-woods; its paneled walls and ceilings rang with a magnificent
+sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like
+marquetry of the floor.
+
+To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
+luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by
+special order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall
+music-stand in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound
+scores of all the German classics and the usual operas of the French
+and Italian schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing
+there seemed to have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it
+grand!" sighed Jane. She already felt herself succumbing beneath these
+accumulated splendors.
+
+Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano stool, with her back
+to the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I
+have sat down here for a month."
+
+"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this
+I should play in it every day."
+
+"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
+practicing in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
+you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
+thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover
+of the keyboard.
+
+"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
+don't believe she can play a single note."
+
+"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on.
+"I had the greatest set-back of my life. I asked to join the Amateur
+Musical Club. They wouldn't let me in."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote
+me a note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it
+meant. I see now well enough that my fingers _were_ rather stiffer
+than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering
+Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and
+Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under.
+I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practiced scales
+an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was crazy. I
+tackled Grieg and Lassen and Chopin,--yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm
+going to play for that committee next month. Let me see if they'll
+dare to vote me out again!"
+
+"Oh, _that's_ it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous of
+meting out exact and even-handed justice. She found it impossible to
+withhold respect from so much grit and determination.
+
+"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
+young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
+sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
+evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
+'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.
+
+"Your father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she
+went on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father
+was one of my old beaux--at least, I always counted him with the rest.
+I was a gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I
+could; so I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your
+father was one of the quiet ones."
+
+"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
+shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.
+
+"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a
+word. My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'--a new
+thing here; I was the first one in town to have it. There were
+thirteen pages, and there was always a rush to see who should turn
+them. Your father didn't often enter the rush, but I really liked his
+way of turning the best of any. He never turned too soon or too late;
+he never bothered me by shifting his feet every second or two, nor by
+talking to me at the hard places. In fact, he was the only one who
+could do it right."
+
+"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa--all over."
+
+Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently
+she shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that
+this place is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."
+
+In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
+yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
+latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre
+and solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the
+walls, around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases,
+constructed with the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's
+art. In the centre of the room a wide and substantial table was set
+with all the paraphernalia of correspondence, and the leathery abysses
+of three or four vast easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish
+self-abandonment.
+
+"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows
+of formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after
+that poor sole book-case of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing
+like a wardrobe, and with a couple of drawers at the bottom,
+receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes.
+"How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole
+being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and
+Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets', and--"
+
+"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in genially;
+"and enough Encyclopædia Britannica to reach around the corner and
+back again. Sets--sets--sets."
+
+"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all
+abashed by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and
+write papers at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
+towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But
+really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it
+was put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the
+keys are to get at them with. _I_ can't do anything with them; why,
+some of them weigh five or six pounds!"
+
+Jane shriveled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
+had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
+interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her
+head to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the
+cord; doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved
+to admire openly nothing more whatever.
+
+Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane
+towards another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with
+a resumption of her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of
+books--especially poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I
+was likely to be alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe
+I could give you even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the
+Romans. Yes; and almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."
+
+Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman; and here
+apparently was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she
+inquired, with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my
+father_--was ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that
+sort of thing?"
+
+"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young
+man, with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above
+the average. And that Shakespeare of his--I recall it perfectly. It
+was a chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed
+stamp, and print a great deal too fine for _my_ eyes. He always had to
+do the reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane
+closely. "Perhaps you have never done your father justice."
+
+Jane felt herself driven to defense--even to apology. "The fact is,"
+she said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about
+the only one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess _I_
+don't know him any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no
+right to defend her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.
+
+"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates slowly. She crossed over to the
+radiator and began working at the valve. "I _told_ Granger I knew he'd
+be sorry if he didn't put in furnace flues too. I really can't ask you
+to take your things off down here; let's go up-stairs--that's the only
+warm place I can think of."
+
+She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the
+rooms before you go up?"
+
+"Yes--I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage
+no ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as
+she felt good manners would allow.
+
+Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
+she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
+the--well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
+decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"
+
+Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering
+apartment; it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of
+the eighteenth century--an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking.
+Grilles, panels, mirror frames, all glimmered in green and gold, and a
+row of lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty
+ceiling.
+
+Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
+general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of
+guide-post, had rather baffled her.
+
+"Hem!" she observed critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
+splendor of the place; "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period;
+done, too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a
+real _jardin d'hiver_, in fact. Very handsome indeed."
+
+Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
+response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"
+
+"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
+periods in architecture and decoration."
+
+"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself--and to three or four
+others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
+still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music lessons. It _is_ a
+little singular, I admit--my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
+pupil. You know, of course, that I _was_ a school-teacher? Yes, I had
+a little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
+basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a
+little bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know
+those old-fashioned frame cottages--one of them. In the early days pa
+was a carpenter--a boss carpenter, to do him full justice; the town
+was growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
+beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted,
+and wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own
+hats till long after I was married."
+
+Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
+tapestried _causeuse_. The light from the lofty windows shattered on
+the prisms of her glittering chandeliers, and diffused itself over the
+paneled Loves and Graces around her.
+
+"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out
+and do something for myself--I've always tried to hold up my own end.
+My little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback--another
+school next door, full of great rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
+and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
+stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught
+book-keeping. Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I
+used to lie awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival
+institution. Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or
+three children who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to
+work on single entry. I don't know whether they learned anything, but
+_I_ did--enough to keep Granger's books for the first year after we
+started out."
+
+Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
+confidences as these.
+
+"We were married at the most fashionable church in town--right there
+in Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like
+it, in her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves,
+but we had some awfully stylish neighbors--all those Terrace Row
+people, just around the corner. 'We'll get there too, sometime,' I
+said to Granger. 'This is going to be a big town, and we have a good
+show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars
+going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the
+front steps and ring the bell _like_ somebody.' So, as I say, we were
+married at the best church in town; we thought it safe enough to
+discount the future."
+
+"Good for you," said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick
+of these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."
+
+"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
+Granger:--'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
+those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out
+some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--'
+The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this
+room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people.
+You ought to have been here at the _bal poudré_ I gave last
+season--lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on
+their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this."
+Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor.
+"The next thing will be something else."
+
+Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
+"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
+distinguished guests."
+
+"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it
+isn't Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example."
+
+The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
+each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
+half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
+fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment,
+broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
+Baroque all over."
+
+"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read
+about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last
+Fortnightly?"
+
+"I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly.
+
+"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
+awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind
+that day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or
+so we thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made
+me blue. You didn't notice it?"
+
+"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."
+
+"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to
+it; it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you
+think them corrupt and degraded?"
+
+"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
+forms are interesting from a historical and sociological point of
+view. And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter."
+Jane slid over these big words with a practiced ease.
+
+"They impressed my notables, any way," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
+entertained a good deal during the Fair--it was expected, of course,
+from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
+without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince--a
+Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
+blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
+English too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
+summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea
+that he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the
+English, isn't it? How can people who are so clever and capable in
+practical things ever be such insolent tom-fools in social things?
+Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture gallery for a
+minute.
+
+"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
+she stood beside Jane in the centre of the room under the coldly
+diffused glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt
+and De Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon
+as I began to hear about the Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw
+there was. Well, I set to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I
+_want_ to learn. I want to move; I want to keep right up with the
+times and the people. I got books and photographs, and I went to all
+the galleries. I read the artists' biographies and took in all the
+loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too. Some of these things are going
+to the Art Institute next week--that Daubigny, for one. It's little,
+but it's good: there couldn't be anything more like him, could there?
+
+"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
+Corot--at least we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
+commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
+minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
+ahead; for after all, people of our position would naturally be
+expected to have a Corot. I don't care to tell you what he paid for
+it."...
+
+"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
+towards the opposite wall. "Carolus Duran; fifty thousand francs; and
+he wouldn't let me pick out my own costume either....
+
+"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too
+dazed to speak or even to smile.
+
+Mrs. Bates hastened forward light-footedly. "Conservatory--_that's_
+Moorish," she indicated casually; "nothing in it but orchids and
+things. Come along." Jane followed--dumbly, humbly.
+
+Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase
+of Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern
+depended above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over
+the balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted
+window on the landing-stage.
+
+"There!" she said, "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
+impassioned splendor, her jeweled fingers shut tightly, and her fists
+thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
+"_We_ did it, we two--just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands
+and hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight--a fair
+field and no favor--and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay
+there too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you
+can. I _do_ head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't
+foot it with the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have
+me. But they'll never get me--never! There's ten more good years in me
+yet; and if we were to slip to the bottom to-morrow we should work
+back to the top again before we finish. When I led the grand march at
+the Charity Ball I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a
+vainglorious show. Well, who would look better in such a role than I,
+or who has earned a better right to play it? There, child! ain't that
+success? ain't that glory? ain't that poetry?--h'm," she broke off
+suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't by to hear that! He's always taking
+up his poor mother."
+
+"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded, do you mean?"
+
+"Humble-minded? one of my boys humble-minded? No indeed; he's
+grammatical, that's all: he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."
+
+Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several
+halls and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and
+spacious room done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier
+wires mingled with pipes, and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a
+massive brass bedstead full-panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases,
+and the mirror of the dressing-case reflected a formal row of
+silver-backed brushes and combs.
+
+"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"
+
+"Why," stammered Jane, "it's all very fine, but--"
+
+"Oh, yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen
+times: 'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like.
+_I_ shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"
+
+"About," said Jane.
+
+"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon
+think of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in;
+it's for the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there
+now."
+
+Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
+it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her
+mussy little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman,"
+she murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano;
+she doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any
+sleep out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the
+next stage of her adventure.
+
+"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side door....
+"This is my office." She traversed the "office," passed into a room
+beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door....
+
+The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
+great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she
+understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what
+footing she had been placed.
+
+She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was
+filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old
+mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to
+correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid
+was lined with faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was
+an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare
+as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose
+plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with
+narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose
+top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung
+a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and
+loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal
+fire.
+
+Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed, and motioned Jane to a
+small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.
+
+"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at
+your service."
+
+"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
+was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."
+
+"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a
+charity. You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond."
+Her eyes were twinkling, but immensely kind.
+
+"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt too
+that not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber.
+"How good you are to me!"
+
+Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
+small plan. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
+Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of club-room in
+some convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and
+others employed in business. There was to be a room where they could
+get lunch, or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor
+where they could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or
+music; it was the expectation to have a piano and a few books and
+magazines.
+
+"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down
+on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
+mother," concluded Jane.
+
+"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
+Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
+hair-brush."
+
+Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?"
+she asked, "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
+see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords,
+but simple catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
+anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use
+a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."...
+
+She dropped her voice.
+
+"Did you ever have a private secretary?"
+
+"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."
+
+"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever
+change--no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters
+and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards.
+Tutors are bad enough--but thank goodness, my boys are past that age.
+And men-servants are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own
+house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my
+train; however, people in our position--well, Granger insists, you
+know."...
+
+"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?"
+She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row
+of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft.
+
+"Asters?"
+
+"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're
+chrysanthemums--you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're
+the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and
+American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass?
+How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of
+gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the
+steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what
+I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up
+strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford
+it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and
+bachelor's-buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls can run
+their clothes-lines somewhere else."
+
+"It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane.
+
+"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in
+the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
+yellow brier roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And
+it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
+child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"
+
+"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.
+
+"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket
+and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of
+yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all
+I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the
+wall-paper."
+
+"The wall-paper?"
+
+"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
+when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
+match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second street. Then I went
+down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West
+Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of
+the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville,
+and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"
+
+"Well, what--finally?"
+
+"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
+chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
+than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"
+
+She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
+cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too
+quaintly ugly for anything?"
+
+"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can
+be! I only wish mine was like it."
+
+
+
+
+SARAH MARGARET FULLER
+
+(MARCHIONESS OSSOLI)
+
+(1810-1850)
+
+[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]
+
+
+"Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art,
+and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote
+Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should
+always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under
+the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so
+live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not
+regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her....
+It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right
+to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any
+other." In the coolest way she said to her friends:--
+
+    "I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the
+    more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or
+    guards, still a queen....In near eight years' experience I
+    have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great
+    talent at explanation.... But in truth I have not much to
+    say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find
+    that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet
+    learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have
+    done in life has been to form my character to a certain
+    consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth
+    with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look
+    at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was
+    worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on
+    talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
+    know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact
+    and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in
+    conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts.
+    They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they
+    tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart
+    hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak
+    points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
+    when we come to write, and without suggestion from another
+    mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in
+    us.... Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better,
+    because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship
+    to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but
+    never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel
+    inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow within me, I
+    am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought
+    into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
+    seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible
+    for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force
+    to be either a genius or a character. One should be either
+    private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood
+    is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At
+    hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle."
+
+All these naïve confessions were made, it must be remembered,
+either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
+fear of misinterpretation.
+
+This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport,
+Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
+Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
+lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
+never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
+which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.
+
+    "He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as
+    early as possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical
+    sketch. "Thus I had tasks given me, as many and as various as
+    the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with
+    the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening
+    after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many
+    interruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he
+    was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his
+    ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till
+    the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
+    bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally
+    stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of
+    the brain that made me a 'youthful prodigy' by day, and by
+    night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
+    somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious
+    development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while
+    later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous
+    affections of all kinds.... I was taught Latin and English
+    grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six
+    years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily....
+    Of the Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the
+    sounds told the same story as the mythology; that the law of
+    life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern
+    composure.... With these books I passed my days. The great
+    amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
+    reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling
+    which under other circumstances might have ripened thought,
+    was turned to learn the thoughts of others."
+
+By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
+herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
+Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the
+great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
+1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.
+
+    "I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first
+    half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six
+    years old. She had a face and a frame that would indicate
+    fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the
+    middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair
+    hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
+    dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her
+    appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme
+    plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her
+    eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice,--all repelled; and I
+    said to myself, 'We shall never get far.' It is to be said
+    that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most
+    persons, including those who became afterwards her best
+    friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in
+    the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her
+    manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and
+    slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her
+    fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
+    to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
+    many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."
+
+In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston,
+continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
+but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
+on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
+women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
+reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
+this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
+a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she
+published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
+and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fräulein Günerode and Bettine
+von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
+England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
+and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling
+of the spirit in each soul,--an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
+pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
+the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
+to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
+Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
+two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.
+
+Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
+of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment
+which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
+found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
+classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder,
+nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
+'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
+being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia."
+
+Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844)led Horace Greeley to
+offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Tribune.
+It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
+interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment
+authoritative. The best of her contributions to that journal were
+published, with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under
+the title of 'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).
+
+In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed and
+written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps, the
+most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy in
+1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republican
+ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her
+husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while he
+was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their baby
+in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the siege
+of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hospital of the
+Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when Lowell was
+satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,'" says Mr. Higginson, "she
+was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century
+before." Her Southern nature and her longing for action and love had
+found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and son from
+Leghorn for America. But the vessel was wrecked off Fire Island within
+a day's sail of home and friends, and, save the body of her child and
+a trunk of water-soaked papers, the sea swallowed up all remnants of
+the happiness of her later life.
+
+The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of letters
+about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to have
+possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
+intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
+so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
+self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
+as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in
+which she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
+egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life and
+movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and husband,
+and their child. And then she died.
+
+The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has found
+expression in three notable biographies: 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
+Ossoli,' by her brother; 'Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson ('American Men of Letters Series'); and 'Margaret Fuller
+(Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe ('Eminent Women Series').
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+TO ELIZABETH HOAR
+
+From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1847
+
+
+You wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris, "Madame
+Sand." I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I
+had supposed it might be exaggerated....
+
+It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters,
+and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant
+whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by
+the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only
+lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my
+natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who
+am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my
+thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.
+
+The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a
+peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her goddaughter, whom
+she had brought from her province. She announced me as "Madame
+Salère," and returned into the ante-room to tell me, "Madame says she
+does not know you." I began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the
+crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if
+she has received a letter from me." As I spoke Madame Sand opened the
+door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall
+forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her
+figure; she is large but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of
+dark-violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful
+hair dressed with the greatest taste; her whole appearance and
+attitude, in its simple and ladylike dignity, presented an almost
+ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her
+face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper
+part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and
+masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but
+not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the
+whole head Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on
+one side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what fixed
+my attention was the expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power
+that pervaded the whole,--the truly human heart and nature that shone
+in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est vous," and held out her
+hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment;
+then I said, "Il me fait de bien de vous voir," and I am sure I said
+it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman,
+so large and so developed in character, and everything that _is_ good
+in it so _really_ good. I loved, shall always love her.
+
+She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez écrit une lettre
+charmante." This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went
+on as if we had always known one another.... Her way of talking is
+just like her writing,--lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep
+feeling, and the same happiness in striking the nail on the head every
+now and then with a blow.... I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich,
+so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very
+much; I never liked a woman better.... For the rest, she holds her
+place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems
+full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but
+she has also enjoyed and done much.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE
+
+From 'At Home and Abroad'
+
+
+The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more
+American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although
+we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe
+as to literature and the arts is still that of a colony, and one feels
+the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to
+the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote
+allusions and derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the
+stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing
+up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
+dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through
+the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant _valets
+de place_, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country,
+and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no
+more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,--lifts some mists
+from his horizon.
+
+There are three species: First, the servile American,--a being utterly
+shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money
+and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable
+clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and
+furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among
+those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance
+at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,--a class
+which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive
+classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric
+feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However,
+though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and
+cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our
+country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws
+develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
+
+Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and
+proud of--he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history
+of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it
+requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.
+With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he
+seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his
+grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came,
+and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old
+things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they
+are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
+ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,--and no wonder, profoundly
+ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends
+which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are
+represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed,
+such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the
+Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite
+sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the
+rules of connoisseurs,--not feeling that to see such objects mental
+vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed
+at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This
+is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
+enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a meaning;
+add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of
+might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy
+of the class first specified.
+
+The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking
+special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of
+these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to
+speak.
+
+This is that of the thinking American,--a man who, recognizing the
+immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil,
+yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to
+gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new
+climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom
+and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from
+noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And
+that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in
+that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.
+
+The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and
+little,--such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some
+brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of men beneath the
+feet of a few, and these too often the least worthy; such a small drop
+of honey to each cup of gall, and in many cases so mingled that it is
+never one moment in life purely tasted; above all, so little achieved
+for humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening
+to blot out the traces of each triumph,--that no wonder if the
+strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many
+indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes.
+Yes! those men _are_ worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
+faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
+agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul
+worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next
+sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous
+love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened
+the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some
+such there are; and feeling that, with all the excuses for failure,
+still only the sight of those who triumph gives a meaning to life or
+makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.
+
+
+
+
+A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE
+
+LETTER TO R. W. EMERSON
+
+From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1846
+
+
+I enjoyed the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much in my
+element in European society. It does not indeed come up to my ideal,
+but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me
+in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not
+like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water....
+
+Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the
+Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and appointed an evening
+to be passed at their house. That first time I was delighted with him.
+He was in a very sweet humor,--full of wit and pathos, without being
+overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow
+of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal
+being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I
+wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full
+sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad.
+He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my
+position, so that I did not get tired. That evening he talked of the
+present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of
+the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely
+stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you
+he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a
+story of some poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday
+lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits
+reading the 'Essays' and looking upon the sea....
+
+The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which was a witty,
+French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author of a 'History of
+Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe, a task for which he
+must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him.
+But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt
+Carlyle a little,--of which one was glad, for that night he was in his
+acrid mood; and though much more brilliant than on the former evening,
+grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he
+said....
+
+Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings,
+his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced
+with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the
+usual misfortune of such marked men,--happily not one invariable or
+inevitable,--that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and
+show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and
+instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience
+of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all
+opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in
+their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical
+superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a
+torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow
+freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly
+resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed
+to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows
+not how to stop in the chase.
+
+Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there
+is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old
+Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse
+that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than
+talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
+with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
+some singular epithet which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is
+full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the
+stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the
+higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject
+is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to
+laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the
+spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact,
+if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to
+others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of
+pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view,
+and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak
+more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to
+blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful,
+if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than
+legislate for good.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS FULLER
+
+(1608-1661)
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER]
+
+
+The fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller seems
+blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet and happy
+spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of Shakespeare and his
+brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine. In Fuller the
+world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes urbanity, the
+mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well satisfied with the
+kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity and the eternal
+problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of England clergyman,
+was no less a cavalier at heart than the most jaunty follower of King
+Charles. He had not the intensity of nature which characterizes the
+theologian by the grace of God. His 'Holy and Profane State,' his
+'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,'
+evidence a comfortable and reasonable reliance on the Unseen; but they
+will not be read for their spiritual insight so much as for their
+well-seasoned and delightful English. That quaint and fragrant style
+of his lends charm even to those passages in which his thought is
+commonplace.
+
+It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that posterity
+recognizes a man of marked intellectual power. His scholarship is
+exhibited in such a work as the 'Church History of Britain'; his
+peculiar faculty for happy description in the 'Worthies of England.'
+Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of his
+own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island; his
+love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same year
+as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyman of the same name as his own,
+he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men and things.
+His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.
+
+His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded him
+opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of his
+day, and especially with its "gentry." By birth, education, and
+inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
+the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death he
+has devoted the last volume of his great work, the 'History of the
+Church of Britain.' Under the Protectorate, the genial priest and man
+of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like many others in
+Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puritan authorities,
+but was permitted to preach again in London by the grace of Cromwell.
+He was subsequently appointed chaplain to Charles II., but did not
+live long after the Restoration, dying of a fever in 1661.
+
+An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
+written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was not
+inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back always to
+the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact which
+gives their permanent value to the 'History of the Church of Britain'
+and to the 'History of the Holy War.' These works bear witness to wide
+and patient research, to a thorough sifting of material. The
+antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its scholarly
+dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the 'Worthies
+of England.' Fuller's other writings may be of more intrinsic value,
+but it is through the 'Worthies' that he is remembered and loved. The
+book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an ancient flower garden,
+where blooms of every sort grow in lavish tangle. He considers the
+counties of England, one by one, telling of their physical
+characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of the princely
+children born in them, of the other "Worthies"--scholars, soldiers,
+and saints--who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller gathered his
+material for this variegated record from every quarter of his beloved
+little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he had many
+opportunities of visiting places and studying their people. As an
+incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ramblings of the
+old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering in their talk
+some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit of folk-lore.
+He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely families as
+familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk. Sometimes an
+exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as in this, of
+the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I.:--
+
+    She was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her
+    infancy, when not fully four years old. Being minded by those
+    about her to call upon God even when the pangs of death were
+    upon her, "I am not able," saith she, "to say my long prayer"
+    (meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I will say my short one,
+    'Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of
+    death.'" This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.
+
+Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be numbered
+among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the world of
+letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of their
+readers.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S CHILDREN
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+Katherine, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen Mary, was
+born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being at St. James), and
+survived not above half an hour after her baptizing; so that it is
+charity to mention her, whose memory is likely to be lost, so short
+her continuance in this life,--the rather because her name is not
+entered, as it ought, into the register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields;
+as indeed none of the King's children, save Prince Charles, though
+they were born in that parish. And hereupon a story depends.
+
+I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of kings born
+at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were ever faithfully
+paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record the names of such
+children in the register of St. Martin's. But the money being
+embezzled (we know by some, God knows by whom), no memorial is entered
+of them. Sad that bounty should betray any to baseness, and that which
+was intended to make them the more solemnly remembered should occasion
+that they should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the
+children of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children
+are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to them;"
+for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the cause that we have
+been so often at a loss about the nativities and other properties of
+those of royal extraction.
+
+
+
+
+A LEARNED LADY
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+Margaret More.--Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among men and
+learned statesmen. The reason is because of her unfeigned affection to
+her father, from whom she would not willingly be parted (and from me
+shall not be), either living or dead.
+
+She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's house therein,
+and attained to that skill in all learning and languages that she
+became the miracle of her age. Foreigners took such notice thereof
+that Erasmus hath dedicated some epistles unto her. No woman that
+could speak so well did speak so little; whose secrecy was such, that
+her father intrusted her with his most important affairs.
+
+Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a depraved place
+in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written "Nisi vos sinceritas"
+she amended it "Nervos sinceritas." Yea, she translated Eusebius out
+of Greek; but it was never printed, because J. Christopherson had done
+it so exactly before.
+
+She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire, one of a
+bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's head was set
+up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would be cast into the
+Thames to make room for divers others (then suffering for denying the
+King's supremacy), she bought the head and kept it for a relic (which
+some called affection, others religion, others superstition in her),
+for which she was questioned before the Council, and for some short
+time imprisoned until she had buried it; and how long she herself
+survived afterwards is to me unknown.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+It happened in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle
+fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and
+Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex, _animum et signum simul
+abjecit_,--betwixt traitor and coward,--cast away both his courage and
+banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that
+had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny, the doing of so foul
+a fact, until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a
+knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon
+his large inheritance was confiscated to the King, and he himself,
+partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl,
+under which, between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder
+of his life.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER
+
+From 'The Holy and Profane State'
+
+
+There is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more necessary,
+which is so slightly performed. The reasons whereof I conceive to be
+these: First, young scholars make this calling their refuge; yea,
+perchance before they have taken any degree in the university,
+commence schoolmasters in the country, as if nothing else were
+required to set up this profession but only a rod and a ferula.
+Secondly, others who are able use it only as a passage to better
+preferment, to patch the rents in their present fortune, till they can
+provide a new one and betake themselves to some more gainful calling.
+Thirdly, they are disheartened from doing their best with the
+miserable reward which in some places they receive, being masters to
+their children and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown
+rich, they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the
+proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves
+himself....
+
+He studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were books, and
+ranks their dispositions into several forms. And though it may seem
+difficult for him in a great school to descend to all particulars, yet
+experienced schoolmasters may quickly make a grammar of boys' natures,
+and reduce them all--saving some few exceptions--to these general
+rules:--
+
+1. Those that are ingenious and industrious. The conjunction of two
+such planets in a youth presages much good unto him. To such a lad a
+frown may be a whipping, and a whipping a death; yea, where their
+master whips them once, shame whips them all the week after. Such
+natures he useth with all gentleness.
+
+2. Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the hare in
+the fable, that running with snails--so they count the rest of their
+schoolfellows--they shall come soon enough to the post, though
+sleeping a good while before their starting. Oh! a good rod would
+finely take them napping!
+
+3. Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger they be, the
+more lees they have when they are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till
+they be clarified with age, and such afterwards prove the best.
+Bristol diamonds are both bright, and squared, and pointed by nature,
+and yet are soft and worthless; whereas Orient ones in India are rough
+and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit
+themselves afterwards the jewels of the country, and therefore their
+dullness at first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The
+schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy
+for a fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world can
+make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one minute before
+the hour Nature hath appointed.
+
+4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correction may
+reform the latter, not amend the former. All the whetting in the world
+can never set a razor's edge on that which hath no steel in it. Such
+boys he consigneth over to other professions. Shipwrights and
+boat-makers will choose those crooked pieces of timber which other
+carpenters refuse. Those may make excellent merchants and mechanics
+who will not serve for scholars.
+
+He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not leading them
+rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his precepts for children
+to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness of his own soul, that his
+scholars may go along with him.
+
+
+
+
+ON BOOKS
+
+From 'The Holy and Profane State'
+
+
+It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by getting
+a great library. As soon shall I believe every one is valiant that
+hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good housekeeping by the
+smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as knowing that many of
+them--built merely for uniformity--are without chimneys, and more
+without fires.
+
+Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first,
+voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over;
+secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions;
+thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on
+them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of
+the index sees as much as if he were in the house. But the laziness of
+those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass over authors of
+consequence, and only trade in their tables and contents. These, like
+city cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make
+silly people believe they have long lived in those places where they
+never were, and flourish with skill in those authors they never
+seriously studied.
+
+
+
+
+LONDON
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+It is the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first for
+good government. There is no civilized part of the world but it has
+heard thereof, though many with this mistake: that they conceive
+London to be the country and England but the city therein.
+
+Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, because of
+late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in buildings, Covent
+Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their fear) it will be
+found to burnish round about with new structures daily added
+thereunto.
+
+It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the
+well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant
+rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but
+employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to commerce, by
+the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was that when King
+James, offended with the city, threatened to remove his court to
+another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough) returned that "he might
+remove his court at his pleasure, but could not remove the river
+Thames."
+
+Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of Rhodes;
+averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and customs of the
+Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no doubt knew of it)
+honoreth not this his etymology with the least mention thereof. As
+improbable in my apprehension is the deduction from Lud's-Town,--town
+being a Saxon, not British termination; and that it was so termed from
+Lan Dian, a temple of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is
+most likely in my opinion.
+
+
+
+
+MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS
+
+
+It is dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the pit of
+hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with the Devil's
+rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword; and from making
+of sport they come to doing of mischief.
+
+A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from them who
+never invited it.
+
+Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their power
+to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own crutches.
+
+Learning has gained most by those books by which the printers have
+lost.
+
+Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all
+virtues.
+
+To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less
+are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
+
+The lion is not so fierce as painted.
+
+... Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room for wit;
+sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much room.
+
+Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built many
+stories high.
+
+The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of
+their founders.
+
+... One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue must be
+confuted by his conscience.
+
+But our captain counts the image of God--nevertheless his image--cut
+in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest Moors he sees the
+representation of the King of Heaven.
+
+
+
+
+ÉMILE GABORIAU
+
+(1835-1873)
+
+
+To speak of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He cannot be
+called the father of it; but the French novelist made his field so
+peculiarly his own, developed its type of human nature so
+painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation associated with it,
+that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to have outrivaled
+him.
+
+Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inférieure, in 1835,
+Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into three
+or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul together;
+and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the private
+secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Féval. His first successful
+story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It was 'The
+Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper circumstances
+find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute
+Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the
+fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to
+another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous
+success.
+
+From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In
+rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No.
+113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M. Lecoq'
+(1869),--in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of
+almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or
+five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every
+modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau
+a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable
+literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
+in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.
+
+Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
+plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in a
+large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and
+purposes the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
+that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The
+unfolding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family
+secret, of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
+The secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it
+the reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's
+novels have often been spoken of as "told backward." Most of the
+novels too gain their movement from one source--the wonderful
+shrewdness and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective
+service. M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and
+wonderfully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of
+episodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
+Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
+stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the
+family likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked
+abuses with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of
+Paris' and other books where he has set forth the merciless system of
+private blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.
+
+As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first order,
+even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write; and there
+is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is much to his
+credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced his work, and
+the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his profession.
+He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent. He has been
+criticized for making his denouements too simple, if one regards them
+as a whole process; but his details are full of variety, and the
+reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on the
+author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of the
+first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels is one
+of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113.'
+
+
+
+
+THE IMPOSTOR AND THE BANKER'S WIFE: THE ROBBERY
+
+From 'File No. 113'
+
+
+Raoul Spencer, supposed to be Raoul de Clameran, began to triumph over
+his instincts of revolt. He ran to the door and rang the bell. It
+opened.
+
+"Is my aunt at home?" he asked the footman.
+
+"Madame is alone in the boudoir next her room," replied the servant.
+
+Raoul ascended.
+
+Clameran had said to Raoul, "Above all, be careful about your
+entrance; your appearance must express everything, and thus you will
+avoid impossible explanations."
+
+The suggestion was useless.
+
+When Raoul entered the little reception-room, his pale face and wild
+eyes frightened Madame Fauvel, who cried:--
+
+"Raoul! What has happened to you?"
+
+The sound of her gentle voice produced upon the young vagrant the
+effect of an electric shock. He trembled from head to foot: yet his
+mind was clear; Louis had not been mistaken in him. Raoul continued
+his role as if on the stage, and as assurance came to him his knavery
+crushed his better nature.
+
+"Mother, the misfortune which has come to me," he replied, "is the
+last one."
+
+Madame Fauvel had never seen him like this. Trembling with emotion,
+she rose and stood before him, with her tender face near his. She
+fixed in a steady gaze the power of her will, as if she meant to read
+the depths of his soul.
+
+"What is it?" she insisted. "Raoul, my son, tell me."
+
+He pushed her gently away.
+
+"What has happened," he replied in a choked voice which pierced the
+heart of Madame Fauvel, "proves that I am unworthy of you, unworthy of
+my noble and generous father."
+
+She moved her head in protestation.
+
+"Ah!" he continued, "I know and judge myself. No one could reproach my
+own infamous conduct so cruelly as my own conscience. I was not born
+wicked, but I am a miserable fool. I have hours when, as if in a
+vertigo, I do not know what I am doing. Ah! I should not have been
+like this, mother, if you had been with me in my childhood. But
+brought up among strangers, and left to myself without any guides but
+my own instincts, I am at the mercy of my own passions. Possessing
+nothing, not even my stolen name, I am vain and devoured by ambition.
+Poor and without resources but your help, I have the tastes and vices
+of a millionaire's son. Alas! when I recovered you, the harm was done.
+Your affection, your maternal tenderness which have given me my only
+days of happiness, could not save me. I who have suffered so much, who
+have endured so many privations, who have known hunger, have been
+spoiled by this new luxury with which you have surrounded me. I threw
+myself into pleasure as a drunkard rushes for the strong drink of
+which he has been deprived."
+
+Raoul expressed himself with such intense conviction and assurance
+that Madame Fauvel did not interrupt.
+
+Mute and terrified, she dared not question him, fearful of learning
+some horrible news.
+
+He however continued:--"Yes, I have been a fool. Happiness has passed
+by me, and I did not know enough to stretch out my hand to take it. I
+have rejected an exquisite reality for the pursuit of a phantom. I,
+who should have spent my life by your side and sought constantly for
+new proofs of my love and gratitude, I, a dark shadow, give you a
+cruel stab, cause you sorrow, and render you the most unfortunate of
+beings. Ah! what a brute I have been! For the sake of a creature whom
+I should despise, I have thrown to the wind a fortune whose every
+piece of gold has cost you a tear! With you lies happiness. I know it
+too late."
+
+He stopped, overcome by the thought of his evil conduct, ready to
+burst into tears.
+
+"It is never too late to repent, my son," murmured Madame Fauvel, "and
+redeem your wrong."
+
+"Ah, if I could!" cried Raoul; "but no, it is too late. Who knows how
+long my good resolutions will last? It is not only to-day that I have
+condemned myself without pity. Seized by remorse at each new failure,
+I have sworn to regain my self-respect. Alas! to what has my
+periodical repentance amounted? At the first new temptation I forget
+my remorse and my oaths. You consider me a man: I am only an unstable
+child. I am weak and cowardly, and you are not strong enough to
+dominate my weakness and control my vacillating character. I have the
+best intentions in the world, yet my actions are those of a scoundrel.
+The gap between my position and my nature is too wide for me to
+reconcile them. Who knows where my deplorable character may lead me?"
+
+He gave a gesture expressing recklessness, and added, "I myself will
+bring justice upon myself."
+
+Madame Fauvel was too deeply agitated to follow Raoul's sudden moods.
+
+"Speak!" she cried; "explain yourself. Am I not your mother? You must
+tell me the truth; I must hear all."
+
+He appeared to hesitate, as if he feared to give so terrible a shock
+to his mother. Finally, in a hollow voice he said, "I am ruined!"
+
+"Ruined!"
+
+"Yes, and I have nothing more to wait for nor to hope for. I am
+dishonored, and through my own fault, my own grievous fault!"
+
+"Raoul!"
+
+"It is true. But fear not, mother; I will not drag the name that you
+bestowed upon me in the dirt. I have the vulgar courage not to survive
+my dishonor. Go, waste no sympathy on me. I am one of those creatures
+of destiny who have no refuge save death. I am the victim of fate.
+Have you not been forced to deny my birth? Did not the memory of me
+haunt you and deprive your nights of sleep? And now, having found you,
+in exchange for your devotion I bring into your life a bitter curse."
+
+"Ungrateful child! Have I ever reproached you?"
+
+"Never. And therefore with your blessing, and with your loved name on
+his lips, your Raoul will--die!"
+
+"Die? You?"
+
+"Yes, mother: honor bids it. I am condemned by inexorable judges--my
+will and my conscience."
+
+An hour earlier Madame Fauvel would have sworn that Raoul had made her
+suffer all that a woman could endure; and now he had brought her a new
+grief so acute that the former ones seemed naught in comparison.
+
+"What have you done?" she stammered.
+
+"Money was intrusted to me. I played, and lost it."
+
+"Was it a large amount?"
+
+"No, but neither you nor I can replace it. Poor mother, have I not
+taken everything from you? Haven't you given me your last jewel?"
+
+"But M. De Clameran is rich; he has put his fortune at my disposal. I
+will order the carriage and go to him."
+
+"M. De Clameran, mother, is absent for eight days; and I must have the
+money to-night, or I am lost. Go! I have thought of everything before
+deciding. But one loves life at twenty!"
+
+He drew a pistol half out of his pocket, saying with a grim smile,
+"This will arrange everything."
+
+Madame Fauvel was too unnerved in reflecting upon the horror of the
+conduct of the supposed Raoul de Clameran to fancy that this last wild
+menace was but a means for obtaining money.
+
+Forgetting the past, ignoring the future, and concentrating her
+thought on the present situation, she saw but one thing--that her son
+was about to kill himself, and that she was powerless to arrest his
+suicide.
+
+"Wait, wait," she said; "André will soon return, and I will tell him
+that I have need of--How much did you lose?"
+
+"Thirty thousand francs."
+
+"You shall have them to-morrow."
+
+"I must have them to-night."
+
+She seemed to be going mad; she wrung her hands in despair.
+
+"To-night!" she said: "why didn't you come sooner? Do you lack
+confidence in me? To-night there is no one to open the safe--without
+that--"
+
+The expectant Raoul caught the word. He gave an exclamation of joy, as
+if a light had broken upon his dark despair.
+
+"The safe!" he cried; "do you know where the key is?"
+
+"Yes, it is here."
+
+"Thank heaven!"
+
+He looked at Madame Fauvel with such a demoniacal glance that she
+dropped her eyes.
+
+"Give it to me, mother," he entreated.
+
+"Miserable boy!"
+
+"It is life that I ask of you."
+
+This prayer decided her. Taking a candle, she stepped quickly into her
+room, opened the writing-desk, and there found M. Fauvel's own key.
+
+But as she was handing it to Raoul, reason returned.
+
+"No," she murmured; "no, it is impossible."
+
+He did not insist, and indeed seemed willing to retire.
+
+"Ah, well!" he said. "Then, my mother, one last kiss."
+
+She stopped him:--"What will you do with the key, Raoul? Have you also
+the secret word?"
+
+"No, but I can try."
+
+"You know there is never money in the safe."
+
+"Let us try. If I open it by a miracle, and if there is money in the
+box, then I shall believe that God has taken pity upon us."
+
+"And if you do not succeed? Then will you swear that you will wait
+until to-morrow?"
+
+"Upon the memory of my father, I swear it."
+
+"Then here is the key! Come." ...
+
+They had now reached Prosper's office, and Raoul had placed the lamp
+on a high shelf, from which point it lighted the entire room. He had
+recovered all of his self-possession, or rather that peculiar
+mechanical precision of action which seems to be independent of the
+will, and which men accustomed to peril always find at their service
+in times of pressing need. Rapidly, and with the dexterity of
+experience, he placed the five buttons of the iron box upon the
+letters forming the name g,y,p,s,y. His expression during this short
+performance was one of intense anxiety. He began to fear that the
+excited energy which he had summoned might fail him, and also that if
+he did open the box he might not find the hoped-for sum. Prosper might
+have changed the letters, and he might have been sent to the bank that
+day.
+
+Madame Fauvel watched Raoul with pathetic distress. She read in his
+wild eyes that despair of the unfortunate, who so passionately desire
+a result that they fancy their unassisted will can overcome all
+obstacles.
+
+Being intimate with Prosper, and having frequently watched him close
+the office, Raoul knew perfectly well--indeed, he had made it a study
+and attempted it himself, for he was a far-seeing youth--how to
+manipulate the key in the lock.
+
+He inserted it gently, turned it, pushed it in deeper, and turned it
+again, then he pushed it in with a violent shock and turned it once
+more. His heart beat so loudly that Madame Fauvel could hear it.
+
+The word had not been changed: the box opened.
+
+Raoul and his mother uttered cries--hers of terror, his of triumph.
+
+"Shut it!" screamed Madame Fauvel, frightened at this inexplicable and
+incomprehensible result; "leave it--come!"
+
+And half mad, she threw herself upon Raoul, clinging to his arm in
+desperation and drawing him to her with such violence that the key was
+dragged from the lock and along the door of the coffer, leaving a long
+and deep mark.
+
+But Raoul had had time to notice upon the upper shelf of the box three
+bundles of bank-notes. These he quickly snatched with his left hand,
+slipped them under his coat and placed them between his waistcoat and
+shirt.
+
+Exhausted by her efforts, and yielding to the violence of her
+emotions, Madame Fauvel dropped Raoul's arm, and to avoid falling,
+supported herself on the back of Prosper's arm-chair.
+
+"I implore you, Raoul," she said, "I beseech you to put those
+bank-notes back in the box. I shall have money to-morrow, I swear it
+to you a hundred times over, and I will give it to you, my son. I beg
+you to take pity on your mother!"
+
+He paid no attention to her. He was examining the long scratch on the
+door. This mark of the theft was very convincing and disturbing.
+
+"At least," implored Madame Fauvel, "don't take all. Keep what you
+need to save yourself, and leave the rest."
+
+"What for? Would a balance make discovery less easy?"
+
+"Yes, because I--you see I can manage it. Let me arrange it! I can
+find an explanation! I will tell André that I needed money--"
+
+With precaution, Raoul closed the safe.
+
+"Come," he said to his mother, "let us leave, so that we may not be
+suspected. One of the servants might go to the drawing-room and be
+surprised not to find us there."
+
+His cruel indifference and cold calculation at such a moment filled
+Madame Fauvel with indignation. Yet she still hoped that she might
+influence her son. She still believed in the power of her entreaties
+and tears.
+
+"Ah me!" she said, "it might be as well! If they discover us, I care
+little or nothing. We are lost! André will drive me from the house, a
+miserable creature. But at least, I will not sacrifice the innocent.
+To-morrow Prosper will be accused. Clameran has taken from him the
+woman he loves, and you, now you will rob him of his honor. I will
+not."
+
+She spoke so loud and with such a penetrating voice that Raoul was
+alarmed. He knew that the office clerk slept in an adjoining room.
+Although it was not late, he might have gone to bed; and if so, he
+could hear every word.
+
+"Let us go," he said, seizing Madame Fauvel by the arm.
+
+But she resisted, and clung to a table, the better to resist.
+
+"I have been a coward to sacrifice Madeleine," she said quietly. "I
+will not sacrifice Prosper!"
+
+Raoul knew of a victorious argument which would break Madame Fauvel's
+resolution.
+
+"Ah!" he cried with a cynical laugh; "you do not know, then, that
+Prosper and I are in league, and that he shares my fate."
+
+"That is impossible."
+
+"What do you think? Do you imagine that it was chance which gave me
+the secret word and opened the box?"
+
+"Prosper is honest."
+
+"Of course, and so am I. But--we need the money."
+
+"You speak falsely!"
+
+"No, dear mother. Madeleine left Prosper, and--well, bless me! he has
+tried to console himself, the poor fellow; and such consolations are
+expensive."
+
+He had lifted the lamp; and gently but with much force pushed Madame
+Fauvel towards the staircase.
+
+She seemed to be more dumbfounded than when she saw the open safe.
+
+"What," she said, "Prosper a thief?"
+
+She asked herself if she were not the victim of a terrible nightmare;
+if an awakening would not rid her of this unspeakable torture. She
+could not control her thoughts, and mechanically, supported by Raoul,
+she placed her foot on the narrow stairs.
+
+"The key must be returned to the writing-desk," said Raoul, when they
+reached the bedroom.
+
+She appeared not to hear, and it was Raoul who replaced the key in the
+box from which he had seen her take it.
+
+He then led or rather carried Madame Fauvel to the little drawing-room
+where he had found her upon his arrival, and placed her in an
+easy-chair. The utter prostration of this unhappy woman, her fixed
+eyes, and her loss of expression, revealed only too well the agony of
+her mind. Raoul, frightened, asked if she had gone mad?
+
+"Come, mother dear," he said, as he tried to warm her icy hands, "come
+to yourself. You have saved my life, and we have both rendered a great
+service to Prosper. Fear nothing: all will come straight. Prosper will
+be accused, perhaps arrested. He expects that; but he will deny it,
+and as his guilt cannot be proved, he will be released."
+
+But his lies and his efforts were lost upon Madame Fauvel, who was too
+distracted to hear them.
+
+"Raoul," she murmured, "my son, you have killed me!"
+
+Her voice was so impressive in its sorrow, her tone was so tender in
+its despair, that Raoul was affected, and even decided to restore the
+stolen money. But the thought of Clameran returned.
+
+Then, noticing that Madame Fauvel remained in her chair, bewildered
+and as still as death, trembling at the thought that M. Fauvel or
+Madeleine might enter at any moment, he pressed a kiss upon his
+mother's forehead--and fled.
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+M. LECOQ'S SYSTEM
+
+From 'File No. 113'
+
+
+In the centre of a large and curiously furnished room, half library
+and half actor's study, was seated at a desk the same person wearing
+gold spectacles who had said at the police station to the accused
+cashier Prosper Bertomy, "Take courage!" This was M. Lecoq in his
+official character.
+
+Upon the entrance of Fanferlot, who advanced respectfully, curving his
+backbone as he bowed, M. Lecoq slightly lifted his head and laid down
+his pen, saying, "Ah! you have come at last, my boy! Well, you don't
+seem to be progressing with the Bertomy case."
+
+"Why, really," stammered Fanferlot, "you know--"
+
+"I know that you have muddled everything, until you are so blinded
+that you are ready to give over."
+
+"But master, it was not I--"
+
+M. Lecoq had arisen and was pacing the floor. Suddenly he stopped
+before Fanferlot, nicknamed "the Squirrel."
+
+"What do you think, Master Squirrel," he asked in a hard and ironical
+tone, "of a man who abuses the confidence of those who employ him, who
+reveals enough of what he has discovered to make the evidence
+misleading, and who betrays for the benefit of his foolish vanity the
+cause of justice--and an unhappy prisoner?"
+
+The frightened Fanferlot recoiled a step.
+
+"I should say," he began, "I should say--"
+
+"You think this man should be punished and dismissed; and you are
+right. The less a profession is honored, the more honorable should be
+those who follow it. You however are treacherous. Ah! Master Squirrel,
+we are ambitious, and we try to play the police in our own way! We let
+Justice wander where she will, while we search for other things. It
+takes a more cunning bloodhound than you, my boy, to hunt without a
+hunter and at his own risk."
+
+"But master, I swear--"
+
+"Be silent. Do you wish me to prove that you have told everything to
+the examining magistrate, as was your duty? Go to! While others were
+charging the cashier, _you_ informed against the banker! _You_ watched
+him; you became intimate with his _valet de chambre_!"
+
+Was M. Lecoq really in anger? Fanferlot, who knew him well, doubted it
+a little; but with this devil of a man one never quite knew how to
+take him.
+
+"If you were only clever," he continued, "but no! You wish to be a
+master, and you are not even a good workman."
+
+"You are right, master," said Fanferlot piteously, who could deny no
+longer. "But how could I work upon a business like this, when there
+was no trace, no mark, no sign, no conviction,--nothing, nothing?"
+
+M. Lecoq raised his shoulders.
+
+"Poor boy!" he said. "Know, then, that the day when you were summoned
+with the commissary to verify the robbery, you had--I will not say
+certainly but very probably--between your two large and stupid hands
+the means of knowing which key, the banker's or the cashier's, had
+been used in committing the theft."
+
+"What an idea!"
+
+"You want proof? Very well. Do you remember that mark which you
+observed on the side of the copper? It struck you, for you did not
+repress an exclamation when you saw it. You examined it carefully with
+a glass; and you were convinced that it was quite fresh, and therefore
+made recently. You said, and with reason, that this mark dated from
+the moment of the theft. But with what had it been made? With a key,
+evidently. That being the case, you should have demanded the keys of
+the banker and the cashier, and examined them attentively. One of
+these would have shown some atoms of the green paint with which a
+strong-box is usually coated."
+
+Fanferlot listened with open mouth to this explanation. At the last
+words, he slapped his forehead violently, and cried--of
+himself--"Imbecile!"
+
+"You are right," replied M. Lecoq--"imbecile. What! With such a guide
+before your eyes, you neglected it and drew no conclusion! This is the
+one clue to the affair. If I find the guilty one, it will be by means
+of this mark, and I will find him; I am determined to do it."
+
+When away from Lecoq, Fanferlot, nicknamed the Squirrel, often
+slandered and defied him; but in his presence he yielded to the
+magnetic influence which this extraordinary man exercised upon all who
+came near him.
+
+Such exact information and such minute details perplexed his mind.
+Where and how could M. Lecoq have gathered them?
+
+"You have been studying the case, master?"
+
+"Probably. But as I am not infallible, I may have let some valuable
+point escape me. Sit down, and tell me all that you know."
+
+One could not prevaricate with M. Lecoq. Therefore Fanferlot told the
+exact truth,--which was not his custom. However, before the end of his
+recital, his vanity prevented him from telling how he had been tricked
+by Mademoiselle Nina Gypsy and the stout gentleman.
+
+Unfortunately, M. Lecoq was never informed by halves.
+
+"It seems to me, Master Squirrel," he said, "that you have forgotten
+something. How far did you follow the empty cab?"
+
+Fanferlot, despite his assurance, blushed to his ears, and dropped his
+eyes like a schoolboy caught in a guilty act.
+
+"O patron," he stammered, "you know that too? How could you have--"
+
+Suddenly a thought flashed through his brain: he stopped, and bounding
+from his chair, cried, "Oh, I am sure--that stout gentleman with the
+red whiskers was you!"
+
+Fanferlot's surprise gave such a ridiculous expression to his face
+that M. Lecoq could not help smiling.
+
+"Then it _was_ you," continued the amazed detective, "it was you, that
+fat man at whom I stared. I did not recognize you! Ah, patron, what an
+actor you would make if you pleased! And _I_ was disguised also!"
+
+"But very poorly, my poor boy, I tell you for your own good. Do you
+think a heavy beard and a blouse sufficient to evade detection? But
+the eye, stupid fellow, the eye! It is the eye that must be changed.
+There is the secret."
+
+This theory of disguise explains why the official, lynx-like Lecoq
+never appeared at the police office without his gold spectacles.
+
+"But then, patron," continued Fanferlot, working out the idea, "you
+have made the little girl confess, although Madame Alexandre failed?
+You know then why she left 'The Grand-Archange'; why she did not wait
+for M. Louis de Clameran; and why she bought calico dresses for
+herself?"
+
+"She never acts without my instructions."
+
+"In this case," said the detective, greatly discouraged, "there is
+nothing more for me to do except acknowledge myself a fool."
+
+"No, Squirrel," replied M. Lecoq with kindness; "no, you are not a
+fool; you are simply wrong in undertaking a task beyond your powers.
+Have you made one progressive step since you began this case? No. This
+only proves that you are incomparable as a lieutenant, but that you
+have not the _sang-froid_ of a general. I will give you an aphorism;
+keep it, and make it a rule of conduct--'Some men may shine in the
+second who are eclipsed in the first rank.'"...
+
+Egotist, like all great artists, M. Lecoq had never had, nor did he
+wish to have, a pupil. He worked alone. He despised assistants; for he
+did not wish to share the pleasures of triumph nor the bitterness of
+defeat.
+
+Therefore Fanferlot, who knew his patron so well, was astonished to
+hear him, who had heretofore given nothing but orders, helping him
+with counsel.
+
+He was so mystified that he could not help showing his surprise.
+
+"It seems to me, patron," he risked saying, "that you take a strong
+personal interest in this case, that you study it so closely."
+
+M. Lecoq started nervously,--which motion escaped his detective,--and
+then, frowning, he said in a hard voice:--
+
+"It is your nature to be curious, Master Squirrel; but take care that
+you do not go too far. Do you understand?"
+
+Fanferlot began to offer excuses.
+
+"Enough! Enough!" interrupted M. Lecoq. "If I lend you a helping hand,
+it is because I wish to. I wish to be the head while you are the arm.
+Alone, with your preconceived ideas, you never would find the guilty
+one. If we two do not find him together, then I am not M. Lecoq."
+
+"We shall succeed, if you make it your business."
+
+"Yes, I am entangled in it, and during four days I have learned many
+things. However, keep this quiet. I have reasons for not being known
+in this case. Whatever happens, I forbid you to mention my name. If we
+succeed, the success must be given to you. And above all, do not seek
+explanations. Be satisfied with what I tell you."
+
+These charges seemed to fill Fanferlot with confidence.
+
+"I will be discreet, patron," he promised.
+
+"I depend upon you, my boy. To begin: Carry this photograph of the
+strong box to the examining magistrate. M. Patrigent, I know, is as
+perplexed as possible upon the subject of the prisoner. You must
+explain, as if it were your own discovery, what I have just shown you.
+When you repeat all this to him with these indications, I am sure he
+will release the cashier. Prosper Bertomy, the accused cashier, must
+be free before I begin my work."
+
+"I understand, patron. But shall I let M. Patrigent see that I suspect
+another than the banker or the cashier?"
+
+"Certainly. Justice demands that you follow up the case. M. Patrigent
+will charge you to watch Prosper; reply that you will not lose sight
+of him. I assure you that he will be in good hands."
+
+"And if he asks news of--Mademoiselle Gypsy?"
+
+M. Lecoq hesitated for a moment.
+
+"You will say to him," he said finally, "that you have decided, in the
+interest of Prosper, to place her in a house where she can watch some
+one whom you suspect."
+
+The joyous Fanferlot rolled the photograph, took his hat, and prepared
+to leave. M. Lecoq detained him by a gesture:--"I have not finished,"
+he said. "Do you know how to drive a carriage and take care of a
+horse?"
+
+"Why, patron, you ask me that--an old rider of the Bouthor Circus?"
+
+"Very well. As soon as the judge has dismissed you, return home, and
+prepare a wig and livery of a _valet de chambre_ of the first class;
+and having dressed, go with this letter to the Agency on the Rue
+Delorme."
+
+"But, patron--"
+
+"There are no 'buts,' my boy; for this agent will send you to M. Louis
+de Clameran, who needs a new _valet de chambre_, his own having left
+yesterday evening."
+
+"Excuse me if I dare say that you are deceived. Clameran will not
+agree to the conditions: he is no friend of the cashier."
+
+"How you always interrupt me," said M. Lecoq, in his most imperative
+tones. "Do only what I tell you, and let everything else alone. M.
+Clameran is not a friend to Prosper. I know that. But he is the friend
+and protector of Raoul de Lagors. Why? Who can explain the intimacy of
+these two men of such different ages? We must know this. We must also
+know who _is_ M. Louis de Clameran--this forge-master who lives in
+Paris and never goes to his own factories! A jolly dog who has taken
+it into his head to live at the Hôtel du Louvre and who mingles in
+the whirling crowd, is difficult to watch. Through you, I shall have
+my eye on him. He has a carriage; you will drive it; and in the
+easiest way you will know his acquaintances, and be able to give me an
+account of his slightest proceedings."
+
+"You shall be obeyed, patron."
+
+"Still another word. M. De Clameran is very irritable and suspicious.
+You will be introduced to him as Joseph Dubois. He will ask for your
+recommendations. Here are three, showing that you have served the
+Marquis de Sairmeuse, the Count de Commarin, and your last place--the
+house of the Baron de Wortschen, who has just gone to Germany. Keep
+your eyes open, be correct, and watch his movements. Serve well, but
+without excess of manner. But don't be too cringing, for that would
+arouse suspicion."
+
+"Make yourself easy, patron: now, where shall I report?"
+
+"I will come to see you every day. Until you have an order, don't step
+inside of this house: you might be followed. If anything unforeseen
+occurs, send a dispatch to your wife, and she will advise me. Now go;
+and be prudent."
+
+The door shut behind Fanferlot, and M. Lecoq passed quickly into his
+bedroom.
+
+In the twinkling of an eye he stripped off all traces of the official
+detective chief,--the starched cravat, the gold spectacles, and the
+wig, which when removed released the thick black hair.
+
+The official Lecoq disappeared; the true Lecoq remained, a person that
+no one knew,--a handsome young man with brilliant eyes and a resolute
+manner.
+
+Only a moment was he visible. Seated before a dressing-table, on which
+were spread a greater array of paints, essences, rouge, cosmetics, and
+false hair than is required for a modern belle, he began to substitute
+a new face for the one accorded him by nature.
+
+He worked slowly, handling his little brushes with extreme care, and
+in about an hour had achieved one of his periodical masterpieces. When
+he had finished, he was no longer Lecoq: he was the stout gentleman
+with the red whiskers, not recognized by Fanferlot.
+
+"There," he exclaimed, giving a last glance in the mirror, "I have
+forgotten nothing; I have left nothing to chance. All my threads are
+tied, and I can progress. I hope the Squirrel will not lose time."
+
+But Fanferlot was too joyous to squander a moment. He did not run,--he
+flew along the way toward the Palais de Justice and M. Patrigent the
+judge.
+
+At last he had the opportunity of demonstrating his own superior
+perspicacity.
+
+It never occurred to him that he was striving to triumph through the
+ideas of another man. The greater part of the world is content to
+strut, like the jackdaw, in peacock's feathers.
+
+The result did not blight his hopes. If M. Patrigent was not
+altogether convinced, he at least admired the ingenuity of the
+proceeding.
+
+"This is what I will do," he said in dismissing Fanferlot: "I will
+present a favorable report to the council chamber, and to-morrow,
+most likely, the cashier will be released."
+
+Immediately he began to write one of those terrible decisions of "Not
+Proven," which restores liberty to the accused man, but not honor;
+which says that he is not guilty, but which does not declare him
+innocent:--
+
+"Whereas, against the prisoner Prosper Bertomy sufficient charges do
+not exist, in accordance with Article 128 of the Criminal Code, we
+declare there are no grounds at present for prosecution against the
+aforesaid prisoner: we therefore order that he be released from the
+prison where he is now detained, and set at liberty by the jailer,"
+etc.
+
+When this was finished, M. Patrigent remarked to his registrar
+Sigault:--"Here is one of those mysterious crimes which baffle
+justice! This is another file to be added to the archives of the
+record office." And with his own hand he wrote upon the outside the
+official number, "_File No. 113_."
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+BÉNITO PEREZ GALDÓS
+
+(1845-)
+
+BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP
+
+
+I
+
+The contemporary school of Spanish fiction dates from about the
+revolution of 1868, which drove out Isabel II. and brought in a more
+liberal form of government. Without this revolution, it would scarcely
+have found opportunity for the free expression of opinion and the bold
+critical tone towards ancient institutions which are among its leading
+characteristics. It is a fresh stirring of the human intellect, a
+distinctly new product, and a valuable contribution to the world's
+literature. It has affiliation with the Russian, the English, and
+other vital modern movements in fiction, and yet it can by no means be
+confused with that of any other country. Its method is realistic; but
+one of its leading figures, De Pereda, a strong delineator of rural
+life, protests, as to him and his works, against the use of the
+word,--"if," he says vigorously, "it means to rank me under the
+triumphal French banner of foul-smelling realism." That is to say,
+they consider the best material for fiction to be the better and
+sweeter part of life and its higher aspirations, and not that coarse
+part of it to which the French would seem to have devoted an undue
+amount of attention. The reader of Anglo-Saxon origin approaches this
+fiction with ease and sympathy; he has not to acquire any new point of
+view in order to understand it, nor to unlearn any wonted standards of
+taste or morals.
+
+An informing Spanish critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, herself a novelist of
+talent, points out that the present Spanish school cannot be said to
+have a "yesterday," but only "a day before yesterday." She means that
+it has skipped a certain interval, and connects itself with remoter,
+and not with recent, tradition. It really comes down from a time
+antedating even the great "Golden Age." It takes its rise in the
+wonderful naturalness of the 'Celestina,' a quaint "tragi-comedy" of
+the year 1499. It bears a close relationship, next, to Don Quixote and
+to the "Novelas Picarescas," the stories of amusing knaves in very low
+life, of which 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and 'Guzman de Alfarache' are the
+best examples, and that French imitation, 'Gil Blas,' better than the
+originals. A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth
+century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the
+nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then
+arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question.
+The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor,
+and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish
+fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary
+novelists in a higher degree than ever before. The Picaresque or Rogue
+stories seem to be--their naturalness admitted--a mere string of
+disconnected adventures, written to the taste of a period that had not
+the habit of keeping its attention fixed upon anything long; and we
+scarcely know any leading character more intimately at the end than at
+the beginning. As against this, we have now complete and lengthy
+novels, in which situations and characters are all worked out upon a
+symmetrical plan, and in which the conclusions generally follow like
+those of fate; that is to say, they are not arbitrary, but inevitably
+result from the conditions and circumstances given.
+
+So far as there is English influence in this literature, it may be
+said to be more in the form of example than as a direct component. It
+has given the Spanish movement courage and persistence, to see the
+same ideals elsewhere affording profit and pleasure to millions of
+men. Otherwise it is a mere coloring, a superficial trace. In
+particular, Pérez Galdós is fond of introducing English characters.
+Some of them have the Dickens-like trait of a beaming, exuberant
+benevolence, and the athletic parson in 'Gloria' who risks his life
+pulling out to the rescue of a wrecked steamer is like Barrie's Little
+Minister. Many of his leading characters are of that mixed blood, at
+Cadiz and elsewhere in the South, where one parent is English and the
+other Spanish, and the offspring have had the advantage of an
+education in England. He admires English types and ways, and yet with
+a reluctance too; which brings it about that they are generally
+introduced subject to considerable satire and mockery. English
+steadiness and thrift,--yes, very well; but he has a lingering
+tenderness still for Spanish levity and improvidence. In 'Halma,' all
+the Marquis de Feramor's children have English names, as "Sandy"
+(_Alexandrito_), "Frank" (_Paquito_), and "Kitty" (_Catalanita_). The
+Marquis has been a student at Cambridge, and he imports into his
+career in Spanish politics the thorough study of the question at
+issue, the conservative temper and abhorrence of extremes, and the
+correct "good form" of some finished English statesman. These ideas of
+English policy and conservatism are talked over again, in the
+_tertulias_ of the amusing family in 'El Amigo Manso,' who have come
+back wealthy from Cuba, the head of the household with the purpose of
+going into Parliament and securing a title. The English and the
+Spanish literary movements may be said to accompany each other
+amicably, much as Wellington's red-coats and the Spanish troops
+marched side by side in the War of Independence, which has left a
+feeling of friendship between the two nations ever since.
+
+At the head of the school of fiction in question are four writers,
+namely, José María de Pereda, Armando Palacio Valdés, Benito Pérez
+Galdós, and Juan Valera. They may be considered, in their various
+ways, as of well-nigh equal merit; each one has some very
+distinguished and distinguishing quality, in virtue of which he cannot
+justly be rated below the others. De Pereda occupies a position apart
+in devoting himself wholly to the lives of humble people, the
+mountaineers and fishermen of the Biscayan Provinces. He never
+willingly departs from these scenes either in his literary or personal
+excursions; he has his home among them, near Santander. Valera stands
+apart in a different way, and would occupy himself by preference with
+the opposite class of society. He is the most learned and scholarly of
+the quartette, and his writing is the most carefully polished in
+style. He is a scholarly critic and essayist as well as a novelist. He
+is a realist like the rest, yet eschews, for instance, the imitation
+of dialect: he is not a realist in quite the same energetic and
+conscientious way; his atmosphere, while no doubt equally true, is
+rather dreamy and poetic. Valdés and Galdós are much more vividly
+modern, and they treat many of the same kind of subjects, the events
+of real life such as we see it all around us. Of the four, Valdés has
+perhaps, in certain passages, the truest tenderness and most delicate
+pathos, and the most genuine humor, of that sunny kind which allows us
+to laugh without bitterness. He can sometimes be bitter too, and such
+a severe social satire as 'Froth' and such books as 'The Grandee' and
+'The Origin of Thought' leave, like many of those of Galdós, an
+impression of gloom; yet even in these we are charmed on the way by
+his light touch and easy grace of treatment. Galdós is he who takes
+the gravest attitude; many great problems of life and destiny occupy
+him seriously; he not only is very earnest, but seems so,--which does
+not however preclude a plentiful use of humor, as will be seen in the
+examples given. Furthermore, he is much the most prolific of the
+distinguished group, and to that extent he may be said to have the
+widest range.
+
+These writers are a highly beneficent influence in Spain at the
+present time, spreading over it as they do a multitude of stimulating
+pictures and liberalizing ideas, cast into charming literary form.
+They cannot fail to have a considerable effect upon conduct. In its
+manner, its aversion to obscurity, and fondness for floods of daylight
+that almost abolish shadow, this fiction is like the Spanish-Roman
+school of art, the painting of Fortuny, the two Madrazos, and others:
+the two seem but manifestations of a common impulse. On another side
+it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of
+information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain,
+and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its
+interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets
+an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and
+mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely
+the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells.
+With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature
+that makes the world akin; and we see, with pleasure and hope, the
+breaking up of the forces of mediævalism, the working of a mental and
+moral turmoil that is preparing the way for a general betterment.
+
+It would not be reasonable to suppose that Spanish literature remained
+wholly unaffected by the vigorous French movement just across the
+border. On the contrary, it clearly shows the trace of the robust
+modern style that has prevailed in France from Balzac to Zola. This
+trace, however, is in the style and not in the matter. It may possibly
+have aided the plainness of speech in the Spanish work, which is
+greater than in English books; and yet this plainness of speech is
+probably not greater than all books should be allowed, in the interest
+of their own usefulness, and in order not to be narrow instead of
+broad pictures of life. The tone towards sexual problems is never
+flippant; immorality is never put in an attractive light; there is
+hardly anywhere a more severe homily on the text that "the wages of
+sin is death" than is found in the wretched career of the
+transgressors in such books as Galdós's 'Lo Prohibido,' 'Tormento,'
+and 'La Desheredada.'
+
+Just as in English books, the young girl, her aspirations and her
+innocent love affairs before marriage, figure largely in these novels.
+It is not necessary for her to wait until she is married in order to
+become a suitable heroine for fiction. Religious revolt or dissent,
+again, is one of the features most often used. There is still a very
+close union of Church and State in Spain, and life has a very
+ecclesiastical coloring. Nearly every family has ties of relationship
+or intimacy with some ecclesiastical person of either sex. This brings
+it about that such figures are as frequent in books as,
+correspondingly, in real life. In Valera's 'Pepita Ximenez' we find an
+earnest young student, a candidate for the priesthood, son of a noble
+house, turned aside from his holy career--through his father's
+connivance--by the fascinations of a most charming woman, their
+neighbor. In Valdés's 'Sister San Sulpicio' it is a young novice, a
+delightfully gay and bright creature, whom love and matrimony withdraw
+from her convent. In the same author's 'Marta y Maria' a fair young
+girl is seen endeavoring to conform in the midst of modern life to
+the ascetic ideals of the mediæval saints, even to the point of
+wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge.
+Galdós's 'Doña Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the
+undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family,
+and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews.
+As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant
+way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such
+is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely
+critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this
+century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of
+the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards
+living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Galdós attacks only
+the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be
+known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from
+within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the
+sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their
+efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a
+curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern
+and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion
+of monarchy in its most absolute form.
+
+The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in
+Antonio de Trueba, and Madame Böhl de Faber, who signed herself
+"Fernan Caballero,"--one of the first of those who took a man's name,
+after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things
+than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott
+and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist
+who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue.
+Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian
+cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a
+torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de
+Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the
+present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The
+Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present
+generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no
+great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in
+it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of
+the movement should read Madame Pardo Bazan's valuable critical study,
+'La Cuestion Palpitante' (The Vital Question). Various books by the
+leading authors named have been well translated into English by Clara
+Bell, Mrs. Mary J. Serrano, Mary Springer, Rollo Ogden, Nathan Haskell
+Dole, and others.
+
+
+II
+
+Benito Pérez Galdós was born May 10th, 1845, in the Canary Islands.
+Las Palmas, his birthplace, capital of the Grand Canary, is a
+well-built little town of about eighteen thousand people, and the
+island is the most fertile of the group. In climate and situation the
+islands belong rather to Africa than Europe. The people are considered
+descendants of the Gothic inhabitants of Spain, who sought refuge
+there from the Saracen invasion. Their existence was all but lost to
+sight for some centuries, and they were only brought under European
+sway about the time of the discovery of America. These Fortunate
+Islands, the somewhat unusual scene where Galdós was born and passed
+his youth, would seem to offer a fresh literary field, yet no word of
+description or reminiscence concerning them appears in any of his
+books. This is perhaps part of the policy of reserve that induces him
+to deny, even by implication, any biographical details concerning
+himself,--a reserve so marked as to have been generally noted as an
+eccentricity. Leopoldo Alas, his biographer, in the 'Celebridades
+Españiolas Contemporanéas,' assures us that it was only with the
+greatest difficulty he drew from him the bare admission that he was
+born in the Canary Islands. He made his studies there in the State
+college, and came to Madrid at the age of eighteen to study law. He
+had no great liking for it, and did not follow it further, unless as
+it became a step for entrance into political life, for he has been a
+deputy in the National Cortes, for Porto Rico. He did not acquire
+skill in forensic eloquence; his biographer, above, states that he
+cannot put four words together in public, nor in private either. A
+reticent man, he is forced to write in order to find expression.
+
+He wrote his first book in 1867 and '68, but it was not published till
+1871. In the mean time the revolution of 1868 took place, which
+enlarged the boundaries of freedom in literature as in many other
+directions; and Galdós at Barcelona had some small part in it. The
+book was 'La Fontana de Oro' (The Fount of Gold). It treats of the
+aspirations of the "ardent youth" of 1820, who rebelled against the
+reactionary policy brought in by Ferdinand VII. after the expulsion of
+the French from the country; and in the student hero Lázaro he perhaps
+displays his own ideas at the period. Violent political clubs were
+formed, on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of the French Revolution,
+and it is from the name of a café that was the meeting-place of the
+most famous of these clubs that the name of the story is derived. His
+next book was 'El Audaz' (The Fearless: 1872). The period is the same.
+The hero is an utterly fearless young radical, who has been driven to
+revolt through wrongs done his family by the Count de Cerezuelo. By a
+peculiar hazard, though far below her in social station, he meets the
+daughter of the count, a very proud and disdainful beauty. It is her
+caprice to fall in love with him, and she remains true to him to the
+end, when he dies in a street tumult, having first gone mad with his
+superheated enthusiasm. These early books are conceived upon
+conventional romantic lines, and hardly gave promise of their
+author's future fame. They contain however passages of strong
+character-drawing, like that of the Porreños, three ancient spinster
+sisters of a fallen patrician house in 'El Audaz,' which are equal to
+his later work.
+
+He next entered upon an extensive enterprise which soon began to give
+him both reputation and profit. This was the writing of a score of
+historical romances, after the model of those of Erckmann-Chatrian,
+called 'Episódios Nacionales' (National Episodes). They are divided
+into two series, the first beginning with 'Trafalgar' (1873), the
+second with 'El Equipaje del Rey José' (King Joseph's Baggage: 1875).
+They deal with the two modern periods comprising the deliverance of
+the country from the usurpation of the French, and the more obscure
+struggles against Ferdinand VII., who sought to reduce the country
+under the same absolutist rule that had prevailed before the ideas of
+the French Revolution liberalized the whole of Europe. The history in
+these romances is intermingled with personal interests and adventures,
+to give it an air of informality; and though each is complete in
+itself, some knowledge of Spanish history is desirable as an aid to
+understanding them. They are considerably interlinked among
+themselves, the same characters appearing more or less in successive
+volumes. The hero of the first series is one Gabriel, who narrates
+them all in the first person. He is a poor boy who becomes servant to
+a family near Cadiz. He accompanies his master on board the huge
+Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship of her age, and is able to
+describe in detail the action of Trafalgar, the description being the
+more interesting for us as coming from the Spanish point of view. In
+'La Corte de Carlos IV.' (The Court of Charles IV.: 1873), we find him
+page to a leading actress, and an eye-witness to the degeneracy of
+that monarch and his favorite Godoy, which resulted in the seizure of
+the country by Napoleon for his brother Joseph. In 'La Batalla de los
+Arapiles' (translated by Rollo Ogden as 'The Battle of Salamanca':
+1875), the last of the series, the same Gabriel is a major, and
+performs an important commission for Wellington. He has risen to this
+level step by step, and on the way has had as many adventures as one
+of Dumas's guardsmen, and has carried them off as gallantly. In the
+second series of 'Episódios,' Salvador Monsalud is the principal
+character. He is a young fellow who is led by dire want--and also by
+sharing the liberalized French view of the decadence and
+worthlessness of the Spanish form of rule--to take service in the
+body-guard of Joseph Bonaparte. A chapter full of strength and pathos,
+in 'King Joseph's Baggage,' shows him disowned by his mother and cast
+off by his village sweetheart on account of such service, both of them
+frantic with a spirit of independence like that which animated the
+Maid of Saragossa. A feature of this book that gives it originality is
+that the action turns not upon the usual principal features of battle,
+but upon the fate of the rich baggage train of booty with which Joseph
+Bonaparte had hoped to escape to France after his brief, disastrous
+reign.
+
+The 'Episódios' have had an extensive influence, and have been
+imitated, under a like title, in the Spanish Americas. The author's
+tone toward the past is generally severe and disdainful. "Had Spain,
+perchance, a 'constitution' when she was the foremost nation in the
+world?" he puts into the mouth of one of his characters, with sardonic
+intent. He has been called unappreciative, and his attitude towards
+Spanish antiquity has been protested against by other leading writers,
+of more conservative feeling, as unwarranted. These romances contain
+some passages showing aversion to the barbarities of war, but in
+general they are less humanitarian than those of Erckmann-Chatrian:
+they are principally devoted to glorifying Spanish fortitude and
+courage. These books are a great advance upon the two earlier novels;
+from the first they showed literary workmanship of a high order: they
+possess ingenuity of plot, sufficient probability, and graphic power
+of description, movement, and conversation. In the latter respects,
+indeed, they surpass some of the author's later works that make more
+serious pretensions.
+
+The wider and more definitely literary reputation of Pérez Galdós
+rests upon more than a score of other works, in addition to the above.
+These are distinctly novels, as contrasted with romances; and they
+treat of contemporary life, in a method that aims to be
+conscientiously observant and impartial. It is often said, without
+much reflection, that we see enough of the things close about us, and
+need our literary recreation in the remote and strange. But it must be
+recalled that we see those things without the eyes of genius, and he
+is a true benefactor who poetizes and dignifies life in making evident
+that all of life is vivid with interest, even that part of it nearest
+to us, which without such illumination we may have thought devoid of
+it. The words in which the ostensible narrator of 'Lo Prohibido'
+(Forbidden Fruit: 1885), explains the purpose of his journal may well
+enough be taken to exhibit the method of Galdós. It was to set down
+"my prosaic adventures, events that in no way differ from those that
+fill and make up the lives of other men. I aspire to no further
+effects than such as the sincere and unaffected presentation of the
+truth may produce; and I have no design upon the reader's emotions by
+means of calculated surprises, frights, or conjurer's tricks, through
+which things look one way for a time and then turn out in a manner
+diametrically opposite."
+
+The titles of a number of his principal books, not hitherto given,
+with dates, are as follows. The dates are those when they were
+written, and they were generally published shortly after: 'Doña
+Perfecta,' 1876; 'Gloria,' 1876; 'Torquemada en la Hoguera'
+(Torquemada at the Stake: 1876); 'Marianela,' 1878; 'La Familia de
+Leon Roch' (Leon Roch's Family: 1878); 'Los Cien Mil Hijos de San
+Luis' (The Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis: 1877) of the
+Episódios; 'Un Faccioso Más' (A Rebel the More: 1879) the completion
+of the Episódios; 'La Desheredada' (The Disowned: 1881); 'El Amigo
+Manso' (Friend Mildman: 1882); 'El Doctor Centeno,' 1883; 'Tormento,'
+1884; 'La de Bringas' (That Mrs. de Bringas: 1884); 'Fortunata y
+Jacinta,' 1886; 'Miau,' 1888; 'La Incógnita' (The Unknown: 1889);
+'Realidad' (Reality: 1890); 'Angel Guerra,' 1891; 'Torquemada en la
+Cruz' (Torquemada on the Cross: 1894); 'Torquemada en el Purgatorio'
+(Torquemada in Purgatory: 1894); 'Torquemada y San Pedro,' 1895;
+'Nazarin,' 1895; 'Halma,' 1896.
+
+Even in his new departure, Galdós did not at once enter upon his final
+manner. 'Doña Perfecta,' 'The Family of Leon Roch,' and 'Gloria' are
+quite distinctly didactic, or "novels with a purpose"; while
+'Marianela' is somewhat cloyingly sentimental, a prose poem after the
+manner of Ouida. In spite of all this, however, 'Doña Perfecta' has
+been pronounced by many his best work. It is the one that has obtained
+greatest celebrity abroad, and it is the one, all things considered,
+likely to be the most satisfactory example of his work to the English
+reader. 'La Desheredada' marks the transition to his final period, and
+he has put it upon record that with this book the real difficulties of
+his vocation began. It is a poignantly affecting story of a poor girl
+who was brought up, by a parent half knave and half insane, to believe
+that she was not his daughter but that of a noble house. After his
+death she undertakes in all good faith to prosecute her claim, and is
+thrown into prison as an impostor. Her heart is broken by the
+disillusionment; she cannot adjust herself to life again without the
+sweetness of that beguiling belief, and so, in the end, not having the
+boldness to die, she throws herself upon the street, a social outcast.
+Both in the person of Isidora and others, the book is a moving
+treatise on false education. Other leading figures are her brother, a
+young "hoodlum" and thief, the burden of whose career she has also to
+bear upon her slender shoulders, and the pampered son of the poor
+Sastres, who have denied themselves bread that he might have an
+education and luxuries. He has a hundred fine schemes for getting a
+living, but never a one of them includes turning his hand to a stroke
+of honest labor.
+
+'El Amigo Manso' is an extended piece of character-drawing, self-told,
+in a gently humorous vein. It gives an account of a college
+instructor, very benevolent, very methodical and prudent, and a trifle
+conceited and patronizing, who is in love with a pretty governess. By
+the time he has settled all his judicious pros and cons, the pretty
+governess, who really cared nothing about him, is engaged to a suitor
+of a more dashing sort. The scenes of 'Tormento,' 'La de Bringas,' and
+'Miau' are laid chiefly among the class of minor office-holders, with
+whose manners the author shows an exhaustive familiarity, and each has
+its peculiar tragic situation in itself. 'Realidad,' written once in
+the form of a novel, and again as a drama, treats of the subject of a
+wife's infidelity, as it might pass in real life, instead of in the
+conventional and hackneyed way. Its title seems to propose to adhere
+even closer to the exact truth than do the others. There come to mind,
+in its suppressed passion and its calm, intellectual, and bitter
+philosophy, suggestions both of Ibsen and Suderman. The banker Orozco,
+a noble and reserved nature, does not slay his wife, does not banish
+her from him, nor even make her reproaches. Augusta, on her side,
+wonders if his mind is not giving way. This bitter commentary on life
+is as near as her smaller mind can approach to a comprehension of his
+magnanimous conduct. The same Augusta, earlier, has said in
+conversation, "Real life is the greatest of all inventors; the only
+one who is ever ready, fresh, and inexhaustible in resource." In these
+books, however serious, the purpose does not obtrude to the detriment
+of art; the reader is left free to draw his own conclusions, as from
+events in actual life; the author ostensibly is neither for nor
+against, and yet he leaves us in no doubt as to his decision, always a
+moral and stimulating one.
+
+The favorite scenes of Galdós's books are in Madrid and the small
+suburban resorts round about it, or at the numerous mineral springs
+which are so important a feature of Spanish summer life. He himself
+lives at Madrid, but goes for the season to a summer place he owns on
+the bold cliffs of the Bay of Biscay, at Santander. There, too he is
+near to Pereda, between whom and himself a remarkable friendship
+exists. A friendship so strong, warm, and long continued has been
+recognized as a notable feature in the careers of both. It is the more
+remarkable because except in literature, which both set above
+everything else, he is violently opposed to most of the views of
+Pereda--a conservative of the conservatives, even to the point of
+preferring the absolutist pretender Don Carlos for king. Even at
+Madrid and at Santander, however, Galdós's scenery is mere stage
+setting; he does not describe nature sympathetically nor aim to
+render local color in an accurate way. As the action must pass
+somewhere, he gives it just as much of a setting as will suffice, and
+seems satisfied with that. The impression of his books, on the whole,
+is a gloomy one. He who sees life clearly must perchance see it
+darkly, and few see it more clearly than Galdós. Yet his admirers will
+not have it that he is pessimistic, because Nature herself is not
+pessimistic. Even the sadness of nightfall ought not to be considered
+gloomy, they say, with much show of reason, since it is only the
+preparation for another day.
+
+                                 [Signature: William Henry Bishop]
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST NIGHT OF A FAMOUS PLAY, IN THE YEAR 1807
+
+From 'The Court of Charles IV.' Copyright 1888, by W.S. Gottsberger.
+Reprinted by permission of George G. Peck, publisher, New York
+
+
+    [Gabriel, a boy of sixteen, has taken service as page with a
+    very charming actress of the Principe Theatre. Between this
+    theatre and La Cruz exists the same sort of hostility as
+    between the rival theatres at Venice when Goldoni inaugurated
+    his reform. La Cruz represents the new and "natural" spirit
+    in the drama, as against the absurd artificial tradition that
+    had prevailed up to that time. A part of Gabriel's duties is
+    to go and hiss the plays at that theatre. The principal
+    occasion of this kind is when he accompanies a band, led by a
+    rival playwright, to the first performance of 'El Sí de las
+    Niñas' (The Maidens' Yes), by the famous Moratin, the leading
+    piece of the new school.]
+
+"What an opening!" he [the rival poet and playwright] exclaimed, as he
+listened to the first dialogue between Don Diego and Simon. "A pretty
+way to begin a comedy! The scene a village inn! What can happen of any
+interest in a village inn? In all my plays, and they are many,--though
+never a one has been represented,--the action opens in a Corinthian
+garden, with monumental fountains to the right and left, and a temple
+of Juno in the background; or in a wide square with three regiments
+drawn up, and in the background the city of Warsaw, with a bridge, and
+so forth. And just listen to the twaddle this old man is made to talk!
+He is about to marry a young girl who has been brought up by the nuns
+of Guadalajara. Well, is that very remarkable? Is not that a matter of
+every-day occurrence?"
+
+Pouring out these remarks, that confounded poet did not allow me to
+hear a word of the piece, and though I answered all his comments with
+humbly acquiescent monosyllables, I only wished that he would hold his
+tongue, deuce take him!...
+
+"What a vulgar subject! what low ideas!" he exclaimed, loud enough for
+every one to hear. "And this is how comedies are written!"...
+
+"But let us listen to it," said I, finding my chief's comments quite
+intolerable. "We can laugh at Moratin afterwards."
+
+"But I cannot bear such a medley of absurdities," he went on. "We do
+not come to the theatre to see just what is to be seen any day in the
+streets, or in every house you go into. If instead of enlarging on her
+matrimonial experiences, the lady were to come in invoking curses on
+an enemy because he had killed one-and-twenty of her sons in battle,
+and left her with only the twenty-second, still an infant at the
+breast, and if she had to carry that one off to save him from being
+eaten by the besieged, all dying of famine--then there would be some
+interest in the plot, and the public would clap their hands till they
+were sore. Gabriel, my boy, we must protest, protest vehemently. We
+must thump the floor with our feet and sticks to show that we are
+bored and out of patience. Yawn; open your mouth till your jaws are
+dislocated; look about you; let all the neighbors see that we are
+people of taste, and utterly weary of this tiresome and monstrous
+piece."
+
+No sooner said than done: we began thumping on the floor, and yawning
+in chorus, exclaiming, "What a bore!" "What a dreary piece!" "What
+waste of money!" and other phrases to the same effect; all of which
+soon bore fruit. The party in the pit imitated our patriotic example
+with great exactness. A general murmur of dissatisfaction was
+presently audible from every part of the theatre; for though the
+author had enemies, he had no lack of friends too, scattered
+throughout the pit, boxes, and upper tiers, and they were not slow to
+protest against our demonstration, sometimes by applauding, and then
+again by roaring at us with threats and oaths, to be silent; till a
+stentorian voice from the very back of the pit bellowed, "Turn the
+blackguards out!" raising a noisy storm of applause that reduced us to
+silence.
+
+Our poetaster was almost jumping out of his skin with indignation, and
+persisted in making his remarks as the piece went on....
+
+"A pretty plot indeed! It seems hardly credible that a civilized
+nation should applaud it. I would sentence Moratin to the galleys, and
+forbid his writing such coarse stuff as long as he lives. So you call
+this a play, Gabrielito? There is no intrigue, no plot, no surprise,
+no catastrophe, no illusion, no _quid pro quo_; no attempt at
+disguising a character to make it seem another--not even the little
+complication that comes of two men provoking each other as enemies,
+and then discovering that they are father and son. If Don Diego now,
+were to catch his nephew and kill him out of hand in the cellar, and
+prepare a banquet and have a dish of the victim's flesh served up to
+his bride, well disguised with spice and bay leaves, there would be
+some spirit in the thing."...
+
+I could not, in fact, conceal my enjoyment of the scene, which seemed
+to me a masterpiece of nature, grace, and interesting comedy. The poet
+however called me to order, abusing me for deserting to the hostile
+camp.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said I. "It was a mistake. And yet--does it not
+strike you, too, that this scene is not altogether bad?"
+
+"How should you be able to judge?--a mere novice who never wrote a
+line in your life! Pray what is there in this scene in the least
+remarkable, or pathetic, or historical?"
+
+"But it is nature itself. I feel that I have seen in the real world
+just what the author has set on the stage."
+
+"Gaby! simpleton! that is exactly what makes it so bad. Have you not
+observed that in 'Frederick the Second,' in 'Catharine of Russia,' in
+'The Slave of Negroponte,' and other fine works, nothing ever takes
+place that has the smallest resemblance to real life? Is not
+everything in those plays strange, startling, exceptional, wonderful,
+and surprising? That is why they are so good. The poets of to-day do
+not choose to imitate those of my time, and hence art has fallen to
+the lowest depths."
+
+"And yet, begging your pardon," I said, "I cannot help thinking--The
+play is wretched, I quite agree, and when you say so there must be a
+good reason for it. But the idea here seems to me a good one, since I
+fancy the author has intended to censure the vicious system of
+education which young girls get nowadays."...
+
+"And who asks the author to introduce all this philosophy?" said the
+pedant. "What has the theatre to do with moralizing? In the 'Magician
+of Astrakhan,' in 'Leon and the Asturias Gave Heraldry to Spain,' and
+in the 'Triumphs of Don Pelayo'--plays that all the world admires--did
+you ever find a passage that describes how girls are to be brought
+up?"
+
+"I have certainly read or heard somewhere that the theatre was to
+serve the purposes of entertainment and instruction."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!"
+
+                                          Translation of Clara Bell.
+
+
+
+
+DOÑA PERFECTA'S DAUGHTER
+
+From 'Doña Perfecta.' Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
+
+
+    [Pepe Rey, a young engineer, arrives at Orbajosa to marry his
+    cousin Rosario, the match having been made up between his
+    father and Doña Perfecta, the girl's mother, who is warmly
+    attached to the father of Pepe, her brother, and furthermore
+    under heavy obligations to him for his excellent management
+    of her large property interests. The landscape is the arid
+    and poverty-stricken country of central Spain, though the
+    town itself--"seated on the slope of a hill from the midst of
+    whose closely clustered houses arose many dark towers, and on
+    the height above it the ruins of a dilapidated castle"--such
+    a town would probably be more appreciated by a traveler from
+    abroad and a lover of the picturesque, than by a Spaniard,
+    too familiar with its type. Orbajosa is a little place, full
+    of narrow prejudices and vanities. Pepe Rey, with his modern
+    ways, soon finds that he is wounding these prejudices at
+    every turn. We look on with pained surprise at the
+    difficulties that grow up around the young man, an excellent
+    and kind-hearted fellow. Lawsuits are multiplied against him;
+    he is turned out of the cathedral by order of the bishop for
+    strolling about during service-time to look at some
+    architectural features; and he is refused the hand of his
+    cousin. Doña Perfecta herself joins in this hostility, which
+    finally develops into a venomous bitterness that menaces his
+    life. Such a feeling was not the outgrowth of mere provincial
+    narrowness: we see in the end that it was the result of the
+    plot of Maria Remedios, a woman of a humble sort, who aspired
+    to secure the heiress Rosario for her own chubby-faced
+    home-bred son. She influenced the village priest, and he
+    influenced Doña Perfecta. Early in the day the young engineer
+    would have abandoned the sinister place but for Rosario, who
+    really loved him. She conveyed to him, on a scrap from the
+    margin of a newspaper, the message:
+
+    "They say you are going away. If you do, I shall die."
+
+    She is a charming picture of girlhood,--lovely, true-hearted,
+    affectionate, aspiring to be heroic, and yet crippled at last
+    by a filial conscience and the long habit of clinging
+    dependence. She has agreed to flee at night with her lover,
+    and he is already in the garden. Her mother, the stern Doña
+    Perfecta, ranging uneasily through the house, enters her room
+    about the appointed time for the escape.]
+
+    [Illustration: _THE WEDDING DRESS._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by Worms.]
+
+"Why don't you sleep?" her mother asked her.
+
+"What time is it?" asked the girl.
+
+"It will soon be midnight."...
+
+Rosario was trembling, and everything about her denoted the keenest
+anxiety. She lifted her eyes to heaven supplicatingly, and then turned
+them on her mother with a look of the utmost terror.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with you?"
+
+"Did you not say it was midnight?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then--but is it already midnight?"...
+
+"Something is the matter with you; you have something on your mind,"
+said her mother, fixing on her daughter her penetrating eyes.
+
+"Yes--I wanted to tell you," stammered the girl, "I wanted to
+say--Nothing, nothing; I will go to sleep."
+
+"Rosario, Rosario! your mother can read your heart like an open book,"
+exclaimed Doña Perfecta with severity. "You are agitated. I have
+already told you that I am willing to pardon you if you will repent,
+if you are a good and sensible girl."
+
+"Why, am I not good? Ah, mamma, mamma! I am dying." Rosario burst into
+a flood of bitter and disconsolate tears.
+
+"What are these tears about?" said her mother, embracing her. "If they
+are tears of repentance, blessed be they."
+
+"I don't repent! I can't repent!" cried the girl, in a burst of
+sublime despair. She lifted her head, and in her face was depicted a
+sudden inspired strength. Her hair fell in disorder over her
+shoulders. Never was there seen a more beautiful image of a rebellious
+angel.
+
+"What is this? Have you lost your senses?" said Doña Perfecta, laying
+both hands on her daughter's shoulders.
+
+"I am going away! I am going away!" said the girl with the exaltation
+of delirium. And she sprang out of bed.
+
+"Rosario, Rosario--my daughter! For God's sake, what is this?"
+
+"Ah mamma, señora!" exclaimed the girl, embracing her mother; "bind me
+fast!"
+
+"In truth, you would deserve it. What madness is this?"
+
+"Bind me fast! I am going away--I am going away with him!"...
+
+"Has he told you to do so? has he counseled you to do that? has he
+commanded you to do that?" asked the mother, launching these words
+like thunderbolts against her daughter.
+
+"He has counseled me to do it. We have agreed to be married. We must
+be married, mamma, dear mamma. I will love you--I know that I ought to
+love you--I shall be forever lost if I do not love you."
+
+"Rosario, Rosario!" cried Doña Perfecta in a terrible voice, "rise!"
+
+There was a short pause.
+
+"This man--has he written to you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you seen him again since that night?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you have written to him?"
+
+"I have written to him also. O señora! why do you look at me in that
+way? You are not my mother."
+
+"Would to God that I were not! Rejoice in the harm you are doing me.
+You are killing me; you have given me my death-blow!" cried Doña
+Perfecta, with indescribable agitation. "You say that that man--"
+
+"Is my husband--I will be his wife, protected by the law. You are not
+a woman! Why do you look at me in that way? You make me tremble.
+Mother, mother, do not condemn me!"
+
+"You have already condemned yourself--that is enough. Obey me, and I
+will forgive you. Answer me--when did you receive letters from that
+man?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+"What treachery! what infamy!" cried her mother, roaring rather than
+speaking. "Had you appointed a meeting?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Here, here! I will confess everything, everything! I know it is a
+crime. I am a wretch; but you, my mother, will take me out of this
+hell. Give your consent. Say one word to me, only one word!"
+
+"That man here in my house!" cried Doña Perfecta, springing back
+several paces from her daughter.
+
+Rosario followed her on her knees.
+
+At the same instant three blows were heard, three crashes, three
+explosions. [Maria Remedios had spied upon Pepe Rey, the lover; shown
+Caballuco, a brutal servant and ally, how to follow him stealthily
+into the garden; and had then come to arouse the house.] It was the
+heart of Maria Remedios knocking at the door through the knocker. The
+house trembled with an awful dread. Mother and daughter stood as
+motionless as statues.
+
+A servant went down-stairs to open the door, and shortly afterward
+Maria Remedios, who was not now a woman but a basilisk enveloped in a
+mantle, entered Doña Perfecta's room. Her face, flushed with anxiety,
+exhaled fire.
+
+"He is there, he is there," she said, as she entered. "He got into the
+garden through the condemned door." She paused for breath at every
+syllable.
+
+"I know already," returned Doña Perfecta, with a sort of bellow.
+
+Rosario fell senseless to the floor.
+
+"Let us go down-stairs," said Doña Perfecta, without paying any
+attention to her daughter's swoon.
+
+The two women glided down-stairs like two snakes. The maids and the
+man-servant were in the hall, not knowing what to do. Doña Perfecta
+passed through the dining-room into the garden, followed by Maria
+Remedios.
+
+"Fortunately we have Ca-Ca-Ca-balluco there," said the canon's niece.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the garden, also. He cli-cli-climbed over the wall."
+
+Doña Perfecta explored the darkness with her wrathful eyes. Rage gave
+them the singular power of seeing in the dark that is peculiar to the
+feline race.
+
+"I see a figure there," she said. "It is going towards the oleanders."
+
+"It is he," cried Remedios. "But there comes Ramos--Ramos!" [Cristóbal
+Ramos, or "Cabulluco."]
+
+The colossal figure of the Centaur was plainly distinguishable.
+
+"Towards the oleanders, Ramos! Towards the oleanders!"
+
+Doña Perfecta took a few steps forward. Her hoarse voice, vibrating
+with a terrible accent, hissed forth these words:--
+
+"Cristobal, Cristobal,--kill him!"
+
+A shot was heard. Then another.
+
+                                     Translation of Mary J. Serrano.
+
+
+
+
+    A FAMILY OF OFFICE-HOLDERS
+
+    Don Francisco de Bringas y Caballero had a second-class
+    clerkship in one of the most ancient of the royal bureaus. He
+    belonged to a family which had held just such offices for time
+    out of mind. "Government employees were his parents and his
+    grandparents, and it is believed that his great-grandparents,
+    and even the ancestors of these, served in one way and another
+    in the administration of the two worlds." His wife Doña
+    Rosalia Pipaon was equally connected with the official class,
+    and particularly with that which had to do with the domestic
+    service of the royal abodes. Thus, "on producing her family
+    tree, this was found to show not so much glorious deeds of war
+    and statesmanship as those humbler doings belonging to a long
+    and intimate association with the royal person. Her mother had
+    been lady of the queen's wardrobe, her uncle a halberdier of
+    the royal guard, her grandfather keeper of the buttery, other
+    uncles at various removes, equerries, pages, dispatch-bearers,
+    huntsmen, and managers of the royal farm at Aranjuez, and so
+    forth and so on.... For this dame there existed two things
+    wholly Divine; namely, heaven and that almost equally
+    desirable dwelling-place for the elect which we indicate by
+    the mere laconic word 'the Palace.' In the Palace were her
+    family history and her ideal; her aspiration was that Bringas
+    might obtain a superior post in the royal exchequer, and that
+    then they should go and take up their abode in one of the
+    apartments of the second story of the great mansion which were
+    conceded to such tenants." The above is from 'Tormento.' In
+    the next succeeding novel, 'La de Bringas,' this aspiration is
+    gratified; the Bringas family are installed in the Palace, in
+    the quarters assigned to the employees of the royal household.
+    The efforts of two of their acquaintances to find them, in the
+    puzzling intricacies of the place, are thus amusingly
+    described.
+
+
+
+
+ABOVE-STAIRS IN A ROYAL PALACE
+
+From 'La de Bringas'
+
+
+Well, this is about the way it was. We threw ourselves bravely into
+the interminable corridor, a veritable street, or alley at least,
+paved with red tiles, feebly lighted with gas jets, and full of
+doublings and twistings. Now and then it spread out into broad
+openings like little plazas, inundated with sunlight which entered
+through large openings from the main court-yard. This illumination
+penetrated lengthwise along the white walls of the narrow passageways,
+alleys, or tunnels, or whatever they may be called, growing ever
+feebler and more uncertain as it went, till finally it fainted away
+entirely at sight of the fan-shaped yellow gas flames, smoking little
+circlets upon their protecting metal disks. There were uncounted
+paneled doors with numbers on them, some newly painted and others
+moldering and weather-stained, but not one displaying the figure we
+were seeking. At this one you would see a rich silken bell cord, some
+happy find in the royal upholstery shop, while the next had nothing
+more than a poor frayed rope's-end; and these were an indication of
+what was likely to be found within, as to order and neatness or
+disarray and squalor. So, too, the mats or bits of carpet laid before
+the doors threw a useful light upon the character of the lodgings. We
+came upon vacant apartments with cobwebs spun across the openings, and
+the door gratings thick with dust, and through broken transoms, drew
+chill drafts that conveyed the breath of silence and desolation. Even
+whole precincts were abandoned, and the vaultings, of unequal height,
+returned the sound of our footsteps hollowly to our ears. We passed up
+one stairway, then down another, and then, as likely as not, we would
+ascend again.... The labyrinthine maze led us on and ever onward....
+
+"It is useless to come here," at length said Pez, decidedly losing
+patience, "without charts and a mariner's compass. I suppose we are
+now in the south wing of the palace. The roofs down there must be
+those of the Hall of Columns and the outer stairway, are they not?
+What a huge mass of a place!" The roofs of which he spoke were great
+pyramidal shapes protected with lead, and they covered in the ceilings
+on which Bayeu's frescoed cherubs cut their lively pigeon-wings and
+pirouettes.
+
+Still going on and on and onward without pause, we found ourselves
+shut up in a place without exit, a considerable inclosure lighted from
+the top, and we had to turn round and beat a retreat by the way we had
+entered. Any one who knows the palace and its symmetrical grandeur
+only from without could never divine all these irregularities that
+constitute a veritable small town in its upper regions. In truth, for
+an entire century there has been but one continual modifying of the
+original plan, a stopping up here and an opening there, a condemning
+of staircases, a widening of some rooms at the expense of others, a
+changing of corridors into living-rooms and of living-rooms into
+corridors, and a cutting through of partitions and a shutting up of
+windows. You fall in with stairways that begin but never arrive
+anywhere, and with balconies that are but the made-over roof coverings
+of dwelling-places below. These dove-cotes were once stately
+drawing-rooms, and on the other hand, these fine salons have been made
+out of the inclosing space of a grand staircase. Then again winding
+stairs are frequent; but if you should take them, Heaven knows what
+would become of you; and frequent, too, are glazed doors permanently
+closed, with naught behind them but silence, dust, and darkness....
+
+"We are looking for the apartment of Don Francisco Bringas."
+
+"Bringas? yes, yes," said an old woman; "you're close to it. All you
+have got to do is, go down the first circular stairway you come to,
+and then make a half-turn. Bringas? yes to be sure; he's sacristan of
+the chapel."
+
+"Sacristan,--he? What is the matter with you? He is head clerk of the
+Administrative Department."
+
+"Oh, then he must be lower down, just off the terrace. I suppose you
+know your way to the fountain?"
+
+"No, not we."
+
+"You know the stairs called the Cáceres Staircase?"
+
+"No, not that either."
+
+"At any rate, you know where the Oratory is?"
+
+"We know nothing about it."
+
+"But the choir of the Oratory? but the dove-cotes?"--
+
+Sum total, we had not the slightest acquaintance with any of that
+congeries of winding turns, sudden tricks, and baffling surprises. The
+architectural arrangement was a mad caprice, a mocking jest at all
+plan and symmetry. Nevertheless, despite our notable lack of
+experience we stuck to our quest, and even carried our infatuation so
+far as to reject the services of a boy who offered himself as our
+guide.
+
+"We are now in the wing facing on the Plaza de Oriente," said Pez;
+"that is to say, at exactly the opposite extreme from the wing in
+which our friend resides." His geographical notions were delivered
+with the gravity and conviction of some character in Jules Verne.
+"Hence, the problem now demanding our attention is by what route to
+get from here to the western wing. In the first place, the cupola of
+the chapel and the grand stairway roof-covering furnish us with a
+certain basis; we should take our bearings from them. I assume that,
+having once arrived in the western wing, we shall be numskulls indeed
+if we do not strike Bringas's abode. All the same, I for one will
+never return to these outlandish regions without a pocket compass, and
+what is more, without a good supply of provender too, against such
+emergencies as this."
+
+Before striking out on the new stage of our explorations, as thus
+projected, we paused to look down from the window. The Plaza de
+Oriente lay below us in a beautiful panorama, and beyond it a portion
+of Madrid crested with at least fifty cupolas, steeples, and bell
+towers. The equestrian Philip IV. appeared a mere toy, and the Royal
+Theatre a paltry shed.... The doves had their nests far below where we
+stood, and we saw them, by pairs or larger groups, plunge headlong
+downward into the dizzy abyss, and then presently come whirling upward
+again, with swift and graceful motion, and settle on the carved
+capitals and moldings. It is credibly stated that all the political
+revolutions do not matter a jot to these doves, and there is nothing
+either in the ancient pile they inhabit or in the free realms of air
+around it, to limit their sway. They remain undisputed masters of the
+place.
+
+Away we go once more. Pez begins to put the geographical notions he
+has acquired from the books of Jules Verne yet further into practice.
+At every step he stops to say to me, "Now we are making our way
+northward.--We shall undoubtedly soon find a road or trail on our
+right, leading to the west.--There is no cause to be alarmed in
+descending this winding stairway to the second story.--Good, it is
+done! Well, bless me! where are we now? I don't see the main dome any
+longer, not so much as a lightning-rod of it.--We are in the realms of
+the feebly flickering gas once more.--Suppose we ascend again by this
+other stairway luckily just at hand. What now? Well, here we are back
+again in the eastward wing and nothing else, just where we were
+before. Are we? no, yes; see, down there in the court the big dome is
+still on our right. There's a regular grove of chimney stacks. You may
+believe it or not, but this sort of thing begins to make my head swim;
+it seems as if the whole place gave a lurch now and then, like a ship
+at sea.--The fountain must be over that way, do you see? for the maids
+are coming and going from there with their pitchers.--Oh well, I for
+one give the whole thing up. We want a guide, and an expert, or we'll
+never get out of this. I can't take another step; we've walked miles
+and I can't stand on my legs.--Hey, there, halloo! send us a
+guide!--Oh for a guide! Get me out of this infernal tangle
+quickly!"...
+
+We came at last to Bringas's apartment. When we got there, we
+understood how we must have passed it, earlier, without knowing it,
+for its number was quite rubbed out and invisible.
+
+                                Translation of William Henry Bishop.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCIS GALTON
+
+(1822-)
+
+
+The modern doctrine of heredity regards man less as an individual than
+as a link in a series, involuntarily inheriting and transmitting a
+number of peculiarities, physical and mental. The general acceptance
+of this doctrine would necessitate a modification of popular ethical
+conceptions, and consequently of social conditions. Except Darwin,
+probably no one has done so much to place the doctrine on a scientific
+basis as Francis Galton, whose brilliant researches have sought to
+establish the hereditary nature of psychical as well as physical
+qualities.
+
+Mr. Galton first took up the subject of the transmissibility of
+intellectual gifts in his 'Hereditary Genius' (1869). An examination
+of the relationships of the judges of England for a period of two
+hundred years, of the statesmen of the time of George III., of the
+premiers of the last one hundred years, and of a certain selection of
+divines and modern scholars, together with the kindred of the most
+illustrious commanders, men of letters and science, poets, painters,
+and musicians of all times and nations, resulted in his conclusion
+that man's mental abilities are derived by inheritance under exactly
+the same limitations as are the forms and features of the whole
+organic world. Mr. Galton argued that, as it is practicable to produce
+a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several
+consecutive generations, the State ought to encourage by dowries and
+other artificial means such marriages as make for the elevation of the
+race.
+
+Having set forth the hereditary nature of general intellectual
+ability, he attempts to discover what particular qualities commonly
+combine to form genius, and whether they also are transmissible.
+'English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture' (1874) was a
+summary of the results obtained from inquiries addressed to the most
+eminent scientific men of England, respecting the circumstances of
+heredity and environment which might have been influential in
+directing them toward their careers. One hundred and eighty persons
+were questioned. From the replies it appeared that in the order of
+their prevalence, the chief qualities that commonly unite to form
+scientific genius are energy both of body and mind; good health; great
+independence of character; tenacity of purpose; practical business
+habits; and strong innate tastes for science generally, or for some
+branch of it. The replies indicated the hereditary character of the
+qualities in question, showing incidentally that in the matter of
+heredity the influence of the father is greater than that of the
+mother. It would have been interesting to have had the results of
+similar inquiries in the case of other classes of eminent
+persons,--statesmen, lawyers, poets, divines, etc. However, it is
+problematical whether other classes would have entered so heartily
+into the spirit of the inquiry, and given such full and frank replies.
+
+Large variation in individuals from their parents is, he argues, not
+only not incompatible with the strict doctrine of heredity, but is a
+consequence of it wherever the breed is impure. Likewise, abnormal
+attributes of individual parents are less transmissible than the
+general characteristics of the family. Both these influences operate
+to deprive the science of heredity of the certainty of prediction in
+individual cases. The latter influence--_i. e._, the law of
+reversion--is made the subject of a separate inquiry in the volume
+entitled 'Natural Inheritance' (1889).
+
+In 'Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development' (1883), he
+described a method of accurately measuring mental processes, such as
+sensation, volition, the formation of elementary judgments, and the
+estimation of numbers; suggested composite photography as a means of
+studying the physiognomy of criminal and other classes; treated the
+subject of heredity in crime; and discussed the mental process of
+visualizing.
+
+'Finger Prints' (1892) is a study from the point of view of heredity
+of the patterns observed in the skin of finger-tips. These patterns
+are not only hereditary, but also furnish a certain means of
+identification--an idea improved in Mark Twain's story of 'Pudd'nhead
+Wilson.'
+
+Mr. Galton is himself an example of the heredity of genius, being a
+grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the author of 'Zoönomia,' and a cousin of
+Charles Darwin. Born near Birmingham in 1822, he studied some time at
+Birmingham Hospital and at King's College, London, with the intention
+of entering the medical profession; but abandoned this design, and was
+graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. He soon after made
+two journeys of exploration in Africa, the latter of which is
+described in his 'Narrative of an Explorer in South Africa' (1853). An
+indirect result of these journeys was 'The Art of Travel; or Shifts
+and Contrivances in Wild Countries' (1855).
+
+'Meteorographica' (1863) is noteworthy as the first attempt ever made
+to represent in charts on a large scale the progress of the weather,
+and on account of the theory of anti-cyclones which Mr. Galton
+advances in it.
+
+Although strictly scientific in aim and method, Mr. Galton's writings,
+particularly those on heredity, appeal to all classes of readers and
+possess a distinct literary value. One may admire in them simplicity
+and purity of diction, animation of style, fertility in the
+construction of theory, resourcefulness in the search for proof, and a
+fine enthusiasm for the subject under consideration.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPARATIVE WORTH OF DIFFERENT RACES
+
+From 'Hereditary Genius'
+
+
+Every long-established race has necessarily its peculiar fitness for
+the conditions under which it has lived, owing to the sure operation
+of Darwin's law of natural selection. However, I am not much concerned
+for the present with the greater part of those aptitudes, but only
+with such as are available in some form or other of high civilization.
+We may reckon upon the advent of a time when civilization, which is
+now sparse and feeble and far more superficial than it is vaunted to
+be, shall overspread the globe. Ultimately it is sure to do so,
+because civilization is the necessary fruit of high intelligence when
+found in a social animal, and there is no plainer lesson to be read
+off the face of Nature than that the result of the operation of her
+laws is to evoke intelligence in connection with sociability.
+Intelligence is as much an advantage to an animal as physical strength
+or any other natural gift; and therefore, out of two varieties of any
+race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most
+intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life.
+Similarly, among animals as intelligent as man, the most social race
+is sure to prevail, other qualities being equal.
+
+Under even a very moderate form of material civilization, a vast
+number of aptitudes acquired through the "survivorship of the fittest"
+and the unsparing destruction of the unfit, for hundreds of
+generations, have become as obsolete as the old mail-coach habits and
+customs since the establishment of railroads, and there is not the
+slightest use in attempting to preserve them; they are hindrances, and
+not gains, to civilization. I shall refer to some of these a little
+further on, but I will first speak of the qualities needed in
+civilized society. They are, speaking generally, such as will enable a
+race to supply a large contingent to the various groups of eminent men
+of whom I have treated in my several chapters. Without going so far as
+to say that this very convenient test is perfectly fair, we are at all
+events justified in making considerable use of it, as I will do in the
+estimates I am about to give.
+
+In comparing the worth of different races, I shall make frequent use
+of the law of deviation from an average, to which I have already been
+much beholden; and to save the reader's time and patience, I propose
+to act upon an assumption that would require a good deal of discussion
+to limit, and to which the reader may at first demur, but which cannot
+lead to any error of importance in a rough provisional inquiry. I
+shall assume that the _intervals_ between the grades of ability are
+the _same_ in all the races.... I know this cannot be strictly true,
+for it would be in defiance of analogy if the variability of all races
+were precisely the same; but on the other hand, there is good reason
+to expect that the error introduced by the assumption cannot sensibly
+affect the off-hand results for which alone I propose to employ it;
+moreover, the rough data I shall adduce will go far to show the
+justice of this expectation.
+
+Let us then compare the negro race with the Anglo-Saxon, with respect
+to those qualities alone which are capable of producing judges,
+statesmen, commanders, men of literature and science, poets, artists,
+and divines. If the negro race in America had been affected by no
+social disabilities, a comparison of their achievements with those of
+the whites in their several branches of intellectual effort, having
+regard to the total number of their respective populations, would give
+the necessary information. As matters stand, we must be content with
+much rougher data.
+
+First, the negro race has occasionally, but very rarely, produced such
+men as Toussaint L'Ouverture....
+
+Secondly, the negro race is by no means wholly deficient in men
+capable of becoming good factors, thriving merchants, and otherwise
+considerably raised above the average of whites....
+
+Thirdly, we may compare, but with much caution, the relative position
+of negroes in their native country with that of the travelers who
+visit them. The latter no doubt bring with them the knowledge current
+in civilized lands, but that is an advantage of less importance than
+we are apt to suppose. The native chief has as good an education in
+the art of ruling men as can be desired; he is continually exercised
+in personal government, and usually maintains his place by the
+ascendency of his character, shown every day over his subjects and
+rivals. A traveler in wild countries also fills to a certain degree
+the position of a commander, and has to confront native chiefs at
+every inhabited place. The result is familiar enough--the white
+traveler almost invariably holds his own in their presence. It is
+seldom that we hear of a white traveler meeting with a black chief
+whom he feels to be the better man. I have often discussed this
+subject with competent persons, and can only recall a few cases of the
+inferiority of the white man,--certainly not more than might be
+ascribed to an average actual difference of three grades, of which one
+may be due to the relative demerits of native education, and the
+remaining two to a difference in natural gifts.
+
+Fourthly, the number among the negroes of those whom we should call
+half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants
+in America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this
+fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in
+their own matters were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like as
+frequently to make me ashamed of my own species. I do not think it any
+exaggeration to say that their _c_ is as low as our _e_, which would
+be a difference of two grades, as before. I have no information as to
+actual idiocy among the negroes--I mean, of course, of that class of
+idiocy which is not due to disease.
+
+The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. I
+possess a few serviceable data about the natural capacity of the
+Australian, but not sufficient to induce me to invite the reader to
+consider them.
+
+The average standard of the Lowland Scotch and the English North
+Country men is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior to that of the
+ordinary English, because the number of the former who attain to
+eminence is far greater than the proportionate number of their race
+would have led us to expect. The same superiority is distinctly shown
+by a comparison of the well-being of the masses of the population; for
+the Scotch laborer is much less of a drudge than the Englishman of the
+Midland counties--he does his work better, and "lives his life"
+besides. The peasant women of Northumberland work all day in the
+fields, and are not broken down by the work; on the contrary, they
+take a pride in their effective labor as girls, and when married they
+attend well to the comfort of their homes. It is perfectly distressing
+to me to witness the draggled, drudged, mean look of the mass of
+individuals, especially of the women, that one meets in the streets of
+London and other purely English towns. The conditions of their life
+seem too hard for their constitutions, and to be crushing them into
+degeneracy.
+
+The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the
+ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal
+departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed and in many
+respects unequaled, and partly because the population that gave birth
+to the creators of those masterpieces was very small. Of the various
+Greek sub-races, that of Attica was the ablest, and she was no doubt
+largely indebted to the following cause for her superiority: Athens
+opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her
+social life was such that none but very able men could take any
+pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men
+of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus
+by a system of partly unconscious selection she built up a magnificent
+breed of human animals, which in the space of one century--viz.,
+between 530 and 430 B. C.--produced the following illustrious persons,
+fourteen in number:--
+
+_Statesmen and Commanders._--Themistocles (mother an alien),
+Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon (son of Miltiades), Pericles (son of
+Xanthippus, the victor at Mycale).
+
+_Literary and Scientific Men._--Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato.
+
+_Poets._--Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.
+
+_Sculptor._--Phidias.
+
+We are able to make a closely approximate estimate of the population
+that produced these men, because the number of the inhabitants of
+Attica has been a matter of frequent inquiry, and critics appear at
+length to be quite agreed in the general results.... The average
+ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very
+nearly two grades higher than our own--that is, about as much as our
+race is above that of the African negro. This estimate, which may seem
+prodigious to some, is confirmed by the quick intelligence and high
+culture of the Athenian commonalty, before whom literary works were
+recited, and works of art exhibited, of a far more severe character
+than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the
+calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the
+contents of a railway book-stall.
+
+We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this
+marvelously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly
+lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more
+ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and
+consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population
+were of a heterogeneous class. In a small sea-bordered country, where
+emigration and immigration are constantly going on, and where the
+manners are as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of
+which I speak, the purity of a race would necessarily fail. It can be
+therefore no surprise to us, though it has been a severe misfortune to
+humanity, that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if
+it had maintained its excellence, and had multiplied and spread over
+large countries, displacing inferior populations (which it well might
+have done, for it was exceedingly prolific), it would assuredly have
+accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree
+that transcends our powers of imagination.
+
+If we could raise the average standard of our race only one grade,
+what vast changes would be produced! The number of men of natural
+gifts equal to those of the eminent men of the present day would be
+necessarily increased more than tenfold;... but far more important to
+the progress of civilization would be the increase in the yet higher
+orders of intellect. We know how intimately the course of events is
+dependent on the thoughts of a few illustrious men. If the first-rate
+men in the different groups had never been born, even if those among
+them who have a place in my appendices on account of their hereditary
+gifts had never existed, the world would be very different to what it
+is....
+
+It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations,
+that the average standard of ability of the present time should be
+raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course
+of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions
+have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have
+had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the
+process of natural selection, whenever the changes were sufficiently
+slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them
+altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding.
+The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed
+under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization,
+reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world
+has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected
+over such wide areas, and with such startling rapidity, as in the case
+of savage man. In the North-American continent, in the West-Indian
+islands, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, and Van
+Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely
+swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure
+of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they
+were incapable of supporting. And we too, the foremost laborers in
+creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable
+of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralization,
+communication, and culture, call for more brains and mental stamina
+than the average of our race possess. We are in crying want for a
+greater fund of ability in all stations of life; for neither the
+classes of statesmen, philosophers, artisans, nor laborers are up to
+the modern complexity of their several professions. An extended
+civilization like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary
+statesmen or philosophers of our present race are capable of dealing
+with, and it exacts more intelligent work than our ordinary artisans
+and laborers are capable of performing. Our race is overweighted, and
+appears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed
+its powers....
+
+When the severity of the struggle for existence is not too great for
+the powers of the race, its action is healthy and conservative;
+otherwise it is deadly, just as we may see exemplified in the scanty,
+wretched vegetation that leads a precarious existence near the summer
+snow line of the Alps, and disappears altogether a little higher up.
+We want as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket to which we
+are henceforth to be exposed, and as good brains as possible to
+contrive machinery, for modern life to work more smoothly than at
+present. We can in some degree raise the nature of man to a level with
+the new conditions imposed upon his existence; and we can also in some
+degree modify the conditions to suit his nature. It is clearly right
+that both these powers should be exerted, with the view of bringing
+his nature and the conditions of his existence into as close harmony
+as possible.
+
+In proportion as the world becomes filled with mankind, the relations
+of society necessarily increase in complexity, and the nomadic
+disposition found in most barbarians becomes unsuitable to the novel
+conditions. There is a most unusual unanimity in respect to the causes
+of incapacity of savages for civilization, among writers on those
+hunting and migratory nations who are brought into contact with
+advancing colonization, and perish, as they invariably do, by the
+contact. They tell us that the labor of such men is neither constant
+nor steady; that the love of a wandering, independent life prevents
+their settling anywhere to work, except for a short time, when urged
+by want and encouraged by kind treatment. Meadows says that the
+Chinese call the barbarous races on their borders by a phrase which
+means "hither and thither," "not fixed." And any amount of evidence
+might be adduced, to show how deeply Bohemian habits of one kind or
+another were ingrained in the nature of the men who inhabited most
+parts of the earth, now overspread by the Anglo-Saxon and other
+civilized races. Luckily there is still room for adventure, and a man
+who feels the cravings of a roving, adventurous spirit to be too
+strong for resistance, may yet find a legitimate outlet for it in the
+colonies, in the army, or on board ship. But such a spirit is, on the
+whole, an heirloom that brings more impatient restlessness and beating
+of the wings against cage bars, than persons of more civilized
+characters can readily comprehend, and it is directly at war with the
+more modern portion of our moral natures. If a man be purely a nomad,
+he has only to be nomadic and his instinct is satisfied; but no
+Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purely nomadic. The most so
+among them have also inherited many civilized cravings that are
+necessarily starved when they become wanderers, in the same way as the
+wandering instincts are starved when they are settled at home.
+Consequently their nature has opposite wants, which can never be
+satisfied except by chance, through some very exceptional turn of
+circumstances. This is a serious calamity; and as the Bohemianism in
+the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes the
+happier for mankind. The social requirements of English life are
+steadily destroying it. No man who only works by fits and starts is
+able to obtain his living nowadays, for he has not a chance of
+thriving in competition with steady workmen. If his nature revolts
+against the monotony of daily labor, he is tempted to the
+public-house, to intemperance, and it may be to poaching, and to much
+more serious crime; otherwise he banishes himself from our shores. In
+the first case, he is unlikely to leave as many children as men of
+more domestic and marrying habits; and in the second case, his breed
+is wholly lost to England. By this steady riddance of the Bohemian
+spirit of our race, the artisan part of our population is slowly
+becoming bred to its duties, and the primary qualities of the typical
+modern British workman are already the very opposite of those of the
+nomad. What they are now was well described by Mr. Chadwick as
+consisting of "great bodily strength, applied under the command of a
+steady, persevering will; mental self-contentedness; impassibility to
+external irrelevant impressions, which carries them through the
+continued repetition of toilsome labor, 'steady as time.'"
+
+It is curious to remark how unimportant to modern civilization has
+become the once famous and thoroughbred-looking Norman. The type of
+his features, which is probably in some degree correlated with his
+peculiar form of adventurous disposition, is no longer characteristic
+of our rulers, and is rarely found among celebrities of the present
+day; it is more often met with among the undistinguished members of
+highly born families, and especially among the less conspicuous
+officers of the army. Modern leading men in all paths of eminence, as
+may easily be seen in a collection of photographs, are of a coarser
+and more robust breed: less excitable and dashing, but endowed with
+far more ruggedness and real vigor. Such also is the case as regards
+the German portion of the Austrian nation....
+
+Much more alien to the genius of an enlightened civilization than the
+nomadic habit is the impulsive and uncontrolled nature of the savage.
+A civilized man must bear and forbear; he must keep before his mind
+the claims of the morrow as clearly as those of the passing minute; of
+the absent as well as of the present. This is the most trying of the
+new conditions imposed on man by civilization, and the one that makes
+it hopeless for any but exceptional natures among savages to live
+under them. The instinct of a savage is admirably consonant with the
+needs of savage life; every day he is in danger through transient
+causes; he lives from hand to mouth, in the hour and for the hour,
+without care for the past or forethought for the future: but such an
+instinct is utterly at fault in civilized life. The half-reclaimed
+savage, being unable to deal with more subjects of consideration than
+are directly before him, is continually doing acts through mere
+maladroitness and incapacity, at which he is afterwards deeply grieved
+and annoyed. The nearer inducements always seem to him, through his
+uncorrected sense of moral perspective, to be incomparably larger than
+others of the same actual size but more remote; consequently, when the
+temptation of the moment has been yielded to and passed away, and its
+bitter result comes in its turn before the man, he is amazed and
+remorseful at his past weakness. It seems incredible that he should
+have done that yesterday which to-day seems so silly, so unjust, and
+so unkindly. The newly reclaimed barbarian, with the impulsive,
+unstable nature of the savage, when he also chances to be gifted with
+a peculiarly generous and affectionate disposition, is of all others
+the man most oppressed with the sense of sin.
+
+Now, it is a just assertion, and a common theme of moralists of many
+creeds, that man, such as we find him, is born with an imperfect
+nature. He has lofty aspirations, but there is a weakness in his
+disposition which incapacitates him from carrying his nobler purposes
+into effect. He sees that some particular course of action is his
+duty, and should be his delight; but his inclinations are fickle and
+base, and do not conform to his better judgment. The whole moral
+nature of man is tainted with sin, which prevents him from doing the
+things he knows to be right.
+
+The explanation I offer to this apparent anomaly seems perfectly
+satisfactory from a scientific point of view. It is neither more nor
+less than that the development of our nature, whether under Darwin's
+law of natural selection or through the effects of changed ancestral
+habits, has not yet overtaken the development of our moral
+civilization. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not
+to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already
+have become molded into accordance with his very recent advance. We,
+men of the present centuries, are like animals suddenly transplanted
+among new conditions of climate and of food: our instincts fail us
+under the altered circumstances.
+
+My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old
+civilizations are far less sensible than recent converts from
+barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The
+conscience of a negro is aghast at his own wild, impulsive nature, and
+is easily stirred by a preacher; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle
+the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.
+
+The sense of original sin would show, according to my theory, not that
+man was fallen from high estate, but that he was rising in moral
+culture with more rapidity than the nature of his race could follow.
+My view is corroborated by the conclusion reached at the end of each
+of the many independent lines of ethnological research--that the human
+race were utter savages in the beginning; and that after myriads of
+years of barbarism, man has but very recently found his way into the
+paths of morality and civilization.
+
+
+
+
+ARNE GARBORG
+
+(1851-)
+
+
+Arne Garborg is one of the most potent forces in the new school of
+Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is
+more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly
+different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the
+result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the
+foundations of a literature essentially Norse.
+
+The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social
+conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates
+the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this
+social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he
+himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental
+idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the
+paths. Where Björnson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life
+might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the
+outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a
+storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material
+way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had
+held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a
+consequence of his books.
+
+Arne Garborg was born at Jæderen, in the southwestern part of Norway,
+January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of
+his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village
+schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom
+religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived,
+Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with
+conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction
+led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of
+his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he
+reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was
+extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only
+models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong
+tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a
+school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in
+1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student
+was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and
+indeed sometimes actual want.
+
+He had previously, in Risör, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a
+small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school
+affairs; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the
+Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had
+qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with
+the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the
+Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really
+the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early
+enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional
+articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book,
+a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'
+
+The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national
+language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in
+Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary
+medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen
+appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon
+the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and
+ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief
+propagandist of the new speech.
+
+His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously
+in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the
+vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism
+and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but
+then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own
+environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story.
+The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was
+looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and
+thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just
+punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper,
+is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of
+unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find
+most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives,
+and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!
+
+Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883),
+deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no
+rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked;
+and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result
+from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to
+which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book,
+again, is to a degree autobiographical; for Garborg, as has been said,
+is himself peasant, and he has fought the fight and suffered the
+anguish of the new culture attained with incalculable sacrifice.
+'Peasant Students' is undoubtedly his greatest work. Nowhere else has
+he indicated more clearly his seriousness of purpose, or worked out
+his theme with more effectiveness. The hero, Daniel Braut, is the
+representative of the ideal student, a son of the people who shall
+strive for "poetry and the soul" and introduce the elements of culture
+among his class. Manual labor is his aversion; and at last, forced by
+the weakness of his nature and the necessity of his poverty, he goes
+over to the ranks of philistinism, marries a woman of property, and
+studies theology. Both books are stories of high ideals and
+humiliating compromises. The author's pessimism is in the ascendant,
+and in the end the lower nature conquers.
+
+In 'Mannfolk' (1886) he takes up a different theme, the relation of
+the sexes, a question which he treats with startling frankness.
+Garborg is a realist in so far that he prefers to depict life as it
+is, well knowing that fiction cannot approach truth in point of
+interest. He bears true testimony of what he sees and knows, but his
+realism is very far removed from the naturalism of the French school.
+
+Following 'Peasant Students' appeared in 1884 'Forteljinger og Sogar'
+(Narratives and Tales), a volume of stories dealing sometimes with
+subjects generally proscribed. Of his other works the most important
+are the narrative 'Hjaa ho Mor' (With Mama), 'Kolbotnbrev og andre
+Skildringar' (Kolbotn Letters and Other Sketches: 1890), the novels
+'Trætte Mænd' (Weary Souls: 1891), 'Fred' (Peace: 1893), and the drama
+'Uforsonlige' (The Irreconcilables: 1888).
+
+After being deprived of his government position upon the publication
+of 'Mannfolk,' Arne Garborg retired with his wife and child into the
+solitude of the mountains, where for two years he lived and wrote in
+his sæter hut; but at last, overcome by the loneliness of this
+isolated life, he left Norway and settled in Germany.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONFLICT OF THE CREEDS
+
+From 'A Freethinker'
+
+
+The noise of carriage wheels increased. The carriage drove up before
+the door, and all the people of the parsonage sprang up in joy. Ragna
+however reddened somewhat. A minute after, both Hans Vangen and
+Eystein Hauk stood in the room. Hans embraced his parents and his
+sister, and on the surface was happy; Hauk greeted them kindly and
+warmly like an acquaintance of the family, and bowed deep before
+Ragna.
+
+"A good evening to you, and a merry Christmas-time!" called out Hans.
+"Here is the great foreign traveler and wise man Eystein Hauk, and
+here"--he pointed to the chaplain--"is the strict man of God, Balle;
+chaplain now, pastor later on, finally bishop; a well-founded
+theologian and a true support to the Church in these distracted times.
+It will be well with you if you do not fall into a quarrel about
+belief."
+
+There was talking and laughing; the pastor's wife poured out wine; the
+new-comers sat down; the table was quickly set, and then they went
+into the dining-room, where Christmas grits and Christmas fish stood
+smoking in a great dish and "awaited the help of the people." The
+pastor read a blessing, which was not listened to with any further
+devoutness. Ragna and Balle sat for the most part and looked at Hauk,
+but Hauk looked at Ragna, and the pastor's wife said of Hans how he
+had grown during the past year, and how his good looks and his
+affability had improved.
+
+The one who talked most at the table was Hans. Hauk was rather silent.
+The pastor asked him in a few words about his travels abroad; he
+answered promptly but shortly, and often in such a cleverly turned way
+of speaking that it was difficult to find out his real meaning.
+
+The chaplain, too, would have liked to hear about foreign lands. What
+was the state of the Christian religion in France?--Well, it was
+various. It was there as here: there were people of all sorts.--But
+was not the great majority unchristian?--Well, of enlightened and
+learned people it was, to be sure, the smallest part who strictly
+could be called Christians.--But with morals? Was there not a great
+deal of social viciousness and impropriety?--Well, if it were only
+considered under certain conditions, in certain cities, it was
+probably there as in other places.--Indeed!--Balle, rebuffed, looked
+away from Hauk, and did not talk with him afterward.
+
+When they left the table there was set out dessert, with wine, and
+pipes were also brought. The conversation went on as before, but it
+was none the less Hans who talked most. He was a fresh, happy fellow.
+His mother sat and found pleasure in looking at him. The pastor and
+Balle sat and smoked; glanced now and then at Hauk, who was a little
+way off at a smaller table, talking small-talk with Ragna. The pastor
+had become more silent, and Balle looked as if he little liked the
+state of things, although he tried to control himself. Hans understood
+this, and laughed.
+
+"Do not bother yourself about Hauk," said he. "He has been in Paris
+and has learned French manners, and consequently he likes women's
+society best; but even if he is a little grand, he will quickly become
+Norse again, keep to his pipe and his glass, and let the women take
+care of themselves."
+
+Balle bit his lips; the pastor smiled a little. "Young people are more
+bashful here in Norway," said he. "That is true," he continued. "You
+have read the new novel 'Virginia,' that the people have waited so
+long for?"
+
+"'Virginia'?--pfh! that is a vile book," answered Hans, and smiled.
+
+"Vile?" said the chaplain questioningly.
+
+"It is a scandalous book! says Christiania. It has set the whole town
+on end. It works destruction upon marriage, they say; upon morals,
+upon society. I have never seen Christiania so moral as in these
+days."
+
+"H'm!" said Balle; "Christiania is on the whole a moral town."
+
+"It is at this time! The young poets are happy for all the days of
+their life. The men forbid the women to read the book, and the women
+forbid their daughters--"
+
+"And so they all read it together?" said the pastor.
+
+"Certainly! The women read it and say, 'Paugh! the poets do not know
+life.' The daughters, the poor dear angels, they read it and say,
+'Dear me, is that anything? Have we not read worse books than that?'"
+
+"But tell us, then, what the book is about?" said the pastor.
+
+"It is about--that married people shall love each other," said Hans
+stoutly.
+
+"Oho! free love!" called out the chaplain.
+
+"Certainly! Free love! 'All true love is free,' says the fool-hardy
+fellow of a poet."
+
+"Do you hear that, pastor?" said Balle.
+
+"If our own poets also take it up, let us have a care! Then he
+recognizes 'free thought'; and what then?" asked the chaplain.
+
+"That is true," replied Hans. "'All thoughts are free,' he says, 'and
+not merely duty free.'"
+
+"Of course he does not believe in God?"
+
+"I doubt it; but even that is not the worst."
+
+"Not the--"
+
+"No, for there are many people in Christiania who do not believe in
+God. But these poets do not even believe in the Devil!" Hans laughed
+like a child at the face that the chaplain made; the pastor looked
+severely at Hans, who cast down his eyes and was silent.
+
+"Worthless fruit," sighed the chaplain. "Our poets have hitherto kept
+themselves free from these godless thoughts, even if they have not
+always had the right opinion of Christianity, and particularly have
+taken up with the confusions of Grundtvigianism; but now, now it has
+taken another path. Do you see the spirit of revolt, pastor? Do you
+hear how they rise and tear asunder all its bonds; how opposition
+arises against all that is high and holy, and they storm even against
+the foundations of society?"
+
+"May God help us!" sighed the pastor. "It does not look right. Is
+there anything new in the newspapers?" he asked, as if to get away
+from a conversation that plainly oppressed him.
+
+Hans ran out, and came quickly in again with the newspapers. Such of
+these as were French he took for himself, the rest he gave to Balle.
+
+"Do you see, father?" said Hans with the mien of a schoolmaster. "If
+you will have politics, you must turn to France. All other politics
+are merely an echo of theirs. France is Europe. France is the world!"
+
+"Do you hear, pastor?" said Balle. "Do you hear how the French spirit
+spreads and increases in power? the French spirit, which has always
+been one and the same with rationalism and revolution?"
+
+"Here is an article that will do Balle good!" called out Hans. "It
+does not assume the good tone or prattle tediously like our Norse
+newspaper articles. There is fire and burning in it; you recognize
+something like a clenched fist back of the words, prepared for
+everything upon which it may hit. That is what I call politics!"
+
+"Oh, you are a foolish fellow," said the pastor. "Come, out with it!"
+
+Hans read an article against the priestly party or clericals, and the
+piece was severely radical. It was particularly to the effect that the
+clergy and Christianity must be ousted from the public schools, if
+thinkers were to be really for a genuine and sound popular education.
+Christianity had already done what it could do; hereafter it lay
+merely in the way. "Freedom and self-government" was the war-cry now,
+for this generation. They might be fair enough, many of the dreams
+which the new time compelled us to abandon; but light and life and
+truth were ten times fairer than all dreams.
+
+The chaplain sat and sulked, and looked into one of the Norse papers.
+"Here stands the same," said he. "No, but--? Yes, the same, and yet
+not the same. The Norse paper has cut out or changed all that treats
+directly of Christianity; the rest is the same."
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Hans.
+
+"Yes, they are as wise as serpents," sighed the chaplain. "Here may
+plainly be seen how the matter stands. It is hidden away in politics,
+but the spirit they cannot conceal; it is precisely the same French
+spirit of hell, the spirit of revolt, the spirit of the Devil, which
+lifts itself against even the living God. Do you see that, pastor? Do
+you see how wholly these 'freedom politics,' as they are called, are
+held up and impregnated with this godless spirit of revolt? In truth,
+it becomes more and more clear that it is the part of us, the watchmen
+of Zion,--more now than ever before,--to watch and pray."
+
+The pastor sat and meditated. He looked oppressed and sorrowful. It
+was too quiet for Hans: he moved away to Hauk and Ragna. The chaplain
+appeared to like this, and became more calm.
+
+"Dear pastor," said he after a while, "just as surely as there is
+truth in our work,--yes, this question presses itself more and more in
+upon me,--as surely as there is truth in our work: that we shall watch
+over God's house and people,--we _cannot_ remain silent and be calm
+when we see a spirit like this coming bearing in upon us--a spirit
+which is directly founded upon heathenism, and so plainly shows its
+Satanic origin. Shall it be? Can we answer for that before our Lord
+and God?"
+
+The pastor was silent. He was in great doubt and uncertainty of mind.
+"I do not believe that it is right to bring politics into the house of
+God," said he at last.
+
+"Politics, no! But this is not politics; this is a spirit of the
+times, a view of life which takes the outward garb of politics, but at
+the bottom is merely a new outbreak of the same old heathenism that
+the Church at all times has had to contend with. I, for my part, do
+not believe that I can keep silent with a quiet conscience."
+
+The pastor held his peace and thought. "This is a hard question," he
+said finally. "May our Lord give us wisdom!"
+
+"Amen," said the chaplain....
+
+That night the old pastor did not sleep well. He walked up and down
+his chamber and thought. "When it comes to the point," said he to
+himself, "Balle is right; there _is_ something bad and evil in the
+spirit of the time; there _is_ something devilish. Merely look, now,
+at this Eystein Hauk, this clever fine fellow: he is not to be got at.
+He is frozen to ice and hardened to steel, slippery and smooth as a
+serpent. There came such an uncanny spirit from him that he made me
+downright sick: no respect, no veneration even for his own father; God
+knows how he can hold fast to his Christian faith. They call it
+freedom, humanity; but it is not that. It is hate, venom, bad blood.
+They will tear from them all bonds, as Balle says, raise a
+revolt--revolt against all that is beautiful and good, against God,
+against belief. H'm! Build the State, this whole earthly life, upon a
+heathen foundation! Sever connection with Christianity, cast the
+Church away from them like old trash. That is terrible! And free love,
+free thought--the Christian religion out of the schools--no! that is
+Satan himself who rages. Free thoughts in my time were not so: they
+were warm and beautiful; there was heart in them; they made us good
+and happy." He shook himself, as if to throw off a chill. Should one
+be silent at such things? Should one look quietly on while this evil
+spirit eats itself in among the people? or should one, like a disciple
+of God, lift up the sword of the Word and the Spirit against this
+poisonous basilisk?
+
+He read in the Bible and in Luther. Then he got up again and walked.
+The clock struck hour after hour, but the old man did not hear it. He
+thought only of the heavy responsibility. Was it not to profane the
+house of God and the holy office, to drag the struggle and strife of
+the day into it? Was he not set to watch over word and teaching, but
+not to be a judge in the world's disputes? But of his flock, the
+people of the Church, the Bride of Christ, whom he should watch, but
+who stood in the midst of a wicked world, and whose souls were harmed
+when such evil gusts blew? Would not every soul at the Judgment Day be
+demanded at his hands? And was he a good shepherd, who indeed kept
+watch against the wolf when the wolf came having on his right garb,
+but looked on and was silent when he came clothed in sheep's garments
+and pretended to belong among the good? He read anew in Luther. At
+last he knelt down and prayed for a long time, and ended with a
+fervent and heartfelt "Our Father."
+
+Then he arose as if freed from doubt, looked meekly up to heaven, and
+said, "As thou wilt, O Lord!" He seated himself in his arm-chair,
+weary but happy, and fell asleep for a while. Presently, however, the
+day grew gray in the east and he awoke. He read the morning prayers to
+himself, chose his text, and thought about the sermon. When the bell
+began to ring he went to church. He was pale, but calm and kindly. The
+farmers looked at him and greeted him more warmly than usual. The
+pastor's wife and Ragna came shortly after; Hans and Eystein did not
+arrive at the church until the pastor stood in the pulpit.
+
+The Christmas sermon was fervid and good. He spoke about the angels'
+song, "Peace on earth." They had seldom heard the old man preach so
+well. But at the end came a turn in the thought that caused some
+astonishment. It was about politics.
+
+"Dear Christians," he said, "how is it in our days with 'peace on
+earth'? Ah, my brothers, we know that all too well. Peace has gone
+from us. It has vanished like a beautiful evening cloud. Evil powers
+rise up in these hours. The Devil is abroad, and tempts anew mankind
+to eat of the tree of knowledge and to tear themselves loose from God.
+Take heed, take heed, dear brothers! Take heed of the false prophets,
+who proclaim a new gospel and promise you 'freedom' and
+'enlightenment,' and all that is good,--yes, promise you righteousness
+and power, if you will eat of the forbidden tree. They give themselves
+out for sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. They promise you
+freedom, but they give you thraldom, the thraldom of sin, which is the
+worst of all. They promise you blessings and joy, but they steal you
+away from Him who alone has blessings and freedom for our poor race.
+They promise you security and defense against all tyranny and
+oppression, but they give you gladly into his power who is the father
+of all tyranny and of all evil; he who is the destroyer of man from
+the beginning. Dear Christians, let us watch and pray! Let us prove
+the spirit, whether it is from God! Let us harden our ears and our
+hearts against false voices and magic songs that deceive, which come
+to us out of the dark chasms and abysses in this wicked world! Let us
+be fearful of this wild and sinful thought of freedom, that from Adam
+down has been the deep and true source of all our woe! Let us pray for
+'peace on earth,' for only then can our Lord God have consideration
+for mankind." With this he ended his sermon.
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
+          by William H. Carpenter
+
+
+
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+(1860-)
+
+[Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND]
+
+
+Hamlin Garland is a favorable example of a class of young writers
+which is coming to the fore in the Middle West of the United
+States,--fresh, original, full of faith and energy, with a robust and
+somewhat aggressive Americanism. In native endowment he is a strong
+man, and his personal character is manly, clean, and high. At times,
+carelessness of technique and lack of taste can be detected in his
+writings, but his strength and spirit make amends for these defects.
+
+Mr. Garland was born September 16th, 1860, in the La Crosse Valley,
+Wisconsin. His family is of Scotch descent,--sturdy farmer folk,
+remarkable for their physical powers. His maternal grandfather was an
+Adventist, with the touch of mysticism that word implies. Garland was
+reared in the picturesque coulé country (French _coulée_, a dry
+gulch); living in various Western towns, one of them being the Quaker
+community of Hesper, Iowa. His early education was received from the
+local schools; the unconscious assimilation of the Western ways came
+while he rode horses, herded cattle, and led the wholesome, simple
+open-air life of the middle-class people. Some years were spent in a
+small seminary at Osage, Wisconsin, whence he was graduated at
+twenty-one years of age. His kin moved to Dakota, but Hamlin faced
+Eastward, eager to see the world. Two years of travel and teaching in
+Illinois found him in 1883 "holding down" a Dakota claim--the only
+result of the land boom being a rich field of literary ore. Then in
+1884 he went to Boston, made his headquarters at the Public Library,
+read diligently, taught literature and elocution in the School of
+Oratory, and became one of the literary workers there, remaining until
+1891. Since then he has lectured much throughout the country, and has
+settled in Chicago, his summer home being at West Salem, Wisconsin, in
+the beautiful coulé region of his boyhood.
+
+Mr. Garland's main work is in fiction, but he has also tried his hand
+at verse and the essay. His volume 'Crumbling Idols,' published in
+1894, a series of audacious papers in which the doctrine of realism is
+cried up and the appeal to past literary canons made a mock of,
+called out critical abuse and ridicule, and no doubt shows a lack of
+perspective. Yet the book is racy and stimulating in the extreme. The
+volume of poetry, 'Prairie Songs' (1893), has the merit of dealing
+picturesquely and at first hand with Western scenery and life, and
+contains many a stroke of imaginative beauty. Of the half-dozen books
+of tales and longer stories, 'Main-Traveled Roads,' Mr. Garland's
+first collection of short stories, including work as striking as
+anything he has done, gives vivid pastoral pictures of the Mississippi
+Valley life. 'A Little Norsk' (1893), along with its realism in
+sketching frontier scenes, possesses a fine romantic flavor. And 'Rose
+of Dutcher's Coolly' (1895), decidedly his strongest full-length
+fiction, is a delineation of Wisconsin rustic and urban life,
+including a study of Chicago, daringly unconventional, but strong,
+earnest, evidently drawn from the author's deepest experiences and
+convictions. Other books of fiction are 'Jason Edwards,' 'A Member of
+the Third House,' 'A Spoil of Office,' and 'Prairie Folks.'
+
+Mr. Garland's work in its increasing command of art, its understanding
+of and sincere sympathy with the life of the great toiling population
+of the Middle West, and its unmistakable qualities of independence,
+vigor, and ideality, is worthy of warm praise. A rich, large nature is
+felt beneath his fiction. His literary creed is "truth for truth's
+sake," and his conception of his art is broad enough to include love
+of country and belief in his fellow-man.
+
+
+
+
+A SUMMER MOOD
+
+From 'Prairie Songs.' Copyright 1893 by Hamlin Garland, and published
+by Stone & Kimball
+
+
+  Oh, to be lost in the wind and the sun,
+    To be one with the wind and the stream!
+  With never a care while the waters run,
+    With never a thought in my dream.
+  To be part of the robin's lilting call
+    And part of the bobolink's rhyme.
+  Lying close to the shy thrush singing alone,
+    And lapped in the cricket's chime!
+
+  Oh, to live with these beautiful ones!
+    With the lust and the glory of man
+  Lost in the circuit of springtime suns--
+    Submissive as earth and part of her plan;
+  To lie as the snake lies, content in the grass!
+    To drift as the clouds drift, effortless, free,
+  Glad of the power that drives them on,
+    With never a question of wind or sea.
+
+
+
+
+A STORM ON LAKE MICHIGAN
+
+From 'Rose of Dutcher's Coolly.' Copyright 1895 by Hamlin Garland, and
+published by Stone & Kimball
+
+
+As the winter deepened, Rose narrowed the circle of conquest. She no
+longer thought of conquering the world; it came to be the question of
+winning the approbation of one human soul. That is, she wished to win
+the approbation of the world in order that Warren Mason might smile
+and say "Well done!"
+
+She did not reach this state of mind smoothly and easily. On the
+contrary, she had moments when she rebelled at the thought of any
+man's opinion being the greatest good in the world to her. She
+rebelled at the implied inferiority of her position in relation to
+him, and also at the physical bondage implied. In the morning, when
+she was strong, in the midst of some social success, when people
+swarmed about her and men bent deferentially, then she held herself
+like a soldier on a tower, defying capture.
+
+But at night, when the lights were all out, when she felt her
+essential loneliness and weakness and need, when the world seemed cold
+and cruel and selfish,--then it seemed as if the sweetest thing in the
+universe would be to have him open his arms and say "Come!"
+
+There would be rest there, and repose. His judgment, his keen wit, his
+penetrating, powerful influence, made him seem a giant to her; a giant
+who disdained effort and gave out an appearance of indifference and
+lassitude. She had known physical giants in her neighborhood, who
+spoke in soft drawl and slouched lazily in action, but who were
+invincible when aroused.
+
+She imagined she perceived in Mason a mental giant, who assumed
+irresolution and weakness for reasons of his own. He was always off
+duty when she saw him, and bent more upon rest than a display of
+power. Once or twice she saw him roused, and it thrilled her; that
+measured lazy roll of voice changed to a quick, stern snarl, the brows
+lowered, and the big plump face took on battle lines. It was like a
+seemingly shallow pool, suddenly disclosed to be of soundless depths
+by a wind of passion.
+
+The lake had been the refuge of the distracted and restless girl. She
+went to it often in the autumn days, for it rested her from the noise
+of grinding wheels, and screams, and yells. Its smooth rise and fall,
+its sparkle of white-caps, its sailing gulls, filled her with
+delicious pleasure. It soothed her and it roused her also. It gave her
+time to think.
+
+The street disturbed her, left her purposeless and powerless; but out
+there where the ships floated like shadows, and shadows shifted like
+flame, and the wind was keen and sweet,--there she could get her
+mental breath again. She watched it change to wintry desolation, till
+it grew empty of vessels and was lonely as the Arctic Sea; and always
+it was grand and thought-inspiring.
+
+She went out one day in March, when the home longing was upon her and
+when it seemed that the city would be her death. She was tired of her
+food, tired of Mary, tired of her room. Her forehead was knotted
+tensely with pain of life and love--
+
+She cried out with sudden joy, for she had never seen the lake more
+beautiful. Near the shore a great mass of churned and heaving ice and
+snow lay like a robe of shaggy fur. Beyond this the deep water spread,
+a vivid pea-green broken by wide irregular strips of dark purple. In
+the open water by the wall a spatter of steel blue lay like the petals
+of some strange flower, scattered upon the green.
+
+Great splendid clouds developed, marvelously like the clouds of June,
+making the girl's heart swell with memories of summer. They were white
+as wool, these mountainous clouds, and bottomed in violet, and as they
+passed the snow-fields they sent down pink-purple misty shadows, which
+trailed away in splendor toward the green which flamed in bewildering
+beauty beyond. The girl sat like one in a dream, while the wind blew
+the green and purple of the outer sea into fantastic, flitting forms
+which dazzled her eyes like the stream of mingled banners.
+
+Each form seemed more beautiful than the preceding one; each
+combination had such unearthly radiance, her heart ached with
+exquisite sorrow to see it vanish. The girl felt that spring was
+coming on the wing of the southern wind, and the desire to utter her
+passion grew almost into pain.
+
+It had other moods, this mighty spread of water. It could be angry,
+dangerous. Sometimes it rolled sullenly, and convoluted in oily surges
+beneath its coverlid of snow, like a bed of monstrous serpents.
+Sometimes the leaden sky shut down over it, and from the desolate
+northeast a snow-storm rushed, hissing and howling. Sometimes it
+slumbered for days, quiet as a sleeping boa, then awoke and was a
+presence and a voice in the night, fit to make the hardiest tremble.
+
+Rose saw it when it was roused, but she had yet to see it in a frenzy.
+The knowledge of its worst came to her early in May, just before her
+return to the Coulé.
+
+The day broke with the wind in the northeast. Rose, lying in her bed,
+could hear the roar of the lake; never before had its voice penetrated
+so far. She sprang up and dressed, eager to see it in such a mood.
+Mary responded sleepily to her call, saying the lake would be there
+after breakfast.
+
+Rose did not regret her eagerness, though it was piercingly cold and
+raw. The sea was already terrific. Its spread of tawny yellow showed
+how it had reached down and laid hold on the sand of its bed. There
+were oily splotches of plum color scattered over it where the wind
+blew it smooth, and it reached to the wild east sky, cold, desolate,
+destructive.
+
+It had a fierce, breathing snarl like a monster at meat. It leaped
+against the sea-wall like a rabid tiger, its sleek and spotted hide
+rolling. Every surge sent a triangular sheet of foam twenty-five feet
+above the wall, yellow and white and shadowed with dull blue; and the
+wind caught it as it rose, and its crest burst into great clouds of
+spray, which sailed across the streets and dashed along the walk like
+rain, making the roadway like a river; while the main body of each
+upleaping wave, falling back astride the wall, crashed like the fall
+of glass, and the next wave met it with a growl of thunderous rage,
+striking it with concave palm with a sound like a cannon's exploding
+roar.
+
+Out of the appalling obscurity to the north, frightened ships scudded
+at intervals, with bare masts bending like fire-trimmed pines. They
+hastened like the homing pigeons, which do not look behind. The
+helmsmen stood grimly at their wheels, with eyes on the harbor ahead.
+
+The girl felt it all as no one native to the sea can possibly do. It
+seemed as if the bounds of the flood had been overcome, and that it
+was about to hurl itself upon the land. The slender trees, standing
+deep in the swash of water, bowed like women in pain; the wall was
+half hidden, and the flood and the land seemed mingled in battle.
+
+Rose walked along the shore, too much excited to go back to her
+breakfast. At noon she ate lunch hurriedly and returned to the shore.
+There were hundreds of people coming and going along the drive; young
+girls shrieking with glee, as the sailing clouds of spray fell upon
+them. Rose felt angry to think they could be so silly in face of such
+dreadful power.
+
+She came upon Mason, dressed in a thick mackintosh coat, taking notes
+rapidly in a little book. He did not look up, and she passed him,
+wishing to speak, yet afraid to speak. Near him a young man was
+sketching.
+
+Mason stood like a rock in his long, close-fitting rain coat, while
+she was blown nearly off her feet by the blast. She came back against
+the wind, feeling her soul's internal storm rising. It seemed quite
+like a proposal of marriage to go up and speak to him--yet she could
+not forego the pleasure.
+
+He did not see her until she came into his lee; then he smiled,
+extending his hand. She spoke first:--
+
+"May I take shelter here?"
+
+His eyes lightened with a sudden tender humor.
+
+"Free anchorage," he said, and drew her by the hand closer to his
+shoulder. It was a beautiful moment to her, and a dangerous one to
+him. He took refuge in outside matters.
+
+"How does that strike your inland eyes?" He pointed to the north.
+
+"It's awful. It's like the anger of God." She spoke into his bowed
+ear.
+
+"Please don't think I'm reporting it," he explained. "I'm only making
+a few notes about it for an editorial on the need of harbors."
+
+Each moment the fury increased, the waves deepened. The commotion sank
+down amid the sands of the deeper inshore water, and it boiled like
+milk. Splendid colors grew into it near at hand; the winds tore at the
+tops of the waves, and wove them into tawny banners, which blurred the
+air like blown sand. On the horizon the waves leaped in savage ranks,
+clutching at the sky like insane sea monsters,--frantic, futile.
+
+"I've seen the Atlantic twice during a gale," shouted the artist to a
+companion, "but I never saw anything more awful than this. These waves
+are quicker and higher. I don't see how a vessel could live in it if
+caught broadside."
+
+"It's the worst I ever saw here."
+
+"I'm going down to the south side: would you like to go?" Mason asked
+of Rose.
+
+"I would indeed," she replied.
+
+Back from the lake shore the wind was less powerful but more
+uncertain. It came in gusts which nearly upturned the street cars. Men
+and women scudded from shelter to shelter, like beleaguered citizens
+avoiding cannon shots.
+
+"What makes our lake so terrible," said Mason in the car, "is the fact
+that it has a smooth shore--no indentations, no harbors. There is only
+one harbor here at Chicago, behind the breakwater, and every vessel in
+mid-lake must come here. Those flying ships are seeking safety here
+like birds. The harbor will be full of disabled vessels."
+
+As they left the car, a roaring gust swept around a twenty-story
+building with such power [that] Rose would have been taken off her
+feet had not Mason put his arms about her shoulders.
+
+"You're at a disadvantage," he said, "with skirts." He knew she prided
+herself on her strength, and he took no credit to himself for standing
+where she fell.
+
+It was precisely as if they were alone together; the storm seemed to
+wall them in, and his manner was more intimate than ever before. It
+was in very truth the first time they had been out together, and also
+it was the only time he had assumed any physical care of her. He had
+never asserted his greater muscular power and mastery of material
+things, and she was amazed to see that his lethargy was only a mood.
+He could be alert and agile at need. It made his cynicism appear to be
+a mood also; at least, it made her heart wondrously light to think so.
+
+They came upon the lake shore again, near the Auditorium. The refuge
+behind the breakwater was full of boats, straining at anchor, rolling,
+pitching, crashing together. Close about the edge of the breakwater,
+ships were rounding hurriedly, and two broken vessels lay against the
+shore, threshing up and down in the awful grasp of the breakers. Far
+down toward the south the water dashed against the spiles, shooting
+fifty feet above the wall, sailing like smoke, deluging the street,
+and lashing against the row of buildings across the way.
+
+Mason's keen eye took in the situation:--
+
+"Every vessel that breaks anchor is doomed! Nothing can keep them from
+going on shore. Doubtless those two schooners lost anchor--that one
+there is dragging anchor." He said suddenly, "She is shifting
+position, and see that hulk--"
+
+Rose for a moment could not see it. She lay flat on her side, a
+two-master, her sails flapping and floating on the waves. Her anchor
+still held, but she had listed her cargo, careened, and so lay
+helpless.
+
+"There are men on it!" cried some one. "Three men--don't you see them?
+The water goes over them every time!"
+
+"Sure enough! I wonder if they are going to let them drown, here in
+the harbor!"
+
+Rose grew numb with horror. On the rounded side of the floating hulk
+three men were clinging, looking like pegs of tops. They could only be
+seen at intervals, for the water broke clear over their heads. It was
+only when one of them began to move to and fro that the mighty crowd
+became certainly aware of life still clinging to the hull. It was an
+awful thing to stand helplessly by and see those brave men battle, but
+no life-boat or tug could live out there. In the station, men wept and
+imprecated in their despair; twice they tried to go to the rescue of
+the beleaguered men, but could not reach them.
+
+Suddenly a flare of yellow spread out on the wave. A cry arose:--
+
+"She's breaking up!"
+
+Rose seized Mason's arm in a frenzy of horror.
+
+"O God! can't somebody help them?"
+
+"They're out of reach!" said Mason solemnly. And then the throng was
+silent.
+
+"They are building a raft!" shouted a man with a glass, speaking at
+intervals for the information of all. "One man is tying a rope to
+planks; ... he is helping the other men; ... he has his little raft
+nearly ready; ... they are crawling toward him--"
+
+"Oh, see them!" exclaimed Rose. "Oh, the brave men! There! they are
+gone--the vessel has broken up."
+
+On the wave nothing now lived but a yellow spread of lumber; the glass
+revealed no living thing.
+
+Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.
+
+"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies--"
+
+"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to
+Mason's thought.
+
+Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of
+human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater
+of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with
+people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow
+approach of that tiny raft. Again and again the waves swept over it,
+and each time that indomitable man rose from the flood and was seen to
+pull his companions aboard.
+
+Other vessels drifted upon the rocks. Other steamers rolled heavily
+around the long breakwater, but nothing now distracted the gaze of the
+multitude from this appalling and amazing struggle against death.
+Nothing? No; once and only once did the onlookers shift their intent
+gaze, and that was when a vessel passed the breakwater and went
+sailing toward the south through the fleet of anchored, straining,
+agonized ships. At first no one paid much attention to this late-comer
+till Mason lifted his voice.
+
+"By Heaven, the man is _sailing_!"
+
+It was true; steady, swift, undeviating, the vessel headed through the
+fleet. She did not drift nor wander nor hesitate. She sailed as if the
+helmsman, with set teeth, were saying:--
+
+"By God! If I must die on the rocks, I'll go to my death the captain
+of my vessel!"
+
+And so with wheel in his hand and epic oaths in his mouth, he sailed
+directly into the long row of spiles, over which the waves ran like
+hell-hounds; where half a score of wrecks lay already churning into
+fragments in the awful tumult.
+
+The sailing vessel seemed not to waver, nor seek nor dodge--seemed
+rather to choose the most deadly battle-place of waves and wall.
+
+"God! but that's magnificent of him!" Mason said to himself.
+
+Rose held her breath, her face white and set with horror.
+
+"Oh, must he die?"
+
+"There is no hope for him. She will strike in a moment--she
+strikes!--she is gone!"
+
+The vessel entered the gray confusion of the breakers and struck the
+piles like a battering-ram; the waves buried her from sight; then the
+recoil flung her back; for the first time she swung broadside to the
+storm. The work of the helmsman was over. She reeled--resisted an
+instant, then submitted to her fate, crumbled against the pitiless
+wall like paper, and thereafter was lost to sight.
+
+This dramatic and terrible scene had held the attention of the
+onlookers--once more they searched for the tiny raft. It was nearing
+the lake wall at another furious point of contact. An innumerable
+crowd spread like a black robe over the shore, waiting to see the tiny
+float strike.
+
+A hush fell over every voice. Each soul was solemn as if facing the
+Maker of the world. Out on the point, just where the doomed sailors
+seemed like to strike, there was a little commotion. A tiny figure was
+seen perched on one of the spiles. Each wave, as it towered above him,
+seemed ready to sweep him away, but each time he bowed his head and
+seemed to sweep through the gray wall. He was a negro, and he held a
+rope in his hands.
+
+As they comprehended his danger the crowd cheered him, but in the
+thunder of the surf no human voice could avail. The bold negro could
+not cry out, he could only motion; but the brave man on the raft saw
+his purpose--he was alone with the shipwrecked ones.
+
+In they came, lifted and hurled by a prodigious swell. They struck the
+wall just beneath the negro and disappeared beneath the waves.
+
+All seemed over, and some of the spectators fell weeping; others
+turned away.
+
+Suddenly the indomitable commander of the raft rose, then his
+companions, and then it was perceived that he had bound them all to
+the raft.
+
+The negro flung his rope and one man caught at it, but it was swept
+out of reach on a backward-leaping billow. Again they came in, their
+white, strained, set faces and wild eyes turned to the intrepid
+rescuer. Again they struck, and this time the negro caught and held
+one of the sailors, held him while the foam fell away, and the
+succeeding wave swept him over the spiles to safety. Again the
+resolute man flung his noose and caught the second sailor, whose rope
+was cut by the leader, the captain, who was last to be saved.
+
+As the negro came back, dragging his third man over the wall, a mighty
+cry went up, a strange, faint, multitudinous cry, and the negro was
+swallowed up in the multitude.
+
+Mason turned to Rose and spoke: "Sometimes men seem to be worth
+while!"
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH STEVENSON GASKELL
+
+(1810-1865)
+
+[Illustration: ELIZABETH S. GASKELL]
+
+
+Critics agree in placing the novels of Mrs. Gaskell on a level with
+the works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronté. It is more than
+probable that future generations will turn to her stories for correct
+pictures of simple every-day life that must fade in the swift
+succession of years. She has been compared to a naturalist who knows
+intimately the flora and fauna of his native heath.
+
+Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in Chelsea, England, September
+29th, 1810, the daughter of William Stevenson, a literary man,
+who was keeper of the records of the Treasury. She lived with her
+aunt at Knutsford in Cheshire, was sent to a private school in
+Stratford-on-Avon, and visited London and Edinburgh, where her beauty
+was much admired. In 1832 she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell,
+minister of a Unitarian chapel in Manchester. Mrs. Gaskell did not
+begin to write until she had reached middle age, and then chiefly to
+distract her thoughts after the death of their only son in 1844. Her
+first book, 'Mary Barton,' published anonymously in 1848, achieved
+extraordinary success. This was a "novel with a purpose," for Mrs.
+Gaskell believed that the hostility between employers and employed,
+which constantly disturbed the manufacturing beehive of Manchester,
+was caused by mutual ignorance. She therefore set herself the task of
+depicting faithfully the lives of the people around her. It must be
+remembered, too, that the social types chosen by her were at that
+moment peculiarly interesting to a public weary of the novel of
+fashionable high life. The story provoked much public discussion; and
+among other critics, the social economist Mr. W. R. Greg, in his
+'Essay on Mary Barton,' published in 1849, took the part of the
+manufacturer. 'Mary Barton' has been translated into French, German,
+and other languages, including Hungarian and Finnish. The story has
+for its central theme the gradual degeneration of John Barton, a
+workman who has a passionate hatred of the classes above him, and who,
+embittered by poverty and the death of his son and wife, joins the
+law-breakers of the town, and finally murders Henry Corson, a master
+manufacturer. 'North and South,' published in 1855, was written from
+the point of view of the masters, an admirable contrast to Barton
+being found in Thornton, the hero of this novel.
+
+In 1850, when Dickens was about to establish Household Words, he
+invited Mrs. Gaskell to contribute. This magazine contained her story
+'Lizzie Leigh' and those immortal pictures of village life known as
+'Cranford.' Mrs. Gaskell's other novels are: 'Ruth,' the tragical
+story of a pretty young milliner's apprentice; 'Sylvia's Lovers,'
+whose scene is Monkhaven (Whitby), at the end of the last century;
+'Cousin Phillis,' a simple story of a farmer's daughter, which
+appeared first in the Cornhill Magazine in 1863-64; and 'Wives and
+Daughters,' also contributed to the Cornhill, and left unfinished by
+her death in Manchester, November 12th, 1865. By many persons the last
+novel is considered her best work, owing to its strength of
+characterization. Molly Gibson, the heroine; Cynthia, a heartless
+coquette; Squire Hamley and his sons Roger and Osborne, of Hamley
+Hall; and the Earl of Cumnor and his family at the Towers,--all are
+treated with impartial skill. Her famous 'Life of Charlotte Bronté'
+appeared in 1857. She became acquainted with Miss Bronté in 1850, and
+they were friends at once.
+
+A collected edition of Mrs. Gaskell's works, published in seven
+volumes in 1873, includes the short stories 'The Grey Woman,' 'Morton
+Hall,' 'Mr. Harrison's Confessions,' 'A Dark Night's Work,' 'The
+Moorland Cottage,' 'Round the Sofa,' 'The Old Nurse's Story,' 'The
+Well of Pen-Morfa,' 'The Sexton's Hero,' 'Lois the Witch,' and others.
+Cranford is identified as the town of Knutsford. Its population
+consists of widows and maiden ladies, in bonds to their ancient
+gentility. With deft touch Mrs. Gaskell brings out the humor and
+pathos of these quaint characters, her finest creation being Miss
+Matty Jenkyns.
+
+
+
+
+OUR SOCIETY
+
+From 'Cranford'
+
+
+In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the
+holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married
+couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears;
+he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the
+Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his
+regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the
+great neighboring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty
+miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen,
+they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The
+surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but
+every man cannot be a surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of
+choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away
+little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the
+railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture into
+the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of
+literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary
+reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of
+everybody's affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat
+maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial)
+to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they
+are in distress,--the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. "A
+man," as one of them observed to me once, "is _so_ in the way in the
+house!" Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's
+proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's
+opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say
+eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal
+retaliation; but somehow, good-will reigns among them to a
+considerable degree.
+
+The Cranford ladies have only an occasional little quarrel, spurted
+out in a few peppery words and angry jerks of the heads; just enough
+to prevent the even tenor of their lives from becoming too flat. Their
+dress is very independent of fashion: as they observe, "What does it
+signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?" And
+if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent: "What does it
+signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?" The materials of
+their clothes are in general good and plain, and most of them are
+nearly as scrupulous as Miss Tyler of cleanly memory; but I will
+answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in
+wear in England, was seen in Cranford--and seen without a smile.
+
+I can testify to a magnificent family red-silk umbrella, under which a
+gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used
+to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red-silk umbrellas in
+London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in
+Cranford; and the little boys mobbed it, and called it "a stick in
+petticoats." It might have been the very red-silk one I have
+described, held by a strong father over a troop of little ones; the
+poor little lady--the survivor of all--could scarcely carry it.
+
+Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they
+were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town,
+with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a
+year on the Tinwald Mount.
+
+"Our friends have sent to inquire how you are after your journey
+to-night, my dear" (fifteen miles in a gentleman's carriage); "they
+will give you some rest to-morrow, but the next day, I have no doubt,
+they will call; so be at liberty after twelve--from twelve to three
+are our calling hours."
+
+Then, after they had called:--
+
+"It is the third day: I daresay your mamma has told you, my dear,
+never to let more than three days elapse between receiving a call and
+returning it; and also, that you are never to stay longer than a
+quarter of an hour."
+
+"But am I to look at my watch? How am I to find out when a quarter of
+an hour has passed?"
+
+"You must keep thinking about the time, my dear, and not allow
+yourself to forget it in conversation."
+
+As everybody had this rule in their minds, whether they received or
+paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We
+kept ourselves to short sentences of small-talk, and were punctual to
+our time.
+
+I imagine that a few of the gentlefolks of Cranford were poor, and had
+some difficulty in making both ends meet; but they were like the
+Spartans, and concealed their smart under a smiling face. We none of
+us spoke of money, because that subject savored of commerce and trade,
+and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The
+Cranfordians had that kindly _esprit de corps_ which made them
+overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to
+conceal their poverty. When Mrs. Forrester, for instance, gave a party
+in her baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the
+ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out
+from underneath, every one took this novel proceeding as the most
+natural thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and
+ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular
+servants' hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of
+the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could
+never have been strong enough to carry the tray up-stairs if she had
+not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state,
+pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and
+we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we
+knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and
+sponge-cakes.
+
+There were one or two consequences arising from this general but
+unacknowledged poverty and this very much acknowledged gentility,
+which were not amiss, and which might be introduced into many circles
+of society to their great improvement. For instance, the inhabitants
+of Cranford kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens
+under the guidance of a lantern-bearer about nine o'clock at night;
+and the whole town was abed and asleep by half-past ten. Moreover, it
+was considered "vulgar" (a tremendous word in Cranford) to give
+anything expensive in the way of eatable or drinkable, at the evening
+entertainments. Wafer bread and butter and sponge-biscuits were all
+that the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson gave; and she was sister-in-law to
+the late Earl of Glenmire, although she did practice such "elegant
+economy."
+
+"Elegant economy!" How naturally one falls back into the phraseology
+of Cranford! There, economy was always "elegant," and money-spending
+always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism which made
+us very peaceful and satisfied. I never shall forget the dismay felt
+when a certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford, and openly
+spoke about his being poor--not in a whisper to an intimate friend,
+the doors and windows being previously closed, but in the public
+street! in a loud military voice! alleging his poverty as a reason for
+not taking a particular house. The ladies of Cranford were already
+rather moaning over the invasion of their territories by a man and a
+gentleman. He was a half-pay captain, and had obtained some situation
+on a neighboring railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned
+against by the little town; and if in addition to his masculine gender
+and his connection with the obnoxious railroad, he was so brazen as to
+talk of being poor--why then indeed he must be sent to Coventry. Death
+was as true and as common as poverty; yet people never spoke about
+that, loud out in the streets. It was a word not to be mentioned to
+ears polite. We had tacitly agreed to ignore that any with whom we
+associated on terms of visiting equality could ever be prevented by
+poverty from doing anything that they wished. If we walked to or from
+a party, it was because the night was _so_ fine, or the air _so_
+refreshing; not because sedan-chairs were expensive. If we wore prints
+instead of summer silks, it was because we preferred a washing
+material; and so on, till we blinded ourselves to the vulgar fact that
+we were all of us people of very moderate means. Of course, then, we
+did not know what to make of a man who could speak of poverty as if it
+was not a disgrace. Yet somehow Captain Brown made himself respected
+in Cranford, and was called upon, in spite of all resolutions to the
+contrary. I was surprised to hear his opinions quoted as authority at
+a visit which I paid to Cranford about a year after he had settled in
+the town. My own friends had been among the bitterest opponents of any
+proposal to visit the captain and his daughters only twelve months
+before; and now he was even admitted in the tabooed hours before
+twelve. True, it was to discover the cause of a smoking chimney,
+before the fire was lighted; but still Captain Brown walked up-stairs,
+nothing daunted, spoke in a voice too large for the room, and joked
+quite in the way of a tame man about the house. He had been blind to
+all the small slights, and omissions of trivial ceremonies, with which
+he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies
+had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good
+faith; and with his manly frankness had overpowered all the shrinking
+which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And at last his
+excellent masculine common-sense, and his facility in devising
+expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas, had gained him an
+extraordinary place as authority among the Cranford ladies. He himself
+went on in his course, as unaware of his popularity as he had been of
+the reverse....
+
+I wondered what the Cranford ladies did with Captain Brown at their
+parties. We had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no
+gentleman to be attended to and to find conversation for, at the card
+parties. We had congratulated ourselves upon the snugness of the
+evenings, and in our love for gentility and distaste of mankind we had
+almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be "vulgar"; so
+that when I found my friend and hostess Miss Jenkyns was going to have
+a party in my honor, and that Captain and the Miss Browns were
+invited, I wondered much what would be the course of the evening. Card
+tables, with green-baize tops, were set out by daylight, just as
+usual: it was the third week in November, so the evenings closed in
+about four. Candles and clean packs of cards were arranged on each
+table. The fire was made up; the neat maid-servant had received her
+last directions: and there we stood, dressed in our best, each with a
+candle-lighter in our hands, ready to dart at the candles as soon as
+the first knock came. Parties in Cranford were solemn festivities,
+making the ladies feel gravely elated as they sat together in their
+best dresses. As soon as three had arrived, we sat down to Preference,
+I being the unlucky fourth. The next four comers were put down
+immediately to another table; and presently the tea-trays, which I had
+seen set out in the store-room as I passed in the morning, were placed
+each on the middle of a card table. The china was delicate egg-shell;
+the old-fashioned silver glittered with polishing; but the eatables
+were of the slightest description.
+
+While the trays were yet on the tables, Captain and the Miss Browns
+came in; and I could see that, somehow or other, the captain was a
+favorite with all the ladies present. Ruffled brows were smoothed,
+sharp voices lowered at his approach. Miss Brown looked ill, and
+depressed almost to gloom. Miss Jessie smiled as usual, and seemed
+nearly as popular as her father. He immediately and quietly assumed
+the man's place in the room; attended to every one's wants, lessened
+the pretty maid-servant's labor by waiting on empty cups and
+bread-and-butterless ladies; and yet did it all in so easy and
+dignified a manner, and so much as if it were a matter of course for
+the strong to attend to the weak, that he was a true man throughout.
+He played for threepenny points with as grave an interest as if they
+had been pounds; and yet in all his attention to strangers he had an
+eye on his suffering daughter--for suffering I was sure she was,
+though to many eyes she might only appear to be irritable. Miss Jessie
+could not play cards, but she talked to the sitters-out, who before
+her coming had been rather inclined to be cross. She sang, too, to an
+old cracked piano which I think had been a spinet in its youth. Miss
+Jessie sang 'Jock o' Hazeldean' a little out of tune; but we were none
+of us musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of
+appearing to be so.
+
+It was very good of Miss Jenkyns to do this; for I had seen that, a
+little before, she had been a good deal annoyed by Miss Jessie Brown's
+unguarded admission (àpropos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle,
+her mother's brother, who was a shopkeeper in Edinburgh. Miss
+Jenkyns tried to drown this confession by a terrible cough--for the
+Honorable Mrs. Jamieson was sitting at the card table nearest Miss
+Jessie, and what would she say or think if she found out that she was
+in the same room with a shopkeeper's niece! But Miss Jessie Brown (who
+had no tact, as we all agreed the next morning) _would_ repeat the
+information, and assure Miss Pole she could easily get her the
+identical Shetland wool required "through my uncle, who has the best
+assortment of Shetland goods of any one in Edinbro'." It was to take
+the taste of this out of our mouths, and the sound of this out of our
+ears, that Miss Jenkyns proposed music: so I say again, it was very
+good of her to beat time to the song.
+
+When the trays reappeared with biscuits and wine, punctually at a
+quarter to nine, there was conversation, comparing of cards, and
+talking over tricks; but by-and-by Captain Brown sported a bit of
+literature.
+
+"Have you seen any numbers of 'The Pickwick Papers'?" said he. (They
+were then publishing in parts.) "Capital thing!"
+
+Now, Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford, and
+on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons and a pretty good
+library of divinity considered herself literary, and looked upon any
+conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and
+said, "Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read
+them."
+
+"And what do you think of them?" exclaimed Captain Brown. "Aren't they
+famously good?"
+
+So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.
+
+"I must say, I don't think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson.
+Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows
+what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model."
+
+This was evidently too much for Captain Brown to take placidly; and I
+saw the words on the tip of his tongue before Miss Jenkyns had
+finished her sentence.
+
+"It is quite a different sort of thing, my dear madam," he began.
+
+"I am quite aware of that," returned she; "and I make allowances,
+Captain Brown."
+
+"Just allow me to read you a scene out of this month's number,"
+pleaded he. "I had it only this morning, and I don't think the company
+can have read it yet."
+
+"As you please," said she, settling herself with an air of
+resignation. He read the account of the "swarry" which Sam Weller gave
+at Bath. Some of us laughed heartily. I did not dare, because I was
+staying in the house. Miss Jenkyns sat in patient gravity. When it was
+ended, she turned to me, and said, with mild dignity:--
+
+"Fetch me 'Rasselas,' my dear, out of the book-room."
+
+When I brought it to her, she turned to Captain Brown:--
+
+"Now allow _me_ to read you a scene, and then the present company can
+judge between your favorite Mr. Boz and Dr. Johnson."
+
+She read one of the conversations between Rasselas and Imlac, in a
+high-pitched, majestic voice; and when she had ended she said, "I
+imagine I am now justified in my preference of Dr. Johnson as a writer
+of fiction." The captain screwed his lips up, and drummed on the
+table, but he did not speak. She thought she would give a finishing
+blow or two.
+
+"I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish
+in numbers."
+
+"How was The Rambler published, ma'am?" asked Captain Brown, in a low
+voice, which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have heard.
+
+"Dr. Johnson's style is a model for young beginners. My father
+recommended it to me when I began to write letters--I have formed my
+own style upon it; I recommend it to your favorite."
+
+"I should be very sorry for him to exchange his style for any such
+pompous writing," said Captain Brown.
+
+Miss Jenkyns felt this as a personal affront, in a way of which the
+captain had not dreamed. Epistolary writing she and her friends
+considered as her _forte_. Many a copy of many a letter have I seen
+written and corrected on the slate, before she "seized the half-hour
+just previous to post-time to assure her friends" of this or that; and
+Dr. Johnson was, as she said, her model in these compositions. She
+drew herself up with dignity, and only replied to Captain Brown's last
+remark by saying, with marked emphasis on every syllable, "I prefer
+Dr. Johnson to Mr. Boz."
+
+It is said--I won't vouch for the fact--that Captain Brown was heard
+to say, _sotto voce_, "D----n Dr. Johnson!" If he did, he was penitent
+afterwards, as he showed by going to stand near Miss Jenkyns's
+arm-chair, and endeavoring to beguile her into conversation on some
+more pleasing subject. But she was inexorable.
+
+
+
+
+VISITING
+
+From 'Cranford'
+
+
+One morning, as Miss Matty and I sat at our work--it was before twelve
+o'clock, and Miss Matty had not changed the cap with yellow ribbons
+that had been Miss Jenkyns's best, and which Miss Matty was now
+wearing out in private, putting on the one made in imitation of Mrs.
+Jamieson's at all times when she expected to be seen--Martha came up,
+and asked if Miss Betty Barker might speak to her mistress. Miss Matty
+assented, and quickly disappeared to change the yellow ribbons while
+Miss Barker came up-stairs; but as she had forgotten her spectacles,
+and was rather flurried by the unusual time of the visit, I was not
+surprised to see her return with one cap on the top of the other. She
+was quite unconscious of it herself, and looked at us with bland
+satisfaction. Nor do I think Miss Barker perceived it; for putting
+aside the little circumstance that she was not so young as she had
+been, she was very much absorbed in her errand, which she delivered
+herself of with an oppressive modesty that found vent in endless
+apologies.
+
+Miss Betty Barker was the daughter of the old clerk at Cranford who
+had officiated in Mr. Jenkyns's time. She and her sister had had
+pretty good situations as ladies'-maids, and had saved money enough to
+set up a milliner's shop, which had been patronized by the ladies in
+the neighborhood. Lady Arley, for instance, would occasionally give
+Miss Barkers the pattern of an old cap of hers, which they immediately
+copied and circulated among the _élite_ of Cranford. I say the
+_élite_, for Miss Barkers had caught the trick of the place, and
+piqued themselves upon their "aristocratic connection." They would not
+sell their caps and ribbons to any one without a pedigree. Many a
+farmer's wife or daughter turned away huffed from Miss Barkers' select
+millinery, and went rather to the universal shop, where the profits of
+brown soap and moist sugar enabled the proprietor to go straight to
+(Paris, he said, until he found his customers too patriotic and
+John-Bullish to wear what the Mounseers wore) London, where, as he
+often told his customers, Queen Adelaide had appeared only the very
+week before in a cap exactly like the one he showed them, trimmed with
+yellow and blue ribbons, and had been complimented by King William on
+the becoming nature of her head-dress.
+
+Miss Barkers, who confined themselves to truth and did not approve of
+miscellaneous customers, throve notwithstanding. They were
+self-denying, good people. Many a time have I seen the eldest of them
+(she that had been maid to Mrs. Jamieson) carrying out some delicate
+mess to a poor person. They only aped their betters in having "nothing
+to do" with the class immediately below theirs. And when Miss Barker
+died, their profits and income were found to be such that Miss Betty
+was justified in shutting up shop and retiring from business. She also
+(as I think I have before said) set up her cow,--a mark of
+respectability in Cranford almost as decided as setting up a gig is
+among some people. She dressed finer than any lady in Cranford, and we
+did not wonder at it; for it was understood that she was wearing out
+all the bonnets and caps and outrageous ribbons which had once formed
+her stock in trade. It was five or six years since she had given up
+shop, so in any other place than Cranford her dress might have been
+considered _passé_.
+
+And now Miss Betty Barker had called to invite Miss Matty to tea at
+her house on the following Tuesday. She gave me also an impromptu
+invitation, as I happened to be a visitor--though I could see she had
+a little fear lest, since my father had gone to live in Drumble, he
+might have engaged in that "horrid cotton trade," and so dragged his
+family down out of "aristocratic society." She prefaced this
+invitation with so many apologies that she quite excited my curiosity.
+"Her presumption" was to be excused. What had she been doing? She
+seemed so overpowered by it, I could only think that she had been
+writing to Queen Adelaide to ask for a receipt for washing lace; but
+the act which she so characterized was only an invitation she had
+carried to her sister's former mistress, Mrs. Jamieson. "Her former
+occupation considered, could Miss Matty excuse the liberty?" Ah!
+thought I, she has found out that double cap, and is going to rectify
+Miss Matty's head-dress. No; it was simply to extend her invitation to
+Miss Matty and to me. Miss Matty bowed acceptance; and I wondered that
+in the graceful action she did not feel the unusual weight and
+extraordinary height of her head-dress. But I do not think she did,
+for she recovered her balance, and went on talking to Miss Betty in a
+kind, condescending manner, very different from the fidgety way she
+would have had if she had suspected how singular her appearance was.
+
+"Mrs. Jamieson is coming, I think you said?" asked Miss Matty.
+
+"Yes. Mrs. Jamieson most kindly and condescendingly said she would be
+happy to come. One little stipulation she made, that she should bring
+Carlo. I told her that if I had a weakness, it was for dogs."
+
+"And Miss Pole?" questioned Miss Matty, who was thinking of her pool
+at Preference, in which Carlo would not be available as a partner.
+
+"I am going to ask Miss Pole. Of course, I could not think of asking
+her until I had asked you, madam--the rector's daughter, madam.
+Believe me, I do not forget the situation my father held under yours."
+
+"And Mrs. Forrester, of course?"
+
+"And Mrs. Forrester. I thought, in fact, of going to her before I went
+to Miss Pole. Although her circumstances are changed, madam, she was
+born a Tyrrell, and we can never forget her alliance to the Bigges of
+Bigelow Hall."
+
+Miss Matty cared much more for the little circumstance of her being a
+very good card-player. Miss Barker looked at me with sidelong dignity,
+as much as to say, although a retired milliner, she was no democrat,
+and understood the difference of ranks.
+
+"May I beg you to come as near half-past six to my little dwelling as
+possible, Miss Matilda? Mrs. Jamieson dines at five, but has kindly
+promised not to delay her visit beyond that time--half-past six." And
+with a swimming curtsy Miss Betty Barker took her leave....
+
+The spring evenings were getting bright and long, when three or four
+ladies in calashes met at Miss Barker's door. Do you know what a
+calash is? It is a covering worn over caps, not unlike the heads
+fastened on old-fashioned gigs; but sometimes it is not quite so
+large. This kind of head-gear always made an awful impression on the
+children in Cranford; and now two or three left off their play in the
+quiet sunny little street, and gathered in wondering silence round
+Miss Pole, Miss Matty, and myself. We were silent too, so that we
+could hear loud suppressed whispers inside Miss Barker's house: "Wait,
+Peggy! wait till I've run up-stairs and washed my hands. When I cough,
+open the door; I'll not be a minute."
+
+And true enough, it was not a minute before we heard a noise, between
+a sneeze and a crow; on which the door flew open. Behind it stood a
+round-eyed maiden, all aghast at the honorable company of calashes,
+who marched in without a word. She recovered presence of mind enough
+to usher us into a small room, which had been a shop, but was now
+converted into a temporary dressing-room. There we unpinned and shook
+ourselves, and arranged our features before the glass into a sweet and
+gracious company face; and then, bowing backwards with "After you,
+ma'am," we allowed Mrs. Forrester to take precedence up the narrow
+staircase that led to Miss Barker's drawing-room. There she sat, as
+stately and composed as though we had never heard that odd-sounding
+cough, from which her throat must have been even then sore and rough.
+Kind, gentle, shabbily dressed Mrs. Forrester was immediately
+conducted to the second place of honor--a seat arranged something like
+Prince Albert's near the Queen's--good, but not so good. The place of
+pre-eminence was of course reserved for the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson,
+who presently came panting up the stairs--Carlo rushing round her on
+her progress, as if he meant to trip her up.
+
+And now Miss Betty Barker was a proud and happy woman! She stirred the
+fire, and shut the door, and sat as near to it as she could, quite on
+the edge of her chair. When Peggy came in, tottering under the weight
+of the tea-tray, I noticed that Miss Barker was sadly afraid lest
+Peggy should not keep her distance sufficiently. She and her mistress
+were on very familiar terms in their every-day intercourse, and Peggy
+wanted now to make several little confidences to her, which Miss
+Barker was on thorns to hear, but which she thought it her duty as a
+lady to repress. So she turned away from all Peggy's asides and signs;
+but she made one or two very malapropos answers to what was said; and
+at last, seized with a bright idea, she exclaimed, "Poor sweet Carlo!
+I'm forgetting him. Come down-stairs with me, poor little doggie, and
+it shall have its tea, it shall!"
+
+In a few minutes she returned, bland and benignant as before; but I
+thought she had forgotten to give the "poor little doggie" anything to
+eat, judging by the avidity with which he swallowed down chance pieces
+of cake. The tea tray was abundantly laden--I was pleased to see it, I
+was so hungry; but I was afraid the ladies present might think it
+vulgarly heaped up. I know they would have done at their own houses;
+but somehow the heaps disappeared here. I saw Mrs. Jamieson eating
+seed-cake slowly and considerately, as she did everything; and I was
+rather surprised, for I knew she had told us on the occasion of her
+last party that she never had it in her house, it reminded her so much
+of scented soap. She always gave us Savoy biscuits. However, Mrs.
+Jamieson, kindly indulgent to Miss Barker's want of knowledge of the
+customs of high life, and to spare her feelings, ate three large
+pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of
+countenance, not unlike a cow's.
+
+After tea there was some little demur and difficulty. We were six in
+number; four could play at Preference, and for the other two there was
+Cribbage. But all except myself (I was rather afraid of the Cranford
+ladies at cards, for it was the most earnest and serious business they
+ever engaged in) were anxious to be of the "pool." Even Miss Barker,
+while declaring she did not know Spadille from Manille, was evidently
+hankering to take a hand. The dilemma was soon put an end to by a
+singular kind of noise. If a baron's daughter-in-law could ever be
+supposed to snore, I should have said Mrs. Jamieson did so then; for
+overcome by the heat of the room, and inclined to doze by nature, the
+temptation of that very comfortable arm-chair had been too much for
+her, and Mrs. Jamieson was nodding. Once or twice she opened her eyes
+with an effort, and calmly but unconsciously smiled upon us; but
+by-and-by even her benevolence was not equal to this exertion, and she
+was sound asleep.
+
+"It is very gratifying to me," whispered Miss Barker at the card table
+to her three opponents, whom notwithstanding her ignorance of the game
+she was "basting" most unmercifully--"very gratifying indeed, to see
+how completely Mrs. Jamieson feels at home in my poor little dwelling;
+she could not have paid me a greater compliment."
+
+Miss Barker provided me with some literature, in the shape of three or
+four handsomely bound fashion-books ten or twelve years old;
+observing, as she put a little table and a candle for my special
+benefit, that she knew young people liked to look at pictures. Carlo
+lay and snorted and started at his mistress's feet. He too was quite
+at home.
+
+The card table was an animated scene to watch: four ladies' heads,
+with niddle-noddling caps, all nearly meeting over the middle of the
+table in their eagerness to whisper quick enough and loud enough; and
+every now and then came Miss Barker's "Hush, ladies! if you please,
+hush! Mrs. Jamieson is asleep."
+
+It was very difficult to steer clear between Mrs. Forrester's deafness
+and Mrs. Jamieson's sleepiness. But Miss Barker managed her arduous
+task well. She repeated the whisper to Mrs. Forrester, distorting her
+face considerably in order to show by the motions of her lips what was
+said; and then she smiled kindly all round at us, and murmured to
+herself, "Very gratifying indeed; I wish my poor sister had been alive
+to see this day."
+
+Presently the door was thrown wide open; Carlo started to his feet
+with a loud snapping bark, and Mrs. Jamieson awoke; or perhaps she had
+not been asleep--as she said almost directly, the room had been so
+light she had been glad to keep her eyes shut, but had been listening
+with great interest to all our amusing and agreeable conversation.
+Peggy came in once more, red with importance. Another tray! "O
+gentility!" thought I, "can you endure this last shock?" For Miss
+Barker had ordered (nay, I doubt not prepared, although she did say,
+"Why! Peggy, what have you brought us?" and looked pleasantly
+surprised at the unexpected pleasure) all sorts of good things for
+supper--scalloped oysters, potted lobsters, jelly, a dish called
+"little Cupids" (which was in great favor with the Cranford ladies,
+although too expensive to be given except on solemn and state
+occasions--macaroons sopped in brandy, I should have called it, if I
+had not known its more refined and classical name). In short, we were
+evidently to be feasted with all that was sweetest and best; and we
+thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our
+gentility--which never ate suppers in general, but which, like most
+non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.
+
+Miss Barker in her former sphere had, I daresay, been made acquainted
+with the beverage they call cherry brandy. We none of us had ever seen
+such a thing, and rather shrank back when she proffered it us--"just a
+little, leetle glass, ladies; after the oysters and lobsters, you
+know. Shell-fish are sometimes thought not very wholesome." We all
+shook our heads like female mandarins; but at last Mrs. Jamieson
+suffered herself to be persuaded, and we followed her lead. It was not
+exactly unpalatable, though so hot and so strong that we thought
+ourselves bound to give evidence that we were not accustomed to such
+things by coughing terribly--almost as strangely as Miss Barker had
+done, before we were admitted by Peggy.
+
+"It's very strong," said Miss Pole, as she put down her empty glass;
+"I do believe there's spirit in it."
+
+"Only a little drop--just necessary to make it keep," said Miss
+Barker. "You know we put brandy paper over preserves to make them
+keep. I often feel tipsy myself from eating damson tart."
+
+I question whether damson tart would have opened Mrs. Jamieson's heart
+as the cherry brandy did; but she told us of a coming event,
+respecting which she had been quite silent till that moment.
+
+"My sister-in-law, Lady Glenmire, is coming to stay with me." There
+was a chorus of "Indeed!" and then a pause. Each one rapidly reviewed
+her wardrobe, as to its fitness to appear in the presence of a baron's
+widow; for of course a series of small festivals were always held in
+Cranford on the arrival of a visitor at any of our friends' houses. We
+felt very pleasantly excited on the present occasion.
+
+Not long after this, the maids and the lanterns were announced. Mrs.
+Jamieson had the sedan-chair, which squeezed itself into Miss Barker's
+narrow lobby with some difficulty, and most literally "stopped the
+way." It required some skillful manoeuvring on the part of the old
+chairmen (shoemakers by day, but when summoned to carry the sedan,
+dressed up in a strange old livery--long greatcoats with small capes,
+coeval with the sedan and similar to the dress of the class in
+Hogarth's pictures) to edge, and back, and try at it again, and
+finally to succeed in carrying their burden out of Miss Barker's front
+door. Then we heard their pit-a-pat along the quiet little street, as
+we put on our calashes and pinned up our gowns; Miss Barker hovering
+about us with offers of help, which if she had not remembered her
+former occupation, and wished us to forget it, would have been much
+more pressing.
+
+
+
+
+THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
+
+(1811-1872)
+
+BY ROBERT SANDERSON
+
+[Illustration: THÉOPHILE GAUTIER]
+
+
+Théophile Gautier was born in Tarbes (Department of the
+Hautes-Pyrénées) in Southern France, August 31st, 1811. Like all
+French boys, he was sent to the lycée (academy), where he promised to
+be a brilliant scholar; but his father was really his tutor, and to
+him Gautier attributed his instruction. Young Théophile showed marked
+preference for the so-called authors of the Decadence--Claudianus,
+Martial, Petronius, and others; also for the old French writers,
+especially Villon and Rabelais, whom he says he knew by heart. This is
+significant, in view of the young man's strong tendencies, later on,
+towards the new romantic school. The artistic temperament was very
+strong in him; and while still carrying on his studies at college he
+entered the painter Rioult's studio. His introduction to Victor Hugo
+in 1830 may be considered the decisive point in Gautier's career: from
+that day he gave up painting and became a fanatic admirer of the
+romantic leader.
+
+A short time afterwards, the first representation of 'Hernani' took
+place (February 25th, 1830), an important date in the life of Gautier.
+It was on this occasion that he put on for the only time that famous
+red waistcoat, which, with his long black mane streaming down his
+back, so horrified the staid Parisian bourgeois. This red waistcoat
+turns out, after all, not to have been a waistcoat at all, but a
+doublet; nor was it red, but pink. No truer is the legend, according
+to Gautier, that on this memorable occasion, armed with his two
+formidable fists, he felled right and left the terrified bourgeois. He
+says that he was at that time rather delicate, and had not yet
+developed that prodigious strength which later on enabled him to
+strike a 520-pound blow on a Turk's-head. In appearance Gautier was a
+large corpulent man with a leonine countenance, swarthy complexion,
+long black hair falling over his shoulders, black beard, and brilliant
+black eyes; an Oriental in looks as well as in some of his tastes. He
+had a passion for cats. His house was overrun by them, and he seldom
+wrote without having one on his lap. The privations he underwent
+during the siege of Paris, doubly hard to a man of Gautier's
+Gargantuesque appetite, no doubt hastened his death. He died on
+October 23d, 1872, of hypertrophy of the heart.
+
+Gautier is one of those writers of whom one may say a vast deal of
+good and a vast deal of harm. His admirers think that justice has not
+been done him, that his fame will go on rising and his name will live
+as one of the great writers of France; others think that his name may
+perhaps not entirely disappear, but that if he is remembered at all it
+will be solely as the author of 'Émaux et Camées' (Enamels and
+Cameos). He wrote in his youth a book that did him great harm in the
+eyes of the public; but he has written something else besides
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin,' and both in prose and poetry we shall find a
+good deal to admire in him. One thing is certain: he is a marvelous
+stylist. In his earliest poems Gautier already possesses that
+admirable artistic skill that prompts him to choose his words as a
+painter his colors, or a jeweler his gems and stones, so as to produce
+the most brilliant effects: these first compositions also have a
+grace, a charm, that we shall find lacking later on, for as he
+proceeds with his work he pays more and more attention to form and
+finish.
+
+'Albertus, or Soul and Sin,' the closing poem of Gautier's first
+collection, is a "semi-diabolic, semi-fashionable" legend. An old
+witch, Veronica, a second Meg Merrilies, transforms herself into a
+beautiful maiden and makes love to Albertus, a young artist--otherwise
+Gautier himself. He cares for nothing but his art, but falls a victim
+to the spell cast over him by the siren. At the stroke of midnight,
+Veronica, to the young man's horror, from a beautiful woman changes
+back to the old hag she was, and carries him off to a place where
+witches, sorcerers, hobgoblins, harpies, ghouls, and other frightful
+creatures are holding a monstrous saturnalia; at the end of which,
+Albertus is left for dead in a ditch of the Appian Way with broken
+back and twisted neck. What does it all mean? the reader may ask. That
+"the wages of sin is death" seems to be the moral contained in this
+poem, if indeed any moral is intended at all. Be that as it may,
+'Albertus' is a literary gem in its way; a work in which the poet has
+given free scope to his brilliant imagination, and showered by the
+handful the gems and jewels in his literary casket. Gautier may be
+said to have possessed the poetry of Death--some would say its
+horrors. This sentiment of horror at the repulsive manner of man's
+total destruction finds most vivid expression in 'The Comedy of
+Death,' a fantastic poem divided into two parts, 'Death in Life' and
+'Life in Death.' The dialogue between the bride and the earth-worm is
+of a flesh-creeping nature.
+
+It is however as the poet of 'Émaux et Camées' (Enamels and Cameos)
+that Théophile Gautier will be chiefly remembered. Every poem but one
+in this collection is written in short octosyllabic verse, and every
+one is what the title implies,--a precious stone, a chiseled gem.
+Gautier's wonderful and admirable talent for grouping together certain
+words that produce on one's eye and mind the effect of a beautiful
+picture, his intense love of art, of the outline, the plastic, appear
+throughout this work. You realize on reading 'Émaux et Camées,' more
+perhaps than in any other work by this writer, that the poet is fully
+conscious of his powers and knows just how to use them. Any poem may
+be selected at random, and will be found a work of art.
+
+The same qualities that distinguish Gautier as a poet are to be found
+in his novels, narratives of travels, criticisms,--in short, in
+everything he wrote; intense love for the beautiful,--physically
+beautiful,--wonderful talent for describing it. Of his novels,
+properly speaking, there are four that stand out prominently, each
+very different in its subject,--a proof of Gautier's great
+versatility,--all perfect in their execution. The first is
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin'; it is an immoral book, but it is a beautiful
+book, not only because written with a rare elegance of style, but also
+because it makes you love beauty. Briefly, 'Mademoiselle de Maupin'
+may be called a pæan to beauty, sung by its high priest Théophile
+Gautier.
+
+The other remarkable novels by this writer are 'Le Capitaine Fracasse'
+(Captain Smash-All), 'Le Roman de la Momie' (The Romance of the
+Mummy), and 'Spirite.' 'Captain Fracasse,' although not published
+until 1863, had been announced long beforehand; and Gautier had worked
+at it, off and on, for twenty years. It belongs to that class of novel
+known as picaresque--romances of adventures and battles. 'Captain
+Fracasse' is certainly the most popular of Gautier's works.
+
+'The Romance of the Mummy' is a very remarkable book, in which science
+and fiction have been blended in the most artistic and clever manner;
+picturesque, like all of Gautier's writings, but the work of a savant
+as well as of a novelist. Here more than in any other book by this
+author,--with the exception perhaps of 'Arria Marcella,'--Gautier has
+revived in a most lifelike way an entire civilization, so long
+extinct. 'The Romance of the Mummy' abounds in beautiful descriptions.
+The description of the finding of the mummy, that of the royal tombs,
+of Thebes with its hundred gates, the triumphal entrance of Pharaoh
+into that city, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, are all
+marvelous pictures, that not only fill the reader with the same
+admiration he would evince at the sight of a painting by one of the
+great masters, but give him the illusion of witnessing in the body the
+scenes so admirably described.
+
+'Spirite,' a fantastic story, is a source of surprise to readers
+familiar with Gautier's other works: they find it hard to conceive
+that so thorough a materialist as Gautier could ever have produced a
+work so spiritualistic in its nature. The clever handling of a mystic
+subject, the richness and coloring of the descriptions, together with
+a certain ideal and poetical vein that runs through the book, make of
+'Spirite' one of Gautier's most remarkable works.
+
+Théophile Gautier has also written a number of _nouvelles_ or short
+novels, and tales, some of which are striking compositions. 'Arria
+Marcella' is one of these; a brilliant, masterly composition, in which
+Gautier gives us such a perfect illusion of the past. Under his magic
+pen we find ourselves walking the streets of Pompeii and living over
+the life of the Romans in the first century of our era; and 'Une Nuit
+de Cléopâtre' (A Night with Cleopatra) is a vivid resurrection of the
+brilliant Egyptian court.
+
+Of his various journeys to Spain, Italy, and the Orient, Gautier has
+given us the most captivating relations. To many this is not the least
+interesting portion of Gautier's work. The same qualities that are so
+striking in his poems and novels--vividness of description, love of
+the picturesque, wonderful power of expression--are likewise apparent
+in his relations of travels.
+
+As a literary and especially as an art critic, Gautier ranks high.
+Bringing to this branch of literature the same qualities that
+distinguish him in others, he created a descriptive and picturesque
+method of criticism peculiarly his own. Of his innumerable articles on
+art and literature, some have been collected under the names of 'Les
+Grotesques,' a series of essays on a number of poets of the end of the
+sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, ridiculed by
+Boileau, but in whom Gautier finds some wheat among the chaff. The
+'History of Dramatic Art in France for the Last Twenty-five Years,'
+beginning with the year 1837, will be consulted with great profit by
+those who are curious to follow the dramatic movement in that country.
+Of his essays on art, one is as excellent as the other; all the great
+masters are treated with a loving and admiring hand.
+
+Among the miscellaneous works of this prolific writer should be
+mentioned 'Ménagerie Intime' (Home Menagerie), in which the author
+makes us acquainted in a most charming and familiar way with his home
+life, and the various pets, cats, dogs, white rats, parrots, etc.,
+that in turn shared his house with him; _la Nature chez elle_ (Nature
+at home), that none but a close observer of nature could have
+written.
+
+The last book written by Gautier before his death was 'Tableaux de
+Siège' (Siege Pictures, 1871). The subjects are treated just in the
+way we might expect from such a writer, from a purely artistic point
+of view.
+
+Gautier has written for the stage only short plays and ballets; but if
+all he ever wrote were published, his works would fill nearly three
+hundred volumes. In spite of the quantity and quality of his books,
+the French Academy did not open her doors to him; but no more did it
+to Molière, Beaumarchais, Balzac, and many others. Opinions still vary
+greatly as to Théophile Gautier's literary merits; but his brilliant
+descriptive powers, his eminent qualities as a stylist, together with
+the influence he exercised over contemporary letters as the introducer
+of the plastic in literature, would seem sufficient to rank him among
+the great writers of France.
+
+                                     [Signature: Robert Sanderson]
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTRY OF PHARAOH INTO THEBES
+
+From 'The Romance of a Mummy'
+
+
+At length their chariot reached the manoeuvring-ground, an immense
+inclosure, carefully leveled, used for splendid military displays.
+Terraces, one above the other, which must have employed for years the
+thirty nations led away into slavery, formed a frame _en relief_ for
+the gigantic parallelogram; sloping walls built of crude bricks lined
+these terraces; their tops were covered, several rows deep, by
+hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, whose white or brightly colored
+costumes blazed in the sun with that perpetually restless movement
+which characterizes a multitude, even when it appears motionless;
+behind this line of spectators the cars, chariots, and litters, with
+their drivers, grooms, and slaves, looked like the encampment of an
+emigrating nation, such was their immense number; for Thebes, the
+marvel of the ancient world, counted more inhabitants than did some
+kingdoms.
+
+The fine, even sand of the vast arena, bordered with a million heads,
+gleamed like mica dust beneath the light, falling from a sky as blue
+as the enamel on the statuettes of Osiris. On the south side of the
+field the terraces were broken, making way for a road which stretched
+towards Upper Ethiopia, the whole length of the Libyan chain. In the
+corresponding corner, the opening in the massive brick walls prolonged
+the roads to the Rhamses-Maïamoun palace....
+
+A frightful uproar, rumbling, deep, and mighty as that of an
+approaching sea, arose in the distance and drowned the thousand
+murmurs of the crowd, like the roar of the lion which hushes the
+barking of the jackals. Soon the noise of instruments of music could
+be distinguished amidst this terrestrial thunder, produced by the
+chariot wheels and the rhythmic pace of the foot-soldiers. A sort of
+reddish cloud, like that raised by the desert blasts, filled the sky
+in that direction, yet the wind had gone down; there was not a breath
+of air, and the smallest branches of the palm-trees hung motionless,
+as if they had been carved on a granite capital; not a hair moved on
+the women's moist foreheads, and the fluted streamers of their
+head-dresses hung loosely down their backs. This powdery fog was
+caused by the marching army, and hung over it like a fallow cloud.
+
+The tumult increases; the whirlwinds of dust opened, and the first
+files of musicians entered the immense arena, to the great
+satisfaction of the multitude, who in spite of its respect for his
+Majesty were beginning to tire of waiting beneath a sun which would
+have melted any other skulls than those of the Egyptians.
+
+The advance guard of musicians halted for several instants; colleges
+of priests, deputations of the principal inhabitants of Thebes,
+crossed the manoeuvring-ground to meet the Pharaoh, and arranged
+themselves in a row in postures of the most profound respect, in such
+manner as to give free passage to the procession.
+
+The band, which alone was a small army, consisted of drums, tabors,
+trumpets, and sistras.
+
+The first squad passed, blowing a deafening blast upon their short
+clarions of polished brass, which shone like gold. Each of these
+trumpeters carried a second horn under his arm, as if the instrument
+might grow weary sooner than the man. The costume of these men
+consisted of a short tunic, fastened by a sash with ends falling in
+front; a small band, in which were stuck two ostrich feathers hanging
+over on either side, bound their thick hair. These plumes, so worn,
+recalled to mind the antennae of scarabæi, and gave the wearers an odd
+look of being insects.
+
+The drummers, clothed in a simple gathered skirt, and naked to the
+waist, beat the onagra-skin heads of their rounded drums with
+sycamore-wood drumsticks, their instruments suspended by leathern
+shoulder-belts, and observed the time which a drum-major marked for
+them by repeatedly turning towards them and clapping his hands.
+
+After the drummers came the sistra-players, who shook their
+instruments by a quick, abrupt motion, and made at measured intervals
+the metal links ring on the four bronze bars.
+
+The tabor-players carried their oblong instruments crosswise, held up
+by a scarf passed around the neck, and struck the lightly stretched
+parchment with both hands.
+
+Each company of musicians numbered at least two hundred men; but the
+hurricane of noise produced by trumpets, drums, tabors, and sistras,
+and which would have drawn blood from the ears inside a palace, was
+none too loud or too unbearable beneath the vast cupola of heaven, in
+the midst of this immense open space, amongst this buzzing crowd, at
+the head of this army which would baffle nomenclators, and which was
+now advancing with a roar as of great waters.
+
+And was it too much to have eight hundred musicians preceding a
+Pharaoh who was the best loved of Ammon-Ra, represented by colossal
+statues of basalt and granite sixty cubits high, whose name was
+written in cartouches on imperishable monuments, and his history
+painted and sculptured and painted on the walls of the hypostyle
+chambers, on the sides of pylons, in interminable _bas-reliefs_, in
+frescoes without end? Was it indeed too much for a king who could
+raise a hundred conquered races by the hair of their heads, and from
+his high throne corrected the nations with his whip; for a living sun
+burning their dazzled eyes; for a god, almost eternal?
+
+After the musicians came the barbarian captives, strangely formed,
+with brutish faces, black skins, woolly hair, resembling apes as much
+as men, and dressed in the costume of their country, a short skirt
+above the hips, held by a single brace, embroidered in different
+colors.
+
+An ingenious and whimsical cruelty had suggested the way in which the
+prisoners were chained. Some were bound with their elbows drawn behind
+their backs; others with their hands lifted above their heads, in a
+still more painful position; one had his wrists fastened in wooden
+cangs (instruments of torture, still used in China); another was half
+strangled in a sort of pillory; or a chain of them were linked
+together by the same rope, each victim having a knot round his neck.
+It seemed as if those who had bound these unfortunates had found a
+pleasure in forcing them into unnatural positions; and they advanced
+before their conqueror with awkward and tottering gait, rolling their
+large eyes and contorted with pain.
+
+Guards walked beside them, regulating their step by beating them with
+staves.
+
+Tawny women, with long flowing hair, carrying their children in ragged
+strips of cloth bound about their foreheads, came behind them; bent,
+covered with shame, exhibiting their naked squalor and deformity: a
+wretched company, devoted to the most degrading uses.
+
+Others, young and beautiful, with lighter skin, their arms encircled
+by broad ivory bracelets, their ears pulled down by large metal discs,
+were enveloped in long tunics with wide sleeves, an embroidered hem
+around the neck, and falling in small flat folds to their ankles, upon
+which anklets rattled. Poor girls, torn from country, family, perhaps
+lovers, smiling through their tears! For the power of beauty is
+boundless; strangeness gives rise to caprice; and perhaps the royal
+favor awaited one of these barbarian captives in the depths of the
+gynæceum.
+
+They were accompanied by soldiers who kept away the crowd.
+
+The standard-bearers came next, lifting high the gilded staves of
+their flags, representing mystic baris, sacred hawks, heads of Hathor
+crowned with ostrich plumes, winged ibexes, inscriptions embellished
+with the King's name, crocodiles, and other religious or warlike
+emblems. Long white streamers, spotted with black, were tied to these
+standards, and floated gracefully with every motion. At sight of the
+standards announcing the appearance of Pharaoh, the deputations of
+priests and notables raised towards him their supplicating hands, or
+let them hang, palm outwards, against their knees. Some even
+prostrated themselves, with elbows pressed to their sides, their faces
+in the dust, in attitudes of absolute submission and profound
+adoration. The spectators waved their large palm-leaves in every
+direction.
+
+A herald, or reader, holding in one hand a roll covered with
+hieroglyphics, came forward quite alone between the standard-bearers
+and the incense-bearers who preceded the King's litter.
+
+He proclaimed in a loud voice, resounding as a brass trumpet, the
+victories of the Pharaoh; he recounted the results of the different
+battles, the number of captives and war chariots taken from the enemy,
+the amount of plunder, the measures of gold dust, and the elephant's
+tusks, the ostrich feathers, the masses of fragrant gum, the giraffes,
+lions, panthers, and other rare animals; he mentioned the names of the
+barbarian chiefs killed by the javelins or the arrows of his Majesty,
+Aroëris, the all-powerful, the loved of the gods.
+
+At each announcement the people sent up an immense cry, and from the
+top of the slopes strewed the conqueror's path with long green
+palm-branches they held in their hands.
+
+At last the Pharaoh appeared!
+
+Priests, turning towards him at regular intervals, stretched out their
+amschiras to him, first throwing incense on the coals blazing in the
+little bronze cup, holding them by a handle formed like a sceptre,
+with the head of some sacred animal at the other end; they walked
+backwards respectfully, while the fragrant blue smoke ascended to the
+nostrils of the triumpher, apparently as indifferent to these honors
+as a divinity of bronze or basalt.
+
+Twelve oëris, or military chiefs, their heads covered by a light
+helmet surrounded by ostrich feathers, naked to the waist, their loins
+enveloped in a narrow skirt with stiff folds, their targes suspended
+from the front of their belts, supported a sort of huge shield, on
+which rested the Pharaoh's throne. It was a chair, with arms and legs
+in the form of a lion, high-backed, with large full cushion, adorned
+on the sides with a kind of trellis-work of pink and blue flowers; the
+arms, legs, moldings of the seat were gilded, and the parts which were
+not, flamed with bright colors.
+
+On either side of the litter, four fan-bearers waved enormous
+semicircular fans, fixed to gilded staves; two priests held aloft a
+large richly decorated horn of plenty, from which fell bunches of
+enormous lotus blooms. The Pharaoh wore a mitre-like helmet, cut out
+to make room for the ear, and brought down over the back of the neck
+to protect it. On the blue ground of the helmet scintillated a
+quantity of dots like the eyes of birds, made of three circles, black,
+white, and red; a scarlet and yellow border ran along the edge, and
+the symbolic viper, twisting its golden coils at the back, stood erect
+above the royal forehead; two long curled feathers, purple in color,
+floated over his shoulders, and completed his majestically elegant
+head-dress.
+
+A wide gorget, with seven rows of enamels, precious stones, and golden
+beads, fell over the Pharaoh's chest and gleamed brightly in the
+sunlight. His upper garment was a sort of loose shirt, with pink and
+black squares; the ends, lengthening into narrow slips, were wound
+several times about his bust and bound it closely; the sleeves, cut
+short near the shoulder, and bordered with intersecting lines of gold,
+red, and blue, exposed his round, strong arms, the left furnished with
+a large metal wristband, meant to lessen the vibration of the string
+when he discharged an arrow from his triangular bow; and the right,
+ornamented by a bracelet in the form of a serpent in several coils,
+held a long gold sceptre with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his
+body was wrapped in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited,
+bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold
+plates. Between the band and the belt his torso appeared, shining and
+polished like pink granite shaped by a cunning workman. Sandals with
+returned toes, like skates, shod his long narrow feet, placed together
+like those of the gods on the temple walls.
+
+His smooth beardless face, with large clearly cut features, which it
+seemed beyond any human power to disturb, and which the blood of
+common life did not color, with its death-like pallor, sealed lips,
+enormous eyes enlarged with black lines, the lids no more lowered than
+those of the sacred hawk, inspired by its very immobility a feeling of
+respectful fear. One might have thought that these fixed eyes were
+searching for eternity and the Infinite; they never seemed to rest on
+surrounding objects. The satiety of pleasures, the surfeit of wishes
+satisfied as soon as expressed, the isolation of a demigod who has no
+equal among mortals, the disgust for perpetual adoration, and as it
+were the weariness of continual triumph, had forever frozen this face,
+implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls
+could not have had a more majestic and calm expression.
+
+A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws
+like a sphinx on its pedestal, and blinked its yellow eyes.
+
+A rope, attached to the litter, bound the war chariots of the
+vanquished chiefs to the Pharaoh. He dragged them behind him like
+animals in leash. These men, with fierce despairing faces, their
+elbows drawn together by a strap and forming an ungraceful angle,
+tottered awkwardly at every motion of the chariots, driven by
+Egyptians.
+
+Next came the chariots of the young princes royal, drawn by
+thoroughbred horses, elegantly and nobly formed, with slender legs,
+sinewy houghs, their manes cut short like a brush, harnessed by twos,
+tossing their red-plumed heads, with metal-bossed headstalls and
+frontlets. A curved pole, upheld on their withers, covered with
+scarlet panels, two collars surmounted by balls of polished brass,
+bound together by a light yoke bent like a bow with upturned ends; a
+bellyband and breastband elaborately stitched and embroidered, and
+rich housings with red or blue stripes and fringed with tassels,
+completed this strong, graceful, and light harness.
+
+The body of the chariot, painted red and white, ornamented with bronze
+plaques and half-spheres, something like the umbo of the shields, was
+flanked with two large quivers placed diagonally opposite each other,
+one filled with arrows and the other with javelins. On the front of
+each, a carved, gilded lion, with set paws, and muzzle wrinkled into a
+frightful grin, seemed ready to spring with a roar upon the enemy.
+
+The young princes had their hair bound with a narrow band, in which
+the royal viper was twisted; their only garment was a tunic gaudily
+embroidered at the neck and sleeves, and held in at the waist by a
+belt of black leather, clasped with a metal plate engraved with
+hieroglyphics. In this belt was a long dagger, with triangular brass
+blade, the handle channeled crosswise, terminated by a hawk's head.
+
+In the chariot, by the side of each prince, stood the charioteer, who
+drove it in battle, and the groom, whose business it was to ward off
+with the shield the blows aimed at the combatant, while the latter
+discharged the arrows or threw the javelins which he took from the
+quivers on either side of the car.
+
+In the wake of the princes followed the chariots, the Egyptian
+cavalry, twenty thousand in number, each drawn by two horses and
+holding three men. They advanced ten in a line, the axletrees
+perilously near together, but never coming in contact with each other,
+so great was the address of the drivers.
+
+Several lighter chariots, used for skirmishing and reconnoitring,
+marched at the head and carried one warrior only, who in order to
+leave his hands free for fighting wound the reins around his body: by
+bending to the right or the left, or backwards, he guided or stopped
+his horses; and it was really wonderful to see the noble animals,
+apparently left to themselves, but governed by imperceptible
+movements, keep up an undisturbedly regular pace....
+
+The stamping of the horses, held in with difficulty, the thundering of
+the bronze-covered wheels, the metallic clash of weapons, gave to this
+line something formidable and imposing enough to raise terror in the
+most intrepid bosoms. The helmets, plumes, and breastplates dotted
+with red, green, and yellow, the gilded bows and brass swords,
+glittered and blazed terribly in the light of the sun, open in the
+sky, above the Libyan chain, like a great Osirian eye; and it was felt
+that the onslaught of such an army must sweep away the nations like a
+whirlwind which drives a light straw before it.
+
+Beneath these innumerable wheels the earth resounded and trembled, as
+if it had been moved by some convulsion of nature.
+
+To the chariots succeeded the battalions of infantry, marching in
+order, their shields on the left arm; in the right hand the lance,
+curved club, bow, sling, or axe, according as they were armed; the
+heads of these soldiers were covered with helmets, adorned with two
+horsehair tails, their bodies girded with a cuirass belt of crocodile
+skin. Their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their
+movements, their reddish copper complexions, deepened by a recent
+expedition to the burning regions of Upper Ethiopia, their clothing
+powdered with the desert sand, they awoke admiration by their
+discipline and courage. With soldiers like these, Egypt could conquer
+the world. After them came the allied troops, recognizable from the
+outlandish form of their head-pieces, which looked like truncated
+mitres, or were surmounted by crescents spitted on sharp points. Their
+wide-bladed swords and jagged axes must have produced wounds which
+could not be healed.
+
+Slaves carried on their shoulders or on barrows the spoils enumerated
+by the herald, and wild-beast tamers dragged behind them leashed
+panthers, cheetahs, crouching down as if trying to hide themselves,
+ostriches fluttering their wings, giraffes which overtopped the crowd
+by the entire length of their necks, and even brown bears,--taken,
+they said, in the Mountains of the Moon.
+
+The procession was still passing, long after the King had entered his
+palace.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE MARSH'
+
+
+  It is a pond, whose sleepy water
+  Lies stagnant, covered with a mantle
+  Of lily pads and rushes. . . .
+  Under the creeping duck-weed
+  The wild ducks dip
+  Their sapphire necks glazed with gold;
+  At dawn the teal is seen bathing,
+  And when twilight reigns,
+  It settles between two rushes and sleeps.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE DRAGON-FLY'
+
+
+  Upon the heather sprinkled
+      With morning dew;
+  Upon the wild-rose bush;
+  Upon the shady trees;
+      Upon the hedges
+  Growing along the path;
+
+  Upon the modest and dainty
+            Daisy,
+  That droops its dreamy brow;
+  Upon the rye, like a green billow
+            Unrolled
+  By the winged caprice of the wind,
+  The dragon-fly gently rocks.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOVES
+
+
+  On the hill-side, yonder where are the graves,
+  A fine palm-tree, like a green plume,
+  Stands with head erect; in the evening the doves
+  Come to nestle under its cover.
+
+  But in the morning they leave the branches;
+  Like a spreading necklace, they may be seen
+  Scattering in the blue air, perfectly white,
+  And settling farther upon some roof.
+
+  My soul is the tree where every eve, as they,
+  White swarms of mad visions
+  Fall from heaven, with fluttering wings,
+  To fly away with the first rays.
+
+
+
+
+THE POT OF FLOWERS
+
+
+  Sometimes a child finds a small seed,
+  And at once, delighted with its bright colors,
+  To plant it he takes a porcelain jar
+  Adorned with blue dragons and strange flowers.
+
+  He goes away. The root, snake-like, stretches,
+  Breaks through the earth, blooms, becomes a shrub;
+  Each day, farther down, it sinks its fibrous foot,
+  Until it bursts the sides of the vessel.
+
+  The child returns: surprised, he sees the rich plant
+  Over the vase's débris brandishing its green spikes;
+  He wants to pull it out, but the stem is stubborn.
+  The child persists, and tears his fingers with the pointed arrows.
+
+  Thus grew love in my simple heart;
+  I believed I sowed but a spring flower;
+  'Tis a large aloe, whose root breaks
+  The porcelain vase with the brilliant figures.
+
+
+
+
+PRAYER
+
+
+  As a guardian angel, take me under your wing;
+  Deign to stoop and put out, smiling,
+  Your maternal hand to my little hand
+  To support my steps and keep me from falling!
+
+  For Jesus the sweet Master, with celestial love,
+  Suffered little children to come to him;
+  As an indulgent parent, he submitted to their caresses
+  And played with them without showing weariness.
+
+  O you who resemble those church pictures
+  Where one sees, on a gold background, august Charity
+  Preserving from hunger, preserving from cold,
+  A fair and smiling group sheltered in her folds;
+
+  Like the nursling of the Divine mother,
+  For pity's sake, lift me to your lap;
+  Protect me, poor young girl, alone, an orphan,
+  Whose only hope is in God, whose only hope is in you!
+
+
+
+
+THE POET AND THE CROWD
+
+
+  One day the plain said to the idle mountain:--
+  Nothing ever grows upon thy wind-beaten brow!
+  To the poet, bending thoughtful over his lyre,
+  The crowd also said:--Dreamer, of what use art thou?
+
+  Full of wrath, the mountain answered the plain:--
+  It is I who make the harvests grow upon thy soil;
+  I temper the breath of the noon sun,
+  I stop in the skies the clouds as they fly by.
+
+  With my fingers I knead the snow into avalanches,
+  In my crucible I dissolve the crystals of glaciers,
+  And I pour out, from the tip of my white breasts,
+  In long silver threads, the nourishing streams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The poet, in his turn, answered the crowd:--
+  Allow my pale brow to rest upon my hand.
+  Have I not from my side, from which runs out my soul,
+  Made a spring gush to slake men's thirst?
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST SMILE OF SPRING
+
+
+  While to their perverse work
+  Men run panting,
+  March that laughs, in spite of showers,
+  Quietly gets Spring ready.
+
+  For the little daisies,
+  Slyly, when all sleep,
+  He irons little collars
+  And chisels gold studs.
+
+  Through the orchard and the vineyard,
+  He goes, cunning hair-dresser,
+  With a swan-puff,
+  And powders snow-white the almond-tree.
+
+  Nature rests in her bed;
+  He goes down to the garden
+  And laces the rosebuds
+  In their green velvet corsets.
+
+  While composing solfeggios
+  That he sings in a low tone to the blackbirds,
+  He strews the meadows with snowdrops
+  And the woods with violets.
+
+  By the side of the cress in the brook
+  Where drinks the stag, with listening ear,
+  With his concealed hand he scatters
+  The silver bells of the lilies of the valley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Then, when his work is done
+  And his reign about to end,
+  On the threshold of April, turning his head,
+  He says, Spring, you may come!
+
+
+
+
+THE VETERANS
+
+From 'The Old Guard'
+
+
+  The thing is worth considering;
+  Three ghosts of old veterans
+  In the uniform of the Old Guard,
+  With two shadows of hussars!
+
+  Since the supreme battle
+  One has grown thin, the other stout;
+  The coat once made to fit them
+  Is either too loose or too tight.
+
+  Don't laugh, comrade;
+  But rather bow low
+  To these Achilles of an Iliad
+  That Homer would not have invented.
+
+  Their faces with the swarthy skin
+  Speak of Egypt with the burning sun,
+  And the snows of Russia
+  Still powder their white hair.
+
+  If their joints are stiff, it is because on the battle-field
+  Flags were their only blankets:
+  And if their sleeves don't fit,
+  It is because a cannon-ball took off their arm.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN GAY
+
+(1685-1732)
+
+[Illustration: JOHN GAY]
+
+
+"In the great society of the wits," said Thackeray, "John Gay deserves
+to be a favorite, and to have a good place." The wits loved him. Prior
+was his faithful ally; Pope wrote him frequent letters of affectionate
+good advice; Swift grew genial in his merry company; and when the
+jester lapsed into gloom, as jesters will, all his friends hurried to
+coddle and comfort him. His verse is not of the first order, but the
+list of "English classics" contains far poorer; it is entertaining
+enough to be a pleasure even to bright children of this generation,
+and each succeeding one reads it with an inherited fondness not by any
+means without help from its own merits. And the man who invented comic
+opera, one of the most enduring molds in which English humor has been
+cast, deserves the credit of all important literary pioneers.
+
+Kind, lazy, clever John Gay came of a good, impoverished Devonshire
+family, which seems to have done its best for the bright lad of twelve
+when it apprenticed him to a London silk mercer. The boy hated this
+employment, grew ill under its fret and confinement, went back to the
+country, studied, possibly wrote poor verses, and presently drifted
+back to London. The cleverest men of the time frequented the crowded
+taverns and coffee-houses, and the talk that he heard at Will's and
+Button's may have determined his profession. Thither came Pope and
+Addison, Swift and Steele, Congreve, St. John, Prior, Arbuthnot,
+Cibber, Hogarth, Walpole, and many a powerful patron who loved good
+company.
+
+Perhaps through some kind acquaintance made in this informal circle,
+Gay obtained a private secretaryship, and began the flirtation with
+the Muse which became serious only after some years of coldness on
+that humorous lady's part. His first poem, 'Wine,' published when he
+was twenty-three, is not included in his collected works: perhaps
+because it is written in blank verse; perhaps because his maturer
+taste condemned it. Three years later, in 1711, when the success of
+the Spectator was yet new, and Pope had just completed his brilliant
+'Art of Criticism,' and Swift was editing the Examiner and working on
+that defense of a French peace, 'The Conduct of the Allies,' which was
+to make him the talk of London,--Gay sent forth his second venture; a
+curious, unimportant pamphlet, 'The Present State of Wit.' Late in
+1713 he is contributing to Dicky Steele's Guardian, and sending
+elegies to his 'Poetical Miscellanies'; and a little later, having
+become a favorite with the powerful Mr. Pope, he is made to bring up
+new reinforcements to the battle of that irascible gentleman with his
+ancient enemy Ambrose Phillips. This he does in 'The Shepherd's Week,'
+a sham pastoral, which is full of wit and easy versification, and
+shows very considerable talents as a parodist. This skit the luckless
+satirist dedicated to Bolingbroke, whose brilliant star was just
+passing into eclipse. Swift thought this harmless courtesy the real
+cause of the indifference of the Brunswick princes to the merits of
+the poet; and in an age when every spark of literary genius was so
+carefully nursed and utilized to sustain the weak dynasty, most likely
+he was right.
+
+For this reason or another, indifferent they were; and in a time when
+court favor counted enormously, poor indolent luxury-loving Gay had to
+earn his loaf by hard work, or go without it. He produced a
+tragi-comi-pastoral farce called 'What D'ye Call It?' which was the
+lineal ancestor of 'Pinafore' and the 'Pirates of Penzance' in its
+method of treating farcical incidents in a grave manner. But the town
+did not see the fun of this expedient, and the play failed, though it
+contained, among other famous songs, ''Twas When the Seas Were
+Roaring.' In 1716 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of
+London,' put some money into the poet's empty pocket, thanks to Pope's
+good offices. A year later a second comedy of his, 'Three Hours after
+Marriage,' met with well-deserved failure. And now, as always, when
+his spirits sank, his good friends showered kindnesses upon him. Mr.
+Secretary Pulteney carried him off to Aix. Lord Bathurst and Lord
+Burlington were his to command. Many fine gentlemen, and particularly
+many fine ladies, pressed him to make indefinite country visits. In
+1720 his friends managed the publication of his poems in two quarto
+volumes, subscribing for ten, twenty, and even fifty copies apiece,
+some of them, and securing to the poet, it is said, £1,000. The
+younger Craggs, the bookseller, gave him some South-Sea stock which
+rose rapidly, and at one time the improvident little gentleman found
+himself in possession of £20,000. All his friends besought him to
+sell, but Alnaschar Gay had visions of a splendid ease and opulence.
+The bubble burst, and poor Alnaschar had not wherewithal to pay his
+broker.
+
+The Duchess of Queensborough (Prior's "Kitty, beautiful and young")
+had already annexed the charmer, and now carried him off to
+Petersham. "I wish you had a little villakin in Mr. Pope's
+neighborhood," scolds Swift to him; "but you are yet too volatile, and
+any lady with a coach and six horses might carry you to Japan;" and
+again:--"I know your arts of patching up a journey between
+stagecoaches and friend's coaches--for you are as arrant a cockney as
+any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into
+yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme which may take
+up seven years to finish, besides two or three under ones that may add
+another thousand pounds to your stock; and then I shall be in less
+pain about you. I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny
+coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole
+thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day." Gay went to Bath
+with the Queensberrys, and to Oxford. Swift complained to Pope:--"I
+suppose Mr. Gay will return from Bath with twenty pounds more flesh,
+and two hundred pounds less money. Providence never designed him to be
+above two-and-twenty, by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has
+as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as
+a girl of fifteen." And his dear Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,
+took him affectionately to task:--"Your head is your best friend: it
+would clothe, lodge, and feed you; but you neglect it, and follow that
+false friend your heart, which is such a foolish, tender thing that it
+makes others despise your head, that have not half so good a one on
+their own shoulders. In short, John, you may be a snail, or a
+silkworm; but by my consent you shall never be a hare again."
+
+He lived under other great roofs, if not contentedly, at least
+gracefully and agreeably. If his dependent state irked him, his hosts
+did not perceive it. To Swift he wrote, indeed, "They wonder at each
+other for not providing for me, and _I_ wonder at them all." Yet, for
+the nine years from 1722 to 1731 he had a small official salary, on
+which a thriftier or more industrious mortal would have managed to
+live respectably even in that expensive age; and for at least a part
+of the time he had official lodgings at Whitehall.
+
+In 1725 was published the first edition of his famous 'Fables,' which
+had been written for the moral behoof of Prince William, afterward
+Duke of Cumberland, of unblessed memory. The book did not make his
+fortune with the court, as he had hoped, and in 1728 he produced his
+best known work, 'The Beggar's Opera.' Nobody had much faith in this
+"Newgate Pastoral," least of all Swift, who had first suggested it.
+But it took the town by storm, running for sixty-three consecutive
+nights. As the heroine, Polly Peachum, the lovely Lavinia Fenton
+captured a duchess's coronet. The songs were heard alike in West End
+drawing-rooms and East End slums. Swift praised it for its morality,
+and the Archbishop of Canterbury scored it for its condonation of
+vice. The breath of praise and blame filled equally its prosperous
+sails, blew it all over the kingdom wherever a theatre could be found,
+and finally wafted it to Minorca. So well did the opera pay him that
+Gay wrote a sequel called 'Polly,' which, being prohibited through
+some notion of Walpole's, sold enormously by subscription and earned
+Gay £1,200.
+
+After this the hospitable Queensberrys seem to have adopted him. He
+produced a musical drama, 'Acis and Galatea,' written long before and
+set to Handel's music; a few more 'Fables'; a thin opera called
+'Achilles'; and then his work was done. He died in London of a swift
+fever, in December 1732, before his kind Kitty and her husband could
+reach him, or his other great friend, the Countess of Suffolk.
+Arbuthnot watched over him; Pope was with him to the last; Swift
+indorsed on the letter that brought him the tidings, "On my dear
+friend Mr. Gay's death; received on December 15th, but not read till
+the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." So faithfully did
+the "giants," as Thackeray calls them, cherish this gentle, friendly,
+affectionate, humorous comrade. He seems indeed to have been almost
+the only companion with whom Swift did not at some time fall out, and
+of his steadfastness the gloomy great man in his 'Verses on my Own
+Death' could write:--
+
+  "Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
+  A week, and Arbuthnot a day."
+
+The 'Trivia' and the 'Shepherd's Week,' the 'Acis and Galatea' and
+even the 'Beggar's Opera,' gradually faded into the realm of "old,
+forgotten, far-off things"; while the 'Fables' passed through many
+editions, found their place in school reading-books, were committed to
+memory by three generations of admiring pupils, and included in the
+most orthodox libraries. Yet criticism now reverts to the earlier
+standard; approves the songs, and the minute observation, the nice
+phrasing, and the humorous swing of the pastorals and operas, and
+finds the fables dull, commonplace, and monotonous. Pope said in his
+affectionate epitaph that the poet had been laid in Westminster Abbey,
+not for ambition, but--
+
+  "That the worthy and the good shall say,
+  Striking their pensive bosoms, '_Here_ lies Gay.'"
+
+If to-day the worthy and the good do not know even where he lies, not
+the less is he to be gratefully remembered whom the best and greatest
+of his own time so much admired, and of whom Pope and Johnson and
+Thackeray and Dobson have written with the warmth of friendship.
+
+
+
+
+THE HARE AND MANY FRIENDS
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  Friendship, like love, is but a name,
+  Unless to one you stint the flame.
+  The child whom many fathers share
+  Hath seldom known a father's care.
+  'Tis thus in friendships: who depend
+  On many, rarely find a friend.
+
+  A Hare, who in a civil way
+  Complied with everything, like Gay,
+  Was known by all the bestial train
+  Who haunt the wood or graze the plain.
+  Her care was, never to offend,
+  And ev'ry creature was her friend.
+
+  As forth she went at early dawn
+  To taste the dew-besprinkled lawn,
+  Behind she hears the hunters' cries,
+  And from the deep-mouthed thunder flies.
+  She starts, she stops, she pants for breath;
+  She hears the near advance of death;
+  She doubles to mislead the hound,
+  And measures back her mazy round;
+  Till fainting in the public way,
+  Half dead with fear, she gasping lay.
+
+  What transport in her bosom grew,
+  When first the horse appeared in view!
+  "Let me," says she, "your back ascend,
+  And owe my safety to a friend.
+  You know my feet betray my flight;
+  To friendship every burden's light."
+
+  The Horse replied:--"Poor honest Puss,
+  It grieves my heart to see thee thus:
+  Be comforted, relief is near;
+  For all your friends are in the rear."
+
+  She next the stately Bull implored;
+  And thus replied the mighty lord:--
+  "Since every beast alive can tell
+  That I sincerely wish you well,
+  I may, without offense, pretend
+  To take the freedom of a friend.
+
+  Love calls me hence; a favorite cow
+  Expects me near yon barley-mow:
+  And when a lady's in the case,
+  You know all other things give place.
+  To leave you thus might seem unkind;
+  But see, the Goat is just behind."
+
+  The Goat remarked her pulse was high,
+  Her languid head, her heavy eye;
+  "My back," says he, "may do you harm:
+  The Sheep's at hand, and wool is warm."
+
+  The Sheep was feeble, and complained
+  His sides a load of wool sustained:
+  Said he was slow, confessed his fears;
+  For hounds eat Sheep, as well as Hares!
+
+  She now the trotting Calf addressed,
+  To save from death a friend distressed.
+  "Shall I," says he, "of tender age,
+  In this important care engage?
+  Older and abler passed you by;
+  How strong are those! how weak am I!
+  Should I presume to bear you hence,
+  Those friends of mine may take offense.
+  Excuse me then. You know my heart:
+  But dearest friends, alas! must part.
+  How shall we all lament! Adieu!
+  For see, the hounds are just in view."
+
+
+
+
+THE SICK MAN AND THE ANGEL
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  Is there no hope? the Sick Man said.
+  The silent doctor shook his head,
+  And took his leave with signs of sorrow,
+  Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
+    When thus the Man with gasping breath:--
+  I feel the chilling wound of death;
+  Since I must bid the world adieu,
+  Let me my former life review.
+  I grant, my bargains well were made,
+  But all men overreach in trade;
+  'Tis self-defense in each profession;
+  Sure, self-defense is no transgression.
+  The little portion in my hands,
+  By good security on lands,
+  Is well increased. If unawares,
+  My justice to myself and heirs
+  Hath let my debtor rot in jail,
+  For want of good sufficient bail;
+  If I by writ, or bond, or deed,
+  Reduced a family to need,--
+  My will hath made the world amends;
+  My hope on charity depends.
+  When I am numbered with the dead,
+  And all my pious gifts are read,
+  By heaven and earth 'twill then be known,
+  My charities were amply shown.
+    An Angel came. Ah, friend! he cried,
+  No more in flattering hope confide.
+  Can thy good deeds in former times
+  Outweigh the balance of thy crimes?
+  What widow or what orphan prays
+  To crown thy life with length of days?
+  A pious action's in thy power;
+  Embrace with joy the happy hour.
+  Now, while you draw the vital air,
+  Prove your intention is sincere:
+  This instant give a hundred pound;
+  Your neighbors want, and you abound.
+    But why such haste? the Sick Man whines:
+  Who knows as yet what Heaven designs?
+  Perhaps I may recover still;
+  That sum and more are in my will.
+    Fool, says the Vision, now 'tis plain,
+  Your life, your soul, your heaven was gain;
+  From every side, with all your might,
+  You scraped, and scraped beyond your right;
+  And after death would fain atone,
+  By giving what is not your own.
+    Where there is life there's hope, he cried;
+  Then why such haste?--so groaned and died.
+
+
+
+
+THE JUGGLER
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  A juggler long through all the town
+  Had raised his fortune and renown;
+  You'd think (so far his art transcends)
+  The Devil at his fingers' ends.
+    Vice heard his fame; she read his bill;
+  Convinced of his inferior skill,
+  She sought his booth, and from the crowd
+  Defied the man of art aloud.
+    Is this, then, he so famed for sleight?
+  Can this slow bungler cheat your sight?
+  Dares he with me dispute the prize?
+  I leave it to impartial eyes.
+    Provoked, the Juggler cried, 'Tis done.
+  In science I submit to none.
+    Thus said, the cups and balls he played;
+  By turns, this here, that there, conveyed.
+  The cards, obedient to his words,
+  Are by a fillip turned to birds.
+  His little boxes change the grain;
+  Trick after trick deludes the train.
+  He shakes his bag, he shows all fair;
+  His fingers spreads,--and nothing there;
+  Then bids it rain with showers of gold,
+  And now his ivory eggs are told.
+  But when from thence the hen he draws,
+  Amazed spectators hum applause.
+    Vice now stept forth, and took the place
+  With all the forms of his grimace.
+    This magic looking-glass, she cries
+  (There, hand it round), will charm your eyes.
+  Each eager eye the sight desired,
+  And ev'ry man himself admired.
+    Next to a senator addressing:
+  See this bank-note; observe the blessing,
+  Breathe on the bill. Heigh, pass! 'Tis gone;
+  Upon his lips a padlock shone.
+  A second puff the magic broke,
+  The padlock vanished, and he spoke.
+    Twelve bottles ranged upon the board,
+  All full, with heady liquor stored,
+  By clean conveyance disappear,
+  And now two bloody swords are there.
+    A purse she to a thief exposed,
+  At once his ready fingers closed:
+  He opes his fist, the treasure's fled:
+  He sees a halter in its stead.
+    She bids ambition hold a wand;
+  He grasps a hatchet in his hand.
+    A box of charity she shows:
+  Blow here; and a churchwarden blows.
+  'Tis vanished with conveyance neat,
+  And on the table smokes a treat.
+    She shakes the dice, the board she knocks,
+  And from her pockets fills her box.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    A counter in a miser's hand
+  Grew twenty guineas at command.
+  She bids his heir the sum retain,
+  And 'tis a counter now again.
+    A guinea with her touch you see
+  Take ev'ry shape but Charity;
+  And not one thing you saw, or drew,
+  But changed from what was first in view.
+    The Juggler now, in grief of heart,
+  With this submission owned her art.
+  Can I such matchless sleight withstand?
+  How practice hath improved your hand!
+  But now and then I cheat the throng;
+  You every day, and all day long.
+
+    [Illustration: _THE JUGGLER._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by L. Knaus.]
+
+
+
+
+SWEET WILLIAM'S FAREWELL TO BLACK-EYED SUSAN
+
+A BALLAD
+
+
+    All in the Downs the fleet was moored,
+      The streamers waving in the wind,
+    When black-eyed Susan came aboard:
+      Oh, where shall I my true love find!
+  Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true,
+  If my sweet William sails among the crew.
+
+    William, who high upon the yard
+      Rocked with the billow to and fro,
+    Soon as her well-known voice he heard,
+      He sighed and cast his eyes below;
+  The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands,
+  And quick as lightning on the deck he stands.
+
+    So the sweet lark, high poised in air,
+      Shuts close his pinions to his breast
+    (If, chance, his mate's shrill call he hear),
+      And drops at once into her nest.
+  The noblest captain in the British fleet
+  Might envy William's lip those kisses sweet.
+
+    O Susan, Susan, lovely dear,
+      My vows shall ever true remain;
+    Let me kiss off that falling tear;
+      We only part to meet again.
+  Change, as ye list, ye winds; my heart shall be
+  The faithful compass that still points to thee.
+
+    Believe not what the landmen say,
+      Who tempt with doubts thy constant mind:
+    They'll tell thee, sailors when away
+      In every port a mistress find.
+  Yes, yes, believe them when they tell thee so,
+  For thou art present wheresoe'er I go.
+
+    If to far India's coast we sail,
+      Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright;
+    Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,
+      Thy skin is ivory so white.
+  Thus every beauteous object that I view,
+  Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue.
+
+    Though battle call me from thy arms,
+      Let not my pretty Susan mourn;
+    Though cannons roar, yet safe from harms,
+      William shall to his dear return.
+  Love turns aside the balls that round me fly,
+  Lest precious tears should drop from Susan's eye.
+
+    The boatswain gave the dreadful word;
+      The sails their swelling bosom spread;
+    No longer must she stay aboard:
+      They kissed, she sighed, he hung his head:
+  Her lessening boat unwilling rows to land:
+  Adieu! she cries; and waved her lily hand.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'WHAT D'YE CALL IT?'
+
+A BALLAD
+
+
+  T'was when the seas were roaring
+    With hollow blasts of wind,
+  A damsel lay deploring,
+    All on a rock reclined.
+  Wide o'er the foaming billows
+    She cast a wistful look;
+  Her head was crowned with willows,
+    That tremble o'er the brook.
+
+  "Twelve months are gone and over,
+    And nine long tedious days;
+  Why didst thou, venturous lover,
+    Why didst thou trust the seas?
+  Cease, cease, thou cruel ocean,
+    And let my lover rest:
+  Ah! what's thy troubled motion
+    To that within my breast?
+
+  "The merchant robbed of pleasure
+    Sees tempests in despair;
+  But what's the loss of treasure,
+    To losing of my dear?
+  Should you some coast be laid on,
+    Where gold and diamonds grow,
+  You'll find a richer maiden,
+    But none that loves you so.
+
+  "How can they say that nature
+    Has nothing made in vain;
+  Why then, beneath the water,
+    Should hideous rocks remain?
+  No eyes the rocks discover
+    That lurk beneath the deep,
+  To wreck the wandering lover,
+    And leave the maid to weep."
+
+  All melancholy lying,
+    Thus wailed she for her dear!
+  Repaid each blast with sighing,
+    Each billow with a tear.
+  When o'er the white wave stooping,
+    His floating corpse she spied,--
+  Then, like a lily drooping,
+    She bowed her head and died.
+
+
+
+
+EMANUEL VON GEIBEL
+
+(1815-1884)
+
+[Illustration: EMANUEL VON GEIBEL]
+
+
+The chief note in Geibel's nature was reverence. A spirit of reverent
+piety, using the phrase in its widest as well as in its strictly
+religious sense, characterizes all his poetical utterances. He
+intended to devote himself to theology, but the humanistic tendencies
+of the age, combined with his own peculiar endowments, led him to
+abandon the Church for pure literature. The reverent attitude of mind,
+however, remained, and has left its impress even upon his most
+impassioned love lyrics. It appears too in his first literary venture,
+a volume of 'Classical Studies' undertaken in collaboration with his
+friend Ernst Curtius, in which is displayed his loving reverence for
+the great monuments of Greek antiquity. He felt himself an exile from
+Greece, and like Goethe's Iphigenia, his soul was seeking ever for the
+land of Hellas. And through the influence of Bettina von Arnim this
+longing was satisfied; he secured the post of tutor in the household
+of the Russian ambassador to Athens.
+
+Geibel was only twenty-three years of age when this good fortune fell
+to his lot. He was born at Lübeck on October 18th, 1815. His poetic
+gifts, early manifested, secured him a welcome in the literary circles
+of Berlin. During the two years that he spent in Greece he was enabled
+to travel over a large part of the Grecian Archipelago in the
+inspiring company of Curtius; and it was upon their return to Germany
+in 1840 that the 'Classical Studies' appeared, and were dedicated to
+the Queen of Greece. Then Geibel eagerly took up the study of French
+and Spanish, with the result that many valuable volumes were published
+in collaboration with Paul Heyse, Count von Schack, and Leuthold,
+which introduced to the German public a vast treasury of song from the
+literatures of France, Spain, and Portugal. The first collection of
+Geibel's own poems in 1843 secured for the poet a modest pension from
+the King of Prussia.
+
+Geibel also made several essays at dramatic composition. He wrote for
+Mendelssohn the text of a 'Lorelei,' but the composer died before the
+music was completed. A comedy called 'Master Andrew' was successful in
+a number of cities; and of his more ambitious tragedies, 'Brunhild'
+and 'Sophonisba,' the latter won the famous Schiller prize in 1869.
+
+In 1852 Geibel received an appointment as royal reader to Maximilian
+II., and was made professor at the University of Munich. It was also
+from the King of Bavaria that he procured his patent of nobility. In
+the same year that he took up his residence in Munich he married; but
+the death of his wife terminated his happy family relations three
+years later, and the death of the King severed his connection with the
+Bavarian court. Moreover, his sympathy with the revolutionary poets,
+such as his intimate friend Freiligrath, his own enthusiasm for the
+popular movement, and the faith which he placed in the King of
+Prussia, led to bitter attacks upon him in the Bavarian press, and
+eventually to his resignation from the faculty of the university. He
+returned to his native city of Lübeck. The Prussian King trebled his
+annual income, and the poet was raised above pecuniary cares. The last
+years of his life were saddened, without being embittered, by feeble
+health. He died on April 6th, 1884.
+
+There was sometimes a touch of effeminate sentimentality in Geibel's
+work, but he did not lack force and virility, as his famous 'Twelve
+Sonnets' and his political poems, entitled 'Zeitgedichte,' show. He
+could speak strong words for right and justice, and in all his poems
+there is a musical beauty of language and a perfection of form that
+render his songs contributions of permanent value to the lyric
+treasury of German literature.
+
+
+
+
+SEE'ST THOU THE SEA?
+
+
+  See'st thou the sea? The sun gleams on its wave
+            With splendor bright;
+  But where the pearl lies buried in its cave
+            Is deepest night.
+  The sea am I. My soul, in billows bold,
+            Rolls fierce and strong;
+  And over all, like to the sunlight's gold,
+            There streams my song.
+  It throbs with love and pain as though possessed
+            Of magic art,
+  And yet in silence bleeds, within my breast,
+            My gloomy heart.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+AS IT WILL HAPPEN
+
+
+  "He loves thee not! He trifles but with thee!"
+    They said to her, and then she bowed her head,
+  And pearly tears, like roses' dew, wept she.
+    Oh, that she ever trusted what they said!
+  For when he came and found his bride in doubt,
+    Then, from sheer spite, he would not show his sorrow;
+  He played and laughed and drank, day in, day out,--
+    To weep from night until the morrow!
+
+  'Tis true, an angel whispered in her heart,
+    "He's faithful still; oh lay thy hand in his!"
+  And he too felt, 'midst grief and bitter smart,
+    "She loves thee! After all, thy love she is;
+  Let but a gentle word pass on each side,
+    The spell that parts you now will then be broken!"
+  They came--each looked on each--oh, evil pride!--
+    That single word remained unspoken!
+
+  They parted then. As in a church one oft
+    Extinguished sees the altar lamps' red fires,
+  Their light grows dim, then once more flares aloft
+    In radiance bright,--and thereupon expires,--
+  So died their love; at first lamented o'er,
+    Then yearned for ardently, and then--forgotten,
+  Until the thought that they had loved before
+    Of mere delusion seemed begotten!
+
+  But sometimes when the moon shone out at night,
+    Each started from his couch! Ah, was it not
+  Bedewed with tears? And tears, too, dimmed their sight,
+    Because these two had dreamed--I know not what!
+  And then the dear old times woke in their heart,
+    Their foolish doubts, their parting, that had driven
+  Their souls so far, so very far apart,--
+    Oh God! let both now be forgiven!
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+GONDOLIERA
+
+
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+  The air is soft as a lover's jest,
+      And gently gleams the light;
+  The zither sounds, and thy soul is blest
+      To join in this delight.
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+
+  This is the hour for lovers true,
+      Darling, like thee and me;
+  Serenely smile the heavens blue
+      And calmly sleeps the sea.
+  And as it sleeps, a glance will say
+      What speech in vain has tried;
+  The lips then do not shrink away,
+      Nor is a kiss denied.
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+THE WOODLAND
+
+
+  The wood grows denser at each stride;
+      No path more, no trail!
+    Only murm'ring waters glide
+  Through tangled ferns and woodland flowers pale.
+      Ah, and under the great oaks teeming
+    How soft the moss, the grass, how high!
+    And the heavenly depth of cloudless sky,
+  How blue through the leaves it seems to me!
+      Here I'll sit, resting and dreaming,
+              Dreaming of thee.
+
+                               Translation of Charles Harvey Genung.
+
+
+
+
+ONWARD
+
+
+  Cease thy dreaming! Cease thy quailing!
+    Wander on untiringly.
+  Though thy strength may all seem failing,
+    Onward! must thy watchword be.
+
+  Durst not tarry, though life's roses
+    Round about thy footsteps throng,
+  Though the ocean's depth discloses
+    Sirens with their witching song.
+
+  Onward! onward! ever calling
+    On thy Muse, in life's stern fray,
+  Till thy fevered brow feels, falling
+    From above, a golden ray.
+
+  Till the verdant wreath victorious
+    Crown with soothing shade thy brow;
+  Till the spirit's flames rise glorious
+    Over thee, with sacred glow.
+
+  Onward then, through hostile fire,
+    Onward through death's agony!
+  Who to heaven would aspire
+    Must a valiant warrior be.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+AT LAST THE DAYLIGHT FADETH
+
+
+  At last the daylight fadeth,
+    With all its noise and glare;
+  Refreshing peace pervadeth
+    The darkness everywhere.
+
+  On the fields deep silence hovers;
+    The woods now wake alone;
+  What daylight ne'er discovers,
+    Their songs to the night make known.
+
+  And what when the sun is shining
+    I ne'er can tell to thee,
+  To whisper it now I am pining,--
+    Oh, come and hearken to me!
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best
+Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
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+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
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+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
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+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i10     {display: block; margin-left: 10em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+    .poem span.i13     {display: block; margin-left: 13em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i14     {display: block; margin-left: 14em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+    .poem span.i17     {display: block; margin-left: 17em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i18     {display: block; margin-left: 18em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i19     {display: block; margin-left: 19em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i20     {display: block; margin-left: 20em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i22     {display: block; margin-left: 22em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+    .poem span.i29     {display: block; margin-left: 29em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+    .poem span.i6     {display: block; margin-left: 6em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+    .poem span.i8     {display: block; margin-left: 8em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+
+    p.dropcap {text-indent: -15px; }
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+    .trans {text-align: right; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .transc {text-align: center; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .regards {text-align: right; margin-right: 8em;}
+    .salute  {text-align: left; margin-left: 2em;}
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best Literature,
+Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: June 29, 2010 [EBook #33027]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE, VOL 15 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 768px;">
+<a name="Illustration_HOW_KRIEMHILD_IS_LED_TO_ETZEL" id="Illustration_HOW_KRIEMHILD_IS_LED_TO_ETZEL"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>HOW KRIEMHILD IS LED TO ETZEL.</i></big></span>
+<p>From the Hundeshagen Nibelungen manuscripts of the 10th century, in
+the Royal Library at Berlin.</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let the messenger ride and thus we make<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Known to you how the queen rode the country."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Kriemhild is the legendary heroine of the "Nibelungenlied," and the
+rival of Brunhild. She was the wife of Siegfried who was slain by her
+brothers. Later, as the wife of Etzel (Attila) King of the Huns, she
+avenged the murder of Siegfried by compassing the death of her
+brothers, but was herself slain.</p>
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="768" height="900" alt="HOW KRIEMHILD IS LED TO ETZEL." title="HOW KRIEMHILD IS LED TO ETZEL." />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIBRARY OF THE</h2>
+<h1>WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE</h1>
+<h3>ANCIENT AND MODERN<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER</h3>
+<h5>EDITOR</h5>
+
+<h4>HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE<br />
+LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE<br />
+GEORGE HENRY WARNER</h4>
+<h5>ASSOCIATE EDITORS</h5>
+
+<h4>Connoisseur Edition<br />
+<span class="smcap">Vol. XV.</span></h4>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK<br />
+<big>THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY</big></h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>Connoisseur Edition</h3>
+<h5>LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA<br />
+<br />
+<i>No</i>.    ..........</h5>
+
+<h5>Copyright, 1896, by<br />
+R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL<br />
+<i>All rights reserved</i></h5>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE ADVISORY COUNCIL</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of Hebrew, <span class="smcap">Harvard University</span>, Cambridge, Mass.</span><br />
+<br />
+THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of <span class="smcap">Yale University</span>, New Haven, Conn.</span><br />
+<br />
+WILLIAM M. SLOANE, <span class="smcap">Ph. D.</span>, L. H. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of History and Political Science, <span class="smcap">Princeton University</span>, Princeton, N. J.</span><br />
+<br />
+BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of Literature, <span class="smcap">Columbia University</span>, New York City.</span><br />
+<br />
+JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">President of the <span class="smcap">University of Michigan</span>, Ann Arbor, Mich.</span><br />
+<br />
+WILLARD FISKE, A. M., <span class="smcap">Ph. D.</span>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, <span class="smcap">Cornell University</span>, Ithaca, N. Y.</span><br />
+<br />
+EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer, <span class="smcap">University of California</span>, Berkeley, Cal.</span><br />
+<br />
+ALC&Eacute;E FORTIER, LIT. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of the Romance Languages, <span class="smcap">Tulane University</span>, New Orleans, La.</span><br />
+<br />
+WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English and History, <span class="smcap">University of the South</span>, Sewanee, Tenn.</span><br />
+<br />
+PAUL SHOREY, <span class="smcap">Ph. D.</span>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of Greek and Latin Literature, <span class="smcap">University of Chicago</span>, Chicago, Ill.</span><br />
+<br />
+WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">United States Commissioner of Education, <span class="smcap">Bureau of Education</span>, Washington, D. C.</span><br />
+<br />
+MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D.,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Professor of Literature in the <span class="smcap">Catholic University of America</span>, Washington, D. C.</span><br />
+</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. XV</h3>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><small>LIVED</small></td>
+  <td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FOLK-SONG"><span class="smcap">Folk-Song</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5853">5853</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY F. B. GUMMERE</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#SAMUEL_FOOTE"><span class="smcap">Samuel Foote</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1720-1777</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5878">5878</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#HOW_TO_BE_A_LAWYER">How to be a Lawyer ('The Lame Lover')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_MISFORTUNE_IN_ORTHOGRAPHY">A Misfortune in Orthography (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_THE_MEMOIRS">From the 'Memoirs':</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">A Cure for Bad Poetry;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Retort Courteous;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">On Garrick's Stature;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Cape Wine;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Graces;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Debtor;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Affectation;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Arithmetical Criticism;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Dear Wife;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Garrick and the Guinea;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Dr. Paul Hifferman;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Foote and Macklin;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Baron Newman;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Mrs. Abington;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Garlic-Eaters;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Mode of Burying Attorneys in London;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Dining Badly;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Dibble Davis;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">An Extraordinary Case;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Mutability of the World;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">An Appropriate Motto;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Real Friendship;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Anecdote of an Author;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Dr. Blair;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Advice to a Dramatic Writer;</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Grafton Ministry</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#JOHN_FORD"><span class="smcap">John Ford</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1586-?</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5889">5889</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_PERKIN_WARBECK">From 'Perkin Warbeck'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#PENTHEAS_DYING_SONG">Penthea's Dying Song ('The Broken Heart')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_THE_LOVERS_MELANCHOLY">From 'The Lover's Melancholy': Amethus and Menaphon</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FRIEDRICH_BARON_DE_LA_MOTTE_FOUQUE"><span class="smcap">Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqu&eacute;</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1777-1843</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5895">5895</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_MARRIAGE_OF_UNDINE">The Marriage of Undine ('Undine')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LAST_APPEARANCE_OF_UNDINE">The Last Appearance of Undine (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SONG_FROM_MINSTREL_LOVE">Song from 'Minstrel Lore'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#ANATOLE_FRANCE"><span class="smcap">Anatole France</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1844-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5909">5909</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#IN_THE_GARDENS">In the Gardens ('The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#CHILD-LIFE">Child-Life ('The Book of my Friend')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_THE_GARDEN_OF_EPICURUS">From the 'Garden of Epicurus'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#ST_FRANCIS_DASSISI"><span class="smcap">St. Francis d'Assisi</span></a></big><span class='pagenum'>[Pg vi]</span></td>
+  <td>1182-1226</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5919">5919</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ORDER">Order</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_CANTICLE_OF_THE_SUN">The Canticle of the Sun</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#BENJAMIN_FRANKLIN"><span class="smcap">Benjamin Franklin</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1706-1790</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5925">5925</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY JOHN BIGELOW</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#OF_FRANKLINS_FAMILY_AND_EARLY_LIFE">Of Franklin's Family and Early Life ('Autobiography')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FRANKLINS_JOURNEY_TO_PHILADELPHIA_HIS_ARRIVAL_THERE">Franklin's Journey to Philadelphia: His Arrival There (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FRANKLIN_AS_A_PRINTER">Franklin as a Printer (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#RULES_OF_HEALTH">Rules of Health ('Poor Richard's Almanack')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_WAY_TO_WEALTH">The Way to Wealth (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SPEECH_IN_THE_FEDERAL_CONVENTION_IN_FAVOR_OF_OPENING">Speech in the Federal Convention, in Favor of Opening Its Sessions with Prayer</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ON_WAR">On War</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#REVENGE">Revenge: Letter to Madame Helv&eacute;tius</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_EPHEMERA_AN_EMBLEM_OF_HUMAN_LIFE">The Ephemera: an Emblem of Human Life</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_PROPHECY">A Prophecy (Letter to Lord Kames)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#EARLY_MARRIAGES">Early Marriages (Letter to John Alleyne)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ART_OF_VIRTUE">The Art of Virtue ('Autobiography')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#LOUIS_HONORE_FRECHETTE"><span class="smcap">Louis Honor&eacute; Fr&eacute;chette</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1839-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5964">5964</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#OUR_HISTORY">Our History ('Le L&eacute;gende d'un Peuple')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#CAUGHNAWAGA">Caughnawaga</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LOUISIANA">Louisiana ('Les Feuilles Volantes')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_DREAM_OF_LIFE">The Dream of Life (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#HAROLD_FREDERIC"><span class="smcap">Harold Frederic</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1856-?</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5971">5971</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LAST_RITE">The Last Rite ('The Damnation of Theron Ware')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#EDWARD_AUGUSTUS_FREEMAN"><span class="smcap">Edward Augustus Freeman</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1823-1892</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5977">5977</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY JOHN BACH M<sup>c</sup>MASTER</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ALTERED_ASPECTS_OF_ROME">The Altered Aspects of Rome ('Historical Essays')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_CONTINUITY_OF_ENGLISH_HISTORY">The Continuity of English History (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#RACE_AND_LANGUAGE">Race and Language (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_NORMAN_COUNCIL_AND_THE_ASSEMBLY_OF_LILLEBONNE">The Norman Council and the Assembly of Lillebonne ('The History of the Norman Conquest of England')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FERDINAND_FREILIGRATH"><span class="smcap">Ferdinand Freiligrath</span></a></big><span class='pagenum'>[Pg vii]</span></td>
+  <td>1810-1876</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6002">6002</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_EMIGRANTS">The Emigrants</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LIONS_RIDE">The Lion's Ride</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#REST_IN_THE_BELOVED">Rest in the Beloved</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#OH_LOVE_SO_LONG_AS_LOVE_THOU_CANST">Oh, Love so Long as Love Thou Canst</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#GUSTAV_FREYTAG"><span class="smcap">Gustav Freytag</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1816-1895</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6011">6011</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_GERMAN_PROFESSOR">The German Professor ('The Lost Manuscript')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FRIEDRICH_FROEBEL"><span class="smcap">Friedrich Froebel</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1782-1852</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6022">6022</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_RIGHT_OF_THE_CHILD">The Right of the Child ('Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#EVOLUTION">Evolution ('The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother Play')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_LAWS_OF_THE_MIND">The Laws of the Mind ('The Letters of Froebel')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FOR_THE_CHILDREN">For the Children (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#MOTIVES">Motives ('The Education of Man')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#APHORISMS">Aphorisms</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FROISSART"><span class="smcap">Froissart</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1337-1410?</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6035">6035</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY GEORGE M<sup>c</sup>LEAN HARPER</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_INVASION_OF_FRANCE_BY_KING_EDWARD_III_AND_THE_BATTLE_OF_CRECY">From the 'Chronicles':</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Invasion of France by King Edward III., and the Battle of Cr&eacute;cy</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">How the King of England Rode through Normandy</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Of the Great Assembly that the French King Made to Resist the King of England</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Of the Battle of Caen, and How the Englishmen Took the Town</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">How the French King Followed the King of England in Beauvoisinois</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Of the Battle of Blanche-Taque</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Of the Order of the Englishmen at Cressy</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">The Order of the Frenchmen at Cressy, and How They Beheld the Demeanor of the Englishmen</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Of the Battle of Cressy, August 26th, 1346</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#JAMES_ANTHONY_FROUDE"><span class="smcap">James Anthony Froude</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1818-1894</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6059">6059</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_GROWTH_OF_ENGLANDS_NAVY">The Growth of England's Navy ('English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_DEATH_OF_COLONEL_GORING">The Death of Colonel Goring ('Two Chiefs of Dunboy')</a></span></td><td><span class='pagenum'>[Pg viii]</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SCIENTIFIC_METHOD_APPLIED_TO_HISTORY">Scientific Method Applied to History ('Short Studies on Great Subjects')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_DEATH_OF_THOMAS_BECKET">The Death of Thomas Becket (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#CHARACTER_OF_HENRY_VIII">Character of Henry VIII. ('History of England')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ON_A_SIDING_AT_A_RAILWAY_STATION">On a Siding at a Railway Station ('Short Studies on Great Subjects')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#HENRY_B_FULLER"><span class="smcap">Henry B. Fuller</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1859-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6101">6101</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#AT_THE_HEAD_OF_THE_MARCH">At the Head of the March ('With the Procession')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#SARAH_MARGARET_FULLER"><span class="smcap">Sarah Margaret Fuller</span></a></big> (Marchioness Ossoli)</td>
+  <td>1810-1850</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6119">6119</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#GEORGE_SAND">George Sand ('Memoirs')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#AMERICANS_ABROAD_IN_EUROPE">Americans Abroad in Europe ('At Home and Abroad')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_CHARACTER_SKETCH_OF_CARLYLE">A Character Sketch of Carlyle ('Memoirs')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#THOMAS_FULLER"><span class="smcap">Thomas Fuller</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1608-1661</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6129">6129</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_KINGS_CHILDREN">The King's Children ('The Worthies of England')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_LEARNED_LADY">A Learned Lady (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#HENRY_DE_ESSEX_STANDARD-BEARER_TO_HENRY_II">Henry de Essex, Standard-Bearer to Henry II. (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_GOOD_SCHOOLMASTER">The Good Schoolmaster ('The Holy and Profane State')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ON_BOOKS">On Books (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#LONDON">London ('The Worthies of England')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#MISCELLANEOUS_SAYINGS">Miscellaneous Sayings</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#EMILE_GABORIAU"><span class="smcap">&Eacute;mile Gaboriau</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1835-1873</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6137">6137</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_IMPOSTOR_AND_THE_BANKERS_WIFE_THE_ROBBERY">The Impostor and the Banker's Wife: The Robbery ('File No. 113')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#M_LECOQS_SYSTEM">M. Lecoq's System (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#BENITO_PEREZ_GALDOS"><span class="smcap">Benito Perez Gald&oacute;s</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1845-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6153">6153</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_FIRST_NIGHT_OF_A_FAMOUS_PLAY_IN_THE_YEAR_1807">The First Night of a Famous Play ('The Court of Charles IV.')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#DONA_PERFECTAS_DAUGHTER">Do&ntilde;a Perfecta's Daughter ('Do&ntilde;a Perfecta')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ABOVE-STAIRS_IN_A_ROYAL_PALACE">Above Stairs in a Royal Palace ('La de Bringas')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#FRANCIS_GALTON"><span class="smcap">Francis Galton</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1822-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6174">6174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_COMPARATIVE_WORTH_OF_DIFFERENT_RACES">The Comparative Worth of Different Races ('Hereditary Genius')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#ARNE_GARBORG"><span class="smcap">Arne Garborg</span></a></big><span class='pagenum'>[Pg ix]</span></td>
+  <td>1851-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6185">6185</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_CONFLICT_OF_THE_CREEDS">The Conflict of the Creeds ('A Freethinker')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#HAMLIN_GARLAND"><span class="smcap">Hamlin Garland</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1860-</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6195">6195</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_SUMMER_MOOD">A Summer Mood ('Prairie Songs')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_STORM_ON_LAKE_MICHIGAN">A Storm on Lake Michigan ('Rose of Butcher's Coolly')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#ELIZABETH_STEVENSON_GASKELL"><span class="smcap">Elizabeth Stevenson Gaskell</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1810-1865</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6205">6205</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#OUR_SOCIETY">Our Society ('Cranford')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#VISITING">Visiting (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#THEOPHILE_GAUTIER"><span class="smcap">Th&eacute;ophile Gautier</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1811-1872</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6221">6221</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">BY ROBERT SANDERSON</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_ENTRY_OF_PHARAOH_INTO_THEBES">The Entry of Pharaoh into Thebes ('The Romance of a Mummy')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_THE_MARSH">From 'The Marsh'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_THE_DRAGON-FLY">From 'The Dragon-Fly'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_DOVES">The Doves</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_POT_OF_FLOWERS">The Pot of Flowers</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#PRAYER">Prayer</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_POET_AND_THE_CROWD">The Poet and the Crowd</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_FIRST_SMILE_OF_SPRING">The First Smile of Spring</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_VETERANS">The Veterans ('The Old Guard')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#JOHN_GAY"><span class="smcap">John Gay</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1685-1732</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6237">6237</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_HARE_AND_MANY_FRIENDS">The Hare and Many Friends ('Fables')</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_SICK_MAN_AND_THE_ANGEL">The Sick Man and the Angel (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_JUGGLER">The Juggler (same)</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SWEET_WILLIAMS_FAREWELL_TO_BLACK-EYED_SUSAN">Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#FROM_WHAT_DYE_CALL_IT">From 'What D'ye Call It?'</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><big><a href="#EMANUEL_VON_GEIBEL"><span class="smcap">Emanuel von Geibel</span></a></big></td>
+  <td>1815-1884</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6248">6248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#SEEST_THOU_THE_SEA">See'st Thou the Sea?</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#AS_IT_WILL_HAPPEN">As it will Happen</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#GONDOLIERA">Gondoliera</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#THE_WOODLAND">The Woodland</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#ONWARD">Onward</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#AT_LAST_THE_DAYLIGHT_FADETH">At Last the Daylight Fadeth</a></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2>FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<h3>VOLUME XV</h3>
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="ILLUSTRATIONS" width="60%">
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#Illustration_HOW_KRIEMHILD_IS_LED_TO_ETZEL">"How Kreimhild is Led to Etzel" (Colored Plate)</a></td>
+  <td align="right">Frontispiece</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#RUSSIAN">Russian Writing (Fac-simile)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5876">5876</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PFranklin">Franklin (Portrait)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5925">5925</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PMSA">"Music, Science, and Art" (Photogravure)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_5964">5964</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PFreytag">Freytag (Portrait)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6011">6011</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PMenagerie">"The Menagerie" (Photogravure)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6034">6034</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PWedding">"The Wedding Dress" (Photogravure)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6166">6166</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#PJuggler">"The Juggler" (Photogravure)</a></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_6244">6244</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<h3>VIGNETTE PORTRAITS</h3>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="PORTRAITS" width="60%">
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#FRIEDRICH_BARON_DE_LA_MOTTE_FOUQUE">Foqu&eacute;</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#JAMES_ANTHONY_FROUDE">Froude</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#ANATOLE_FRANCE">France</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#SARAH_MARGARET_FULLER">Fuller (Margaret)</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#HAROLD_FREDERIC">Frederic</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#THOMAS_FULLER">Fuller (Thomas)</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#EDWARD_AUGUSTUS_FREEMAN">Freeman</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#HAMLIN_GARLAND">Garland</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#FERDINAND_FREILIGRATH">Freiligrath</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#ELIZABETH_STEVENSON_GASKELL">Gaskell</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#FRIEDRICH_FROEBEL">Froebel</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#THEOPHILE_GAUTIER">Gautier</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><a href="#FROISSART">Froissart</a></td>
+  <td><a href="#JOHN_GAY">Gay</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><span style="margin-left: 6em;"><a href="#EMANUEL_VON_GEIBEL">Von Giebel</a></span></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5853" id="Page_5853">[Pg 5853]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FOLK-SONG" id="FOLK-SONG"></a>FOLK-SONG</h2>
+
+<h4>BY F. B. GUMMERE</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capa.png" width="90" height="90" alt="A" title="A" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">s in the case of ballads, or narrative songs, it was important to
+sunder not only the popular from the artistic, but also the ballad of
+the people from the ballad for the people; precisely so in the article
+of communal lyric one must distinguish songs of the folk&mdash;songs made
+by the folk&mdash;from those verses of the street or the music hall which
+are often caught up and sung by the crowd until they pass as genuine
+folk-song. For true folk-song, as for the genuine ballad, the tests
+are simplicity, sincerity, mainly oral tradition, and origin in a
+homogeneous community. The style of such a poem is not only simple,
+but free from individual stamp; the metaphors, employed sparingly at
+the best, are like the phrases which constantly occur in narrative
+ballads, and belong to tradition. The metre is not so uniform as in
+ballads, but must betray its origin in song. An unsung folk-song is
+more than a contradiction,&mdash;it is an impossibility. Moreover, it is to
+be assumed that primitive folk-songs were an outcome of the dance, for
+which originally there was no music save the singing of the dancers. A
+German critic declares outright that for early times there was "no
+dance without singing, <i>and no song without a dance</i>; songs for the
+dance were the earliest of all songs, and melodies for the dance the
+oldest music of every race." Add to this the undoubted fact that
+dancing by pairs is a comparatively modern invention, and that
+primitive dances involved the whole able-bodied primitive community
+(Jeanroy's assertion that in the early Middle Ages only women danced,
+is a libel on human nature), and one begins to see what is meant by
+folk-song; primarily it was made by the singing and dancing throng, at
+a time when no distinction of lettered and unlettered classes divided
+the community. Few, if any, of these primitive folk-songs have come
+down to us; but they exist in survival, with more or less trace of
+individual and artistic influences. As we cannot apply directly the
+test of such a communal origin, we must cast about for other and more
+modern conditions.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. George Saintsbury deplores "the lack, notorious to this day,
+of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty," he
+leaves his readers to their own devices by way of defining this
+species of poetry. Probably, however, he means the communal lyric in
+survival, not the ballad, not what Germans would include under
+<i>volkslied</i> and Frenchmen under <i>chanson populaire</i>. This distinction, so
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5854" id="Page_5854">[Pg 5854]</a></span>
+often forgotten by our critics, was laid down for English usage a
+century ago by no less a person than Joseph Ritson. "With us," he
+said, "songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are
+properly called Songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative
+compositions, which now denominate Ballads."</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding this lucid statement, we have failed to clear the
+field of all possible causes for error. The song of the folk is
+differentiated from the song of the individual poet; popular lyric is
+set over against the artistic, personal lyric. But lyric is commonly
+assumed to be the expression of individual emotion, and seems in its
+very essence to exclude all that is not single, personal, and
+conscious emotion. Professor Barrett Wendell, however, is fain to
+abandon this time-honored notion of lyric as the subjective element in
+poetry, the expression of individual emotion, and proposes a
+definition based upon the essentially musical character of these
+songs. If we adhere strictly to the older idea, communal lyric, or
+folk-song, is a contradiction in terms; but as a musical expression,
+direct and unreflective, of communal emotion, and as offspring of the
+enthusiasm felt by a festal, dancing multitude, the term is to be
+allowed. It means the lyric of a throng. Unless one feels this
+objective note in a lyric, it is certainly no folk-song, but merely an
+anonymous product of the schools. The artistic and individual lyric,
+however sincere it may be, is fairly sure to be blended with
+reflection; but such a subjective tone is foreign to communal
+verse&mdash;whether narrative or purely lyrical. In other words, to study
+the lyric of the people, one must banish that notion of individuality,
+of reflection and sentiment, which one is accustomed to associate with
+all lyrics. To illustrate the matter, it is evident that Shelley's 'O
+World, O Life, O Time,' and Wordsworth's 'My Heart Leaps Up,' however
+widely sundered may be the points of view, however varied the
+character of the emotion, are of the same individual and reflective
+class. Contrast now with these a third lyric, an English song of the
+thirteenth century, preserved by some happy chance from the oblivion
+which claimed most of its fellows; the casual reader would
+unhesitatingly put it into the same class with Wordsworth's verses as
+a lyric of "nature," of "joy," or what not,&mdash;an outburst of simple and
+natural emotion. But if this 'Cuckoo Song' be regarded critically, it
+will be seen that precisely those qualities of the individual and the
+subjective are wanting. The music of it is fairly clamorous; the
+refrain counts for as much as the verses; while the emotion seems to
+spring from the crowd and to represent a community. Written down&mdash;no
+one can say when it was actually composed&mdash;not later than the middle
+of the thirteenth century, along with the music and a Latin hymn interlined
+in red ink, this song is justly regarded by critics as communal rather
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5855" id="Page_5855">[Pg 5855]</a></span>
+than artistic in its character; and while it is set
+to music in what Chappell calls "the earliest secular composition, in
+parts, known to exist in any country," yet even this elaborate music
+was probably "a national song and tune, selected according to the
+custom of the times as a basis for harmony," and was "not entirely a
+scholastic composition." It runs in the original:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sumer is icumen in.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lhude sing cuccu.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Groweth sed<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And bloweth med<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And springth the wde nu.<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Sing cuccu.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Awe bleteth after lomb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lhouth after calve cu;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bulluc sterteth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bucke verteth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Murie sing cuccu.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Cuccu, cuccu.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Wel singes thu cuccu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne swik thu naver nu.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="char"><span class="smcap">Burden</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The monk, whose passion for music led him to rescue this charming
+song, probably regretted the rustic quality of the words, and did
+his best to hide the origin of the air; but behind the complicated
+music is a tune of the country-side, and if the refrain is here a
+burden, to be sung throughout the piece by certain voices while
+others sing the words of the song, we have every right to think of
+an earlier refrain which almost absorbed the poem and was sung by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5856" id="Page_5856">[Pg 5856]</a></span>
+a dancing multitude. This is a most important consideration. In all
+parts of Europe, songs for the dance still abound in the shape of a
+welcome to spring; and a lyrical outburst in praise of the jocund
+season often occurs by way of prelude to the narrative ballad: witness
+the beautiful opening of 'Robin Hood and the Monk.' The
+troubadour of Provence, like the minnesinger of Germany, imitated
+these invocations to spring. A charming <i>balada</i> of Provence
+probably takes us beyond the troubadour to the domain of actual
+folk-song.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+"At the entrance of the bright season," it runs, "in order to
+begin joy and to tease the jealous, the queen will show that she is
+fain to love. As far as to the sea, no maid nor youth but must join
+the lusty dance which she devises. On the other hand comes the
+king to break up the dancing, fearful lest some one will rob him of
+his April queen. Little, however, cares she for the graybeard; a gay
+young 'bachelor' is there to pleasure her. Whoso might see her as
+she dances, swaying her fair body, he could say in sooth that nothing
+in all the world peers the joyous queen!" Then, as after each
+stanza, for conclusion the wild refrain&mdash;like a <i>procul este,
+profani!</i>&mdash;"Away, ye jealous ones, away! Let us dance together,
+together let us dance!" The interjectional refrain, "eya," a mere cry
+of joy, is common in French and German songs for the dance, and gives
+a very echo of the lusty singers. Repetition, refrain, the infectious
+pace and merriment of this old song, stamp it as a genuine product of
+the people.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+The brief but emphatic praise of spring with which it
+opens is doubtless a survival of those older pagan hymns and songs
+which greeted the return of summer and were sung by the community in
+chorus to the dance, now as a religious rite, now merely as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5857" id="Page_5857">[Pg 5857]</a></span>
+the expression of communal rejoicing. What the people once sang in chorus
+was repeated by the individual poet. Neidhart the German is famous on
+account of his rustic songs for the dance, which often begin with this
+lusty welcome to spring: while the dactyls of Walther von der
+Vogelweide not only echo the cadence of dancing feet, but so nearly
+exclude the reflective and artistic element that the "I" of the singer
+counts for little. "Winter," he sings,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Winter has left us no pleasure at all;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leafage and heather have fled with the fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds' call!<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the
+village dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance,
+but was often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit
+with the fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved
+for us by song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those
+intellectual tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a
+merry song of May and then turned it more or less freely into their
+barbarous but not unattractive Latin. For example:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now is time for holiday!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let our singing greet the May:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flowers in the breezes play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Every holt and heath is gay.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Let us dance and let us spring<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With merry song and crying!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Joy befits the lusty May:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Set the ball a-flying!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I woo my lady-love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Will she be denying?<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The steps of the dance are not remote; and the same echo haunts
+another song of the sort:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dance we now the measure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dance, lady mine!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May, the month of pleasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Comes with sweet sunshine.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5858" id="Page_5858">[Pg 5858]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Winter vexed the meadow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Many weary hours:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fled his chill and shadow,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lo, the fields are laughing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Red with flowers.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or the song at the dance may set forth some of the preliminaries, as
+when a girl is supposed to sing:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Care and sorrow, fly away!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the green field let us play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Playmates gentle, playmates mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where we see the bright flowers shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I say to thee, I say to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Playmate mine, O come with me!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Gracious Love, to me incline,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make for me a garland fine,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Garland for the man to wear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who can please a maiden fair.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I say to thee, I say to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Playmate mine, O come with me!<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The greeting from youth to maiden, from maiden to youth, was
+doubtless a favorite bit of folk-song, whether at the dance or as
+independent lyric. Readers of the 'Library' will find such a greeting
+incorporated in 'Child Maurice'<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>; only there it is from the son to
+his mother, and with a somewhat eccentric list of comparisons by way
+of detail, instead of the terse form known to German tradition:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Soar, Lady Nightingale, soar above!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A hundred thousand times greet my love!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The variations are endless; one of the earliest is found in a charming
+Latin tale of the eleventh century, 'Rudlieb,' "the oldest known
+romance in European literature." A few German words are mixed with the
+Latin; while after the good old ballad way the greeting is first given
+to the messenger, and repeated when the messenger performs his
+task:&mdash;"I wish thee as much joy as there are leaves on the trees,&mdash;and
+as much delight as birds have, so much love (<i>minna</i>),&mdash;and as much
+honor I wish thee as there are flowers and grass!" Competent critics
+regard this as a current folk-song of greeting inserted in the
+romance, and therefore as the oldest example of <i>minnesang</i>
+in German literature. Of the less known variations of this
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5859" id="Page_5859">[Pg 5859]</a></span>
+theme, one may be given from the German of an old song where male singers are
+supposed to compete for a garland presented by the maidens; the rivals not only
+sing for the prize but even answer riddles. It is a combination of
+game and dance, and is evidently of communal origin. The honorable
+authorities of Freiburg, about 1556, put this practice of "dancing of
+evenings in the streets, and singing for a garland, and dancing in a
+throng" under strictest ban. The following is a stanza of greeting in
+such a song:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Maiden, thee I fain would greet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From thy head unto thy feet.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As many times I greet thee even<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As there are stars in yonder heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As there shall blossom flowers gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From Easter to St. Michael's day!<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These competitive verses for the dance and the garland were, as
+we shall presently see, spontaneous: composed in the throng by lad
+or lassie, they are certainly entitled to the name of communal lyric.
+Naturally, the greeting could ban as well as bless; and little Kirstin
+(Christina) in the Danish ballad sends a greeting of double charge:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To Denmark's King wish as oft good-night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As stars are shining in heaven bright;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Denmark's Queen as oft bad year<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the linden hath leaves or the hind hath hair!<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus.
+The invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is
+doubtless a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of
+summer and flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin
+'Pervigilium Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of
+spring and love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic
+rhythm to some song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter
+Pater is not far from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the
+whole poem was suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of
+the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets
+of Pisa," during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines.
+This haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the
+festal throng, is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's
+translation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Let those love now who never loved before;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let those who always loved now love the more!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Contrast the original!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5860" id="Page_5860">[Pg 5860]</a></span>
+This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome
+and the near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different
+speech from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own
+songs withal; a few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song
+about C&aelig;sar, have come down to us.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical
+poets like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these
+refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung
+in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry,
+even, the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folk-song,
+sung by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a
+refrain. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up
+the refrain, experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those
+highly artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade.
+The refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if
+not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or sorrow,
+like the <i>eya</i> noted above, mere emotional utterances or imitations of
+various sounds, then growing in distinctness and compass, until the
+separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the increasing importance
+of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely ancillary function,
+and finally did away with it altogether. Many refrains are still used
+for the dance which are mere exclamations, with just enough coherence
+of words added to make them pass as poetry. Frequently, as
+in the French, these have a peculiar beauty. Victor Hugo has imitated
+them with success; but to render them into English is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>The refrain, moreover, is closely allied to those couplets or quatrains
+composed spontaneously at the dance or other merry-making
+of the people. In many parts of Germany, the dances of harvest
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5861" id="Page_5861">[Pg 5861]</a></span>
+were until recent days enlivened by the so-called <i>schnaderh&uuml;pfl</i>, a
+quatrain sung to a simple air, composed on the spot, and often
+inclining to the personal and the satiric. In earlier days this power
+to make a quatrain off-hand seems to have been universal among the
+peasants of Europe. In Scandinavia such quatrains are known as
+<i>stev</i>. They are related, so far as their spontaneity, their universal
+character, and their origin are concerned, to the <i>coplas</i> of Spain, the
+<i>stornelli</i> of Italy, and the distichs of modern Greece. Of course, the
+specimens of this poetry which can be found now are rude enough;
+for the life has gone out of it, and to find it at its best one must go
+back to conditions which brought the undivided genius of the community
+into play. What one finds nowadays is such motley as this,&mdash;a
+so-called <i>rund&acirc;</i> from Vogtland, answering to the Bavarian <i>schnaderh&uuml;pfl</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I and my Hans,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We go to the dance;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if no one will dance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dance I and my Hans!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A <i>schnaderh&uuml;pfl</i> taken down at Appenzell in 1754, and one of the
+oldest known, was sung by some lively girl as she danced at the
+reapers' festival:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mine, mine, mine,&mdash;O my love is fine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And my favor shall he plainly see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till the clock strike eight, till the clock strike nine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My door, my door shall open be.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is evident that the great mass of this poetry died with the
+occasion that brought it forth, or lingered in oral tradition, exposed
+to a thousand chances of oblivion. The Church made war upon these
+songs, partly because of their erotic character, but mainly, one may
+assume, because of the chain of tradition from heathen times which
+linked them with feasts in honor of abhorred gods, and with rustic
+dances at the old pagan harvest-home. A study of all this, however,
+with material at a minimum, and conjecture or philological combination
+as the only possible method of investigation, must be relegated
+to the treatise and the monograph;<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> for present purposes we must confine
+our exposition and search to songs that shall attract readers as
+well as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into
+our pages of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to
+the touch of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal
+and popular.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5862" id="Page_5862">[Pg 5862]</a></span>
+Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to
+ask what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting
+at once rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering
+clerk, have come down to us from the later Middle Ages.
+Having answered this question, it will remain to deal with the difficult
+material accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads
+are far easier to preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and
+this story in them has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral
+transmission. A good story travels far, and the path which it wanders
+from people to people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile
+contents of the popular lyric&mdash;we are not speaking of its tune,
+which is carried in every direction&mdash;are easily lost.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> Such a lyric
+lives chiefly by its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We
+can however get some notion of this communal song by process of
+inference, for the earliest lays of the Proven&ccedil;al troubadour, and
+probably of the German minnesinger, were based upon the older
+song of the country-side. Again, in England there was little distinction
+made between the singer who entertained court and castle and
+the gleeman who sang in the villages and at rural festivals; the latter
+doubtless taking from the common stock more than he contributed
+from his own. A certain proof of more aristocratic and distinctly
+artistic, that is to say, individual origin, and a conclusive reason for
+refusing the name of folk-song to any one of these lyrics of love, is
+the fact that it happens to address a married woman. Every one
+knows that the troubadour and the minnesinger thus addressed their
+lays; and only the style and general character of their earliest poetry
+can be considered as borrowed from the popular muse. In other
+words, however vivacious, objective, vigorous, may be the early lays
+of the troubadour, however one is tempted to call them mere modifications
+of an older folk-song, they are excluded by this characteristic
+from the popular lyric and belong to poetry of the schools.
+Marriage, says Jeanroy, is always respected in the true folk-song.
+Moreover, this is only a negative test. In Portugal, many songs
+which must be referred to the individual and courtly poet are written
+in praise of the unmarried girl; while in England, whether it be set
+down to austere morals or to the practical turn of the native mind,
+one finds little or nothing to match this troubadour and minnesinger
+poetry in honor of the stately but capricious dame.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> The folk-song
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5863" id="Page_5863">[Pg 5863]</a></span>
+that we seek found few to record it; it sounded at the dance, it was
+heard in the harvest-field; what seemed to be everywhere, growing
+spontaneously like violets in spring, called upon no one to preserve
+it and to give it that protection demanded by exotic poetry of the
+schools. What is preserved is due mainly to the clerks and gleemen
+of older times, or else to the curiosity of modern antiquarians, rescuing
+here and there a belated survival of the species. Where the
+clerk or the gleeman is in question, he is sure to add a personal element,
+and thus to remove the song from its true communal setting.
+Contrast the wonderful little song, admired by Alceste in Moli&egrave;re's
+'Misanthrope,' and as impersonal, even in its first-personal guise as
+any communal lyric ever made,&mdash;with a reckless bit of verse sung by
+some minstrel about the famous Eleanor of Poitou, wife of Henry II.
+of England. The song so highly commended by Alceste<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> runs, in
+desperately inadequate translation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If the King had made it mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Paris, his city gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I must the love resign<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of my bonnie may,<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To King Henry I would say:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take your Paris back, I pray;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Better far I love my may,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">O joy!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love my bonnie may!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Let us hear the reckless "clerk":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If the whole wide world were mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the ocean to the Rhine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All I'd be denying<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If the Queen of England once<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In my arms were lying!<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The tone is not directly communal, but it smacks more of the
+village dance than of the troubadour's harp; for even Bernart of
+Ventadour did not dare to address Eleanor save in the conventional
+tone of despair. The clerks and gleemen, however, and even English
+peasants of modern times,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> took another view of the matter. The
+"clerk," that delightful vagabond who made so nice a balance between
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5864" id="Page_5864">[Pg 5864]</a></span>
+church and tavern, between breviary and love songs, has probably
+done more for the preservation of folk-song than all other agents
+known to us. In the above verses he protests a trifle or so too much
+about himself; let us hear him again as mere reporter for the communal
+lyric, in verses that he may have brought from the dance to
+turn into his inevitable Latin:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Come, my darling, come to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am waiting long for thee,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am waiting long for thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come, my darling, come to me!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come and make me well again;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come and make me well again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>More graceful yet are the anonymous verses quoted in certain
+Latin love-letters of a manuscript at Munich; and while a few critics
+rebel at the notion of a folk-song, the pretty lines surely hint more
+of field and dance than of the study.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Thou art mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I am thine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of that may'st certain be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Locked thou art<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Within my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I have lost the key:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There must thou ever be!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now it happens that this notion of heart and key recurs in later
+German folk-song. A highly popular song of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries has these stanzas:<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For thy dear sake I'm hither come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sweetheart, O hear me woo!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My hope rests evermore on thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I love thee well and true.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let me but be thy servant,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy dear love let me win;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5865" id="Page_5865">[Pg 5865]</a></span><span class="i0">Come, ope thy heart, my darling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And lock me fast within!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where my love's head is lying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There rests a golden shrine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in it lies, locked hard and fast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This fresh young heart of mine:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh would to God I had the key,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I'd throw it in the Rhine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What place on earth were more to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Than with my sweeting fine?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where my love's feet are lying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A fountain gushes cold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whoso tastes the fountain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Grows young and never old:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full often at the fountain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I knelt and quenched my drouth,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet tenfold rather would I kiss<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My darling's rosy mouth!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And in my darling's garden<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is many a precious flower;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, in this budding season,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Would God 'twere now the hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To go and pluck the roses<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And nevermore to part:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I think full sure to win her<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who lies within my heart!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now who this merry roundel<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hath sung with such renown?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That have two lusty woodsmen<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At Freiberg in the town,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have sung it fresh and fairly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And drunk the cool red wine:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And who hath sat and listened?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Landlady's daughter fine!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What with the more modern tone, and the lusty woodsmen, one
+has deserted the actual dance, the actual communal origin of song;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5866" id="Page_5866">[Pg 5866]</a></span>
+but one is still amid communal influences. Another little song about
+the heart and the key, this time from France, recalls one to the
+dance itself, and to the simpler tone:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Shut fast within a rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I ween my heart must be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No locksmith lives in France<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who can set it free,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only my lover Pierre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who took away the key!<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Coming back to England, and the search for her folk-song, it is
+in order to begin with the refrain. A "clerk," in a somewhat artificial
+lay to his sweetheart, has preserved as refrain what seems to
+be a bit of communal verse:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ever and aye for my love I am in sorrow sore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I think of her I see so seldom any more,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a>&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>rather a helpless moan, it must be confessed.</p>
+
+<p>Better by far is the song of another <i>clericus</i>, with a lusty little refrain
+as fresh as the wind it invokes, as certainly folk-song as anything
+left to us:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Blow, northern wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Send thou me my sweeting!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Blow, northern wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blow, blow, blow!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The actual song, though overloaded with alliteration, has a good
+movement. A stanza may be quoted:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I know a maid in bower so bright<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That handsome is for any sight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Noble, gracious maid of might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Precious to discover.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In all this wealth of women fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maid of beauty to compare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With my sweeting found I ne'er<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All the country over!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Old too is the lullaby used as a burden or refrain for a religious
+poem printed by Thomas Wright in his 'Songs and Carols':&mdash;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5867" id="Page_5867">[Pg 5867]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lullay, myn lykyng, my dere sone, myn swetyng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derlyng.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The same English manuscript which has kept the refrain 'Blow,
+Northern Wind,' offers another song which may be given in modern
+translation and entire. All these songs were written down about the
+year 1310, and probably in Herefordshire. As with the <i>carmina
+burana</i>, the lays of German "clerks," so these English lays represent
+something between actual communal verse and the poetry of the
+individual artist; they owe more to folk-song than to the traditions of
+literature and art. Some of the expressions in this song are taken,
+if we may trust the critical insight of Ten Brink, directly from the
+poetry of the people.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A maid as white as ivory bone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pearl in gold that golden shone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A turtle-dove, a love whereon<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">My heart must cling:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her blitheness nevermore be gone<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">While I can sing!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When she is gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all the world no more I pray<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than this: alone with her to stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Withouten strife.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could she but know the ills that slay<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Her lover's life!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Was never woman nobler wrought;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when she blithe to sleep is brought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well for him who guessed her thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Proud maid! Yet O,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full well I know she will me nought.<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">My heart is woe.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And how shall I then sweetly sing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That thus am marr&eacute;d with mourning?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To death, alas, she will me bring<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Long ere my day.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Greet her well, the sweet&euml; thing,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i3"><i>With eyen gray!</i><br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5868" id="Page_5868">[Pg 5868]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her eyes have wounded me, i-wis.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her arching brows that bring the bliss;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her comely mouth whoso might kiss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In mirth he were;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I would change all mine for his<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That is her fere.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her fere, so worthy might I be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her fere, so noble, stout and free,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For this one thing I would give three,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor haggle aught.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From hell to heaven, if one could see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So fine is naught,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">[Nor half so free;<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All lovers true, now listen unto me.]<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now hearken to me while I tell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In such a fume I boil and well;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is no fire so hot in hell<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As his, I trow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who loves unknown and dares not tell<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">His hidden woe.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>I will her well, she wills me woe;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>I am her friend, and she my foe;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Methinks my heart will break in two<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For sorrow's might;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>In God's own greeting may she go,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>That maiden white!</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>I would I were a throstlecock,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A bunting, or a laverock,</i><a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Sweet maid!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Between her kirtle and her smock</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>I'd then be hid!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The reader will easily note the struggle between our poet's conventional
+and quite literary despair and the fresh communal tone in
+such passages as we have ventured, despite Leigh Hunt's direful
+example, to put in italics. This poet was a clerk, or perhaps not
+even that,&mdash;a gleeman; and he dwells, after the manner of his kind,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5869" id="Page_5869">[Pg 5869]</a></span>
+upon a despair which springs from difference of station. But it is
+England, not France; it is a maiden, not countess or queen, whom he
+loves; and the tone of his verse is sound and communal at heart.
+True, the metre, afterwards a favorite with Burns, is one used by the
+oldest known troubadour of Provence, Count William, as well as by
+the poets of miracle plays and of such romances as the English
+'Octavian'; but like Count William himself, who built on a popular
+basis, our clerk or gleeman is nearer to the people than to the schools.
+Indeed, Uhland reminds us that Breton <i>kloer</i> ("clerks") to this day
+play a leading part as lovers and singers of love in folk-song; and
+the English clerks in question were not regular priests, consecrated
+and in responsible positions, but students or unattached followers of
+theology. They sang with the people; they felt and suffered with
+the people&mdash;as in the case of a far nobler member of the guild, William
+Langland; and hence sundry political poems which deal with
+wrongs and suffering endured by the commons of that day. In the
+struggle of barons and people against Henry III., indignation made
+verses; and these, too, we owe to the clerks. Such a burst of indignation
+is the song against Richard of Cornwall, with a turbulent
+refrain which sounds like a direct loan from the people. One stanza,
+with this refrain, will suffice. It opens with the traditional "lithe
+and listen" of the ballad-singer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sit all now still and list to me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The German King, by my loyalty!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thirty thousand pound asked he<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To make a peace in this country,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">And so he did and more!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="char"><span class="smcap">Refrain</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Richard, though thou be ever trichard,<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trichen<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> shalt thou nevermore!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This, however, like many a scrap of battle-song, ribaldry exchanged
+between two armies, and the like, has interest rather for the antiquarian
+than for the reader. We shall leave such fragments, and
+turn in conclusion to the folk-song of later times.</p>
+
+<p>The England of Elizabeth was devoted to lyric poetry, and folk-song
+must have flourished along with its rival of the schools. Few
+of these songs, however, have been preserved; and indeed there is
+no final test for the communal quality in such survivals. Certainly
+some of the songs in the drama of that time are of popular origin;
+but the majority, as a glance at Mr. Bullen's several collections will
+prove, are artistic and individual, like the music to which they were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5870" id="Page_5870">[Pg 5870]</a></span>
+sung. Occasionally we get a tantalizing glimpse of another lyrical
+England, the folk dancing and singing their own lays; but no Autolycus
+brings these to us in his basket. Even the miracle plays had
+not despised folk-song; unfortunately the writers are content to mention
+the songs, like our Acts of Congress, only by title. In the "comedy"
+called 'The Longer Thou Livest the More Foole Thou Art,'
+there are snatches of such songs; and a famous list, known to all
+scholars, is given by Laneham in a letter from Kenilworth in 1575,
+where he tells of certain songs, "all ancient," owned by one Captain
+Cox. Again, nobody ever praised songs of the people more sincerely
+than Shakespeare has praised them; and we may be certain that he
+used them for the stage. Such is the 'Willow Song' that Desdemona
+sings,&mdash;an "old thing," she calls it; and such perhaps the song in
+'As You Like It,'&mdash;'It Was a Lover and His Lass.' Nash is credited
+with the use of folk-songs in his 'Summer's Last Will and Testament';
+but while the pretty verses about spring and the tripping
+lines, 'A-Maying,' have such a note, nothing could be further from
+the quality of folk-song than the solemn and beautiful 'Adieu, Farewell,
+Earth's Bliss.' In Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Knight of the Burning
+Pestle,' however, Merrythought sings some undoubted snatches of
+popular lyric, just as he sings stanzas from the traditional ballad;
+for example, his&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Go from my window, love, go;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Go from my window, my dear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wind and the rain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will drive you back again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You cannot be lodged here,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is quoted with variations in other plays, and was a favorite of the
+time,<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>
+and like many a ballad appears in religious parody. A modern
+variant, due to tradition, comes from Norwich; the third and
+fourth lines ran:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the wind is in the west,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the cuckoo's in his nest.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>From the time of Henry VIII. a pretty song is preserved of this
+same class:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Westron wynde, when wyll thou blow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The smalle rain downe doth rayne;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh if my love were in my armys,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or I in my bed agayne!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This sort of song between the lovers, one without and one within,
+occurs in French and German at a very early date, and is probably
+much older than any records of it; as serenade, it found great favor
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5871" id="Page_5871">[Pg 5871]</a></span>
+with poets of the city and the court, and is represented in English
+by Sidney's beautiful lines, admirable for purposes of comparison
+with the folk-song:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"Who is it that this dark night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Underneath my window plaineth?"<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">"It is one who, from thy sight<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Being, ah, exiled! disdaineth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Every other vulgar light."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The zeal of modern collectors has brought together a mass of
+material which passes for folk-song. None of it is absolutely communal,
+for the conditions of primitive lyric have long since been
+swept away; nevertheless, where isolated communities have retained
+something of the old homogeneous and simple character, the spirit
+of folk-song lingers in survival. From Great Britain, from France,
+and particularly from Germany, where circumstances have favored this
+survival, a few folk-songs may now be given in inadequate translation.
+To go further afield, to collect specimens of Italian, Russian,
+Servian, modern Greek, and so on, would need a book. The songs
+which follow are sufficiently representative for the purpose.</p>
+
+<p>A pretty little song, popular in Germany to this day, needs no
+pompous support of literary allusion to explain its simple pathos;
+still, it is possible that one meets here a distant echo of the tragedy
+of obstacles told in romance of Hero and Leander. When one hears
+this song, one understands where Heine found the charm of his best
+lyrics:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Over a waste of water<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The bonnie lover crossed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A-wooing the King's daughter:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But all his love was lost.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah, Elsie, darling Elsie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fain were I now with thee;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But waters twain are flowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dear love, twixt thee and me!<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even more of a favorite is the song which represents two girls in
+the harvest-field, one happy in her love, the other deserted; the noise
+of the sickle makes a sort of chorus. Uhland placed with the two stanzas
+of the song a third stanza which really belongs to another tune;
+the latter, however, may serve to introduce the situation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I heard a sickle rustling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ay, rustling through the corn:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I heard a maiden sobbing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Because her love was lorn.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5872" id="Page_5872">[Pg 5872]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh let the sickle rustle!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I care not how it go;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I have found a lover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">A lover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where clover and violets blow."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And hast thou found a lover<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where clover and violets blow?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I stand here, ah, so lonely,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">So lonely,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And all my heart is woe!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Two songs may follow, one from France, one from Scotland, bewailing
+the death of lover or husband. 'The Lowlands of Holland'
+was published by Herd in his 'Scottish Songs.'<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> A clumsy attempt
+was made to fix the authorship upon a certain young widow; but the
+song belies any such origin. It has the marks of tradition:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My love has built a bonny ship, and set her on the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With sevenscore good mariners to bear her company;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There's threescore is sunk, and threescore dead at sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Lowlands of Holland has twin'd<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> my love and me.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My love he built another ship, and set her on the main,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And nane but twenty mariners for to bring her hame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the weary wind began to rise, and the sea began to rout;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My love then and his bonny ship turned withershins<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> about.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There shall neither coif come on my head nor comb come in my hair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There shall neither coal nor candle-light come in my bower mair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor will I love another one until the day I die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O haud your tongue, my daughter dear, be still and be content;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are mair lads in Galloway, ye neen nae sair lament."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O there is none in Gallow, there's none at a' for me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5873" id="Page_5873">[Pg 5873]</a></span>
+The French song<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> has a more tender note:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Low, low he lies who holds my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The sea is rolling fair above;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Go, little bird, and tell him this,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Go, little bird, and fear no harm,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say I am still his faithful love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Say that to him I stretch my arms.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Another song, widely scattered in varying versions throughout
+France, is of the forsaken and too trustful maid,&mdash;'En revenant des
+Noces.' The narrative in this, as in the Scottish song, makes it approach
+the ballad.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Back from the wedding-feast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All weary by the way,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I rested by a fount<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And watched the waters' play;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And at the fount I bathed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So clear the waters' play;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And with a leaf of oak<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wiped the drops away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the highest branch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Loud sang the nightingale.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sing, nightingale, oh sing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hast a heart so gay!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not gay, this heart of mine:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My love has gone away,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Because I gave my rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too soon, too soon away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah, would to God that rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet on the rosebush lay,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Would that the rosebush, even,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unplanted yet might stay,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Would that my lover Pierre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My favor had to pray!<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5874" id="Page_5874">[Pg 5874]</a></span>
+The corresponding Scottish song, beautiful enough for any land
+or age, is the well-known 'Waly, Waly':&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh waly, waly, up the bank,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And waly, waly, down the brae,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And waly, waly, yon burn-side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where I and my love wont to gae.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I lean'd my back unto an aik,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I thought it was a trusty tree;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But first it bowed and syne it brak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sae my true-love did lightly<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> me.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh waly, waly, but love be bonny<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A little time, while it is new;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fades away like morning dew.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh wherefore should I busk my head?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or wherefore should I kame my hair?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For my true-love has me forsook,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And says he'll never love me mair.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now Arthur's Seat shall be my bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The sheets shall ne'er be fyled by me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Saint Anton's well shall be my drink,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Since my true-love has forsaken me.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And shake the green leaves off the tree?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For of my life I am weary.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Tis not the frost that freezes fell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor blawing snaw's inclemency;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But my love's heart grown cauld to me.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5875" id="Page_5875">[Pg 5875]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When we came in by Glasgow town,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We were a comely sight to see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My love was clad in the black velvet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I myself in cramasie.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But had I wist, before I kissed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That love had been sae ill to win,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I'd locked my heart in a case of gold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And pinned it with a silver pin.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, oh, if my young babe were born,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And set upon the nurse's knee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I myself were dead and gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">[And the green grass growing over me!]<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The same ballad touch overweighs even the lyric quality of the
+verses about Yarrow:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Willy's rare, and Willy's fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And Willy's wondrous bonny,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Willy heght<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> to marry me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Gin e'er he married ony.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh came you by yon water-side?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pu'd you the rose or lily?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or came you by yon meadow green?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or saw you my sweet Willy?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She sought him east, she sought him west,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She sought him brade and narrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Syne, in the clifting of a craig,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She found him drowned in Yarrow.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Returning to Germany and to pure lyric, we have a pretty bit
+which is attached to many different songs.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">High up on yonder mountain<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A mill-wheel clatters round,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, night or day, naught else but love<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within the mill is ground.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The mill has gone to ruin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And love has had its day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God bless thee now, my bonnie lass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I wander far away.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5876" id="Page_5876">[Pg 5876]</a></span>
+But there is a more cheerful vein in this sort of song; and the
+mountain offers pleasanter views:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh yonder on the mountain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There stands a lofty house,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where morning after morning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i9">Yes, morning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Three maids go in and out.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The first she is my sister,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The second well is known,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The third, I will not name her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i9">No, name her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And she shall be my own!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Finally, that pearl of German folk-song, 'Innspr&uuml;ck.' The wanderer
+must leave the town and his sweetheart; but he swears to be true,
+and prays that his love be kept safe till his return:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Innspr&uuml;ck, I must forsake thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My weary way betake me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Unto a foreign shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all my joy hath vanished,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ne'er while I am banished<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall I behold it more.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I bear a load of sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And comfort can I borrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dear love, from thee alone.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, let thy pity hover<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About thy weary lover<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When he is far from home.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My one true love! Forever<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thine will I bide, and never<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall our dear vow be vain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now must our Lord God ward thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In peace and honor guard thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Until I come again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 608px;">
+<a name="RUSSIAN" id="RUSSIAN"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>RUSSIAN CURSIVE WRITING.</i></big><br />
+A public document of Kamtschatka, written on birch bark.</span>
+<img src="images/russian.jpg" width="608" height="1024" alt="RUSSIAN CURSIVE WRITING" title="RUSSIAN CURSIVE WRITING" />
+</div>
+
+<p>In leaving the subject of folk-song, it is necessary for the reader
+not only to consider anew the loose and unscientific way in which
+this term has been employed, but also to bear in mind that few of
+the above specimens can lay claim to the title in any rigid classification.
+Long ago, a German critic reminded zealous collectors of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5877" id="Page_5877">[Pg 5877]</a></span>
+day that when one has dipped a pailful of water from the brook,
+one has captured no brook; and that when one has written down a
+folk-song, it has ceased to be that eternally changing, momentary,
+spontaneous, dance-begotten thing which once flourished everywhere
+as communal poetry. Always in flux, if it stopped it ceased to be
+itself. Modern lyric is deliberately composed by some one, mainly to
+be sung by some one else; the old communal lyric was sung by
+the throng and was made in the singing. When festal excitement at
+some great communal rejoicing in the life of clan or tribe "fought
+its battles o'er again," the result was narrative communal song. A
+disguised and baffled survival of this most ancient narrative is the
+popular ballad. Still more disguised, still more baffled, is the purely
+lyrical survival of that old communal and festal song; and the best
+one can do is to present those few specimens found under conditions
+which preserve certain qualities of a vanished world of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked why the contemporary songs found among Indian
+tribes of our continent, or among remote islanders in low stages of
+culture, should not reproduce for us the old type of communal verse.
+The answer is simple. Tribes which have remained in low stages of
+culture do not necessarily retain all the characteristics of primitive
+life among races which had the germs of rapidly developing culture.
+That communal poetry which gave life to the later epic of Hellenic
+or of Germanic song must have differed materially, no matter in what
+stage of development, from the uninteresting and monotonous chants
+of the savage. Moreover, the specimens of savage verse which we
+know retain the characteristics of communal verse, while they lack
+its nobler and vital quality. The dance, the spontaneous production,
+repetition,&mdash;these are all marked characteristics of savage verse. But
+savage verse cannot serve as model for our ideas of primitive folk-song.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 265px;">
+<img src="images/sign041.png" width="265" height="165" alt="F.B. Gummere" title="F.B. Gummere" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+For facsimile of the MS., music, and valuable remarks,
+see Chappell, 'Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time,'
+Vol. i., frontispiece, and pages 21 ff. For pronunciation, see A. J.
+Ellis, 'Early English Pronunciation,' ii., 419 ff. The translation
+given by Mr. Ellis is:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+"Summer has come in; loudly sing, cuckoo! Grows seed and blossoms mead
+and springs the wood now. Sing, cuckoo! Ewe bleats after lamb, lows
+after (its) calf the cow; bullock leaps, buck verts (seeks the green);
+merrily sing, cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo! Well singest thou, cuckoo; cease
+thou not never now. <i>Burden</i>.&mdash;Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo! Sing,
+cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now."&mdash;<i>Lhude</i>, <i>wde</i> (=<i>wude</i>), <i>awe</i>, <i>calve</i>,
+<i>bucke</i>, are dissyllabic. Mr. Ellis's translation of <i>verteth</i> is very
+doubtful.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a>
+The first stanza in the original will show the structure
+of this true "ballad" in the primitive sense of a dance-song. There
+are five of these stanzas, carrying the same rhymes throughout:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; A l'entrada del temps clar,&mdash;eya,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Per joja recomen&ccedil;ar,&mdash;eya,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; E per jelos irritar,&mdash;eya,&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Vol la regina mostrar<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Qu' el' est si amoroza.</p>
+<p class="char"><span class="smcap">Refrain</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Alavi', alavia, jelos,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; laissaz nos, laissaz nos<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; ballar entre nos, entre nos!</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a>
+Games and songs of children are still to be found which
+preserve many of the features of these old dance-songs. The dramatic
+traits met with in the games point back now to the choral poetry of
+pagan times, when perhaps a bit of myth was enacted, now to the
+communal dance where the stealing of a bride may have been imitated.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>
+Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the writer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a>
+From 'Carmina Burana,' a collection of these songs in
+Latin and German preserved in a MS. of the thirteenth century; edited
+by J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1883. This song is page 181 ff., in
+German, 'Nu Suln Wir Alle Fr&ouml;ude H&acirc;n.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a>
+Ibid., page 178: 'Springe wir den Reigen.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a>
+Ibid., page 213: 'Ich wil Tr&ucirc;ren Varen l&acirc;n.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a>
+Article in 'Ballads,' Vol. iii., page 1340.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a>
+Uhland, 'Volkslieder,' i. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a>
+Grundtvig, 'Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser,' iii. 161.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a>
+We cannot widen our borders so as to include that
+solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the 'Song of
+the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of Rhodes as they went
+about asking gifts from house to house at the coming of the earliest
+swallow. The metre is interesting in comparison with the rhythm of
+later European folk-songs, and there is evident dramatic action. Nor
+can we include the fragments of communal drama found in the favorite
+Debates Between Summer and Winter,&mdash;from the actual contest, to such
+lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's Labor's
+Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen of this class in
+'Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,'
+Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the refrain:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Nay, Ivy, nay,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Hyt shal not be, I wys;<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Let Holy hafe the maystry,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; As the maner ys.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+Folk-lore, mythology, sociology even, must share in this
+work. The reader may consult for indirect but valuable material such
+books as Frazer's 'Golden Bough,' or that admirable treatise, Tylor's
+'Primitive Culture.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a>
+For early times translation from language to language is
+out of the question, certainly in the case of lyrics. It is very
+important to remember that primitive man regarded song as a momentary
+and spontaneous thing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a>
+Yet even rough Scandinavia took up this brilliant but
+doubtful love poetry. To one of the Norse kings is attributed a song
+in which the royal singer informs his "lady" by way of credentials for
+his wooing,&mdash;"I have struck a blow in the Saracen's land; <i>let thy
+husband do the same!</i>"</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a>
+'Le Misanthrope,' i. 2; he calls it a <i>vielle chanson</i>.
+M. Tiersot concedes it to the popular muse, but thinks it is of the
+city, not of the country.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+<i>May</i>, a favorite ballad word for "maid," "sweetheart."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a>
+'Carm. Bur.,' page 185: "W&aelig;r diu werlt alliu m&icirc;n."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a>
+See Child's Ballads, vi. 257, and Grandfer Cantle's
+ballad in Mr. Hardy's 'Return of the Native.' See next page.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a>
+'Carm. Bur.,' page 208: "Kume, Kume, geselle min."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a>
+Translated from B&ouml;hme 'Altdeutsches Liederbuch,'
+Leipzig, 1877, page 233. Lovers of folk-song will find this book
+invaluable on account of the carefully edited musical accompaniments.
+With it and Chappell, the musician has ample material for English and
+German songs; for French, see Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire en
+France.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a>
+The garden in these later songs is constantly a symbol
+of love. To pluck the roses, etc., is conventional for making love.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a>
+Quoted by Tiersot, page 88, from 'Chansons &agrave; Danser en
+Rond,' gathered before 1704.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a>
+B&ouml;ddeker's 'Old Poems from the Harleian MS. 2253,' with
+notes, etc., in German; Berlin, 1878, page 179.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a>
+See also Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,' 3rd Ed.,
+pages xlviii., 202 ff. The Percy folio MS. preserved a cradle song,
+'Balow, my Babe, ly Still and Sleepe,' which was published as a
+broadside, and finally came to be known as 'Lady Anne Bothwell's
+Lament.' These "balow" lullabies are said by Mr. Ebbsworth to be
+imitations of a pretty poem first published in 1593, and now printed
+by Mr. Bullen in his 'Songs from Elizabethan Romances,' page 92.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a>
+<i>Fere</i>, companion, lover. "I would give all I have to be
+her lover."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a>
+Superfluous verses; but the MS. makes no distinction.
+<i>Free</i> means noble, gracious. "If one could see everything between
+hell and heaven, one would find nothing so fair and noble."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a>
+Lark. The poem is translated from B&ouml;ddeker, page 161 ff.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a>
+Traitor.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a>
+Betray.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a>
+The music in Chappell, page 141.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a>
+B&ouml;hme, with music, page 94.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a>
+Quoted by Child, 'Ballads,' iv. 318.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a>
+Separated, divided.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a>
+An equivalent to upside down, "in the wrong direction."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a>
+See Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire,' p. 103, with the
+music. The final verses, simple as they are, are not rendered even
+remotely well. They run:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Que je suis sa fid&egrave;le amie,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; Et que vers lui je tends les bras.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a>
+Tiersot, p. 90. In many versions there is further
+complication with king and queen and the lover. This song is extremely
+popular in Canada.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Lightly (a verb) is to treat with contempt, to
+undervalue. Compare the burden quoted by Chappell, p. 458, and very
+old:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; The bonny broome, the well-favored broome,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The broome blooms faire on hill;<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; What ailed my love to lightly me,<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; And I working her will?</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a>
+Promised.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a>
+Child's <i>Ballads</i>, vii. 179.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a>
+B&ouml;hme, p. 271.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a>
+The rhyme in German leaves even more to be desired.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5878" id="Page_5878">[Pg 5878]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SAMUEL_FOOTE" id="SAMUEL_FOOTE"></a>SAMUEL FOOTE</h2>
+
+<h4>(1720-1777)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he name of Samuel Foote suggests a whimsical, plump little man, with
+a round face, twinkling eyes, and one of the readiest wits of the
+eighteenth century. This contemporary of the elder Colman, Cumberland,
+Mrs. Cowley, and the great Garrick, knew many famous men and women,
+and they admired as well as feared his talents.</p>
+
+<p>Samuel Foote was born at Truro in 1720. He was a young boy when he
+first exhibited his powers of mimicry at his father's dinner-table. At
+that time he did not expect to earn his living by them, for he came of
+well-to-do people, and his mother, who was of aristocratic birth,
+inherited a comfortable fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout his school days at Worcester and his college days at
+Worcester College, Oxford, where he did not remain long enough to take
+a degree, and the idle days when he was supposed to be studying law at
+the Temple and was in reality frequenting coffee-houses and
+drawing-rooms as a young man of fashion, he was establishing a
+reputation for repartee, <i>bons mots</i>, and satiric imitation. So, when
+the wasteful youth had squandered all his money, he naturally turned
+to the stage as offering him the best opportunity. Like many another
+amateur addicted to a mistaken ambition, Foote first tried tragedy,
+and made his d&eacute;but as Othello. But in this and in other tragedies he
+was a failure; so he soon took to writing comic plays with parts
+especially adapted to himself. 'The Diversions of the Morning' was the
+first of a long series, of which 'The Mayor of Garratt,' 'The Lame
+Lover,' 'The Nabob,' and 'The Minor,' are among the best known. As
+these were written from the actor's rather than from the dramatist's
+point of view, they often seem faulty in construction and crude in
+literary quality. They are farces rather than true comedies. But they
+abound in witty dialogue, and in a satire which illuminates
+contemporary vices and follies.</p>
+
+<p>Foote seems to have been curiously lacking in conscience. He lived his
+life with a gayety which no poverty, misfortune, or physical suffering
+could long dampen. When he had money he spent it lavishly, and when
+the supply ran short he racked his clever brains to make a new hit.
+To accomplish this he was utterly unscrupulous, and never
+spared his friends or those to whom he was indebted,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5879" id="Page_5879">[Pg 5879]</a></span>
+if he saw good material in their foibles. His victims smarted, but his
+ready tongue and personal geniality usually extricated him from
+consequent unpleasantness. Garrick, who aided him repeatedly, and who
+dreaded ridicule above all things, was his favorite butt, yet remained
+his friend. The irate members of the East India Company, who called
+upon him armed with stout cudgels to administer a castigation for an
+offensive libel in 'The Nabob,' were so speedily mollified that they
+laid their cudgels aside with their hats, and accepted his invitation
+to dinner.</p>
+
+<p>To us, much of his charm has evaporated, for it lay in these very
+personalities which held well-known people up to ridicule with a
+precision which made it impossible for the originals to escape
+recognition. Even irascible Dr. Johnson, who wished to disapprove of
+him, admitted that there was no one like "that fellow Foote." So this
+"Aristophanes of the English stage" was mourned when he died at the
+age of fifty-seven, and a company of his friends and fellow-actors
+buried him one evening by the dim light of torches in a cloister of
+Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>There is often a boisterous unreserve in the plays of Foote, as in
+other eighteenth-century drama, which revolts modern taste. As they
+consist of character study rather than incident, mere extracts are apt
+to appear incomplete and meaningless. Therefore it seems fairer to
+represent the famous wit not alone by formal citation, but also by
+some of his <i>bons mots</i> extracted from the collection of William Cooke
+in his 'Memoirs of Samuel Foote' (2 vols. 1806).</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="HOW_TO_BE_A_LAWYER" id="HOW_TO_BE_A_LAWYER"></a>HOW TO BE A LAWYER</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Lame Lover'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Enter</i> Jack</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;So, Jack, anybody at chambers to-day?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Fieri Facias from Fetter Lane, about the bill to
+be filed by Kit Crape against Will Vizard this term.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Praying for an equal partition of plunder?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Yes, sir.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Strange world we live in, that even highwaymen
+can't be true to each other! [<i>Half aside to himself.</i>] But we
+shall make Vizard refund; we'll show him what long hands the
+law has.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Facias says that in all the books he can't hit a precedent.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5880" id="Page_5880">[Pg 5880]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Then I'll make one myself; <i>Aut inveniam, aut
+faciam</i>, has been always my motto. The charge must be made
+for partnership profit, by bartering lead and gunpowder against
+money, watches, and rings, on Epping Forest, Hounslow Heath,
+and other parts of the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;He says if the court should get scent of the scheme,
+the parties would all stand committed.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Cowardly rascal! but however, the caution mayn't
+prove amiss. [<i>Aside.</i>] I'll not put my own name to the bill.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;The declaration, too, is delivered in the cause of Roger
+Rapp'em against Sir Solomon Simple.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;What, the affair of the note?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Yes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Why, he is clear that his client never gave such a
+note.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Defendant never saw plaintiff since the hour he was
+born; but notwithstanding, they have three witnesses to prove a
+consideration and signing the note.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;They have!</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;He is puzzled what plea to put in.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;<i>Three</i> witnesses ready, you say?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Yes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Tell him Simple must acknowledge the note [<i>Jack
+starts</i>]; and bid him against the trial comes on, to procure <i>four</i>
+persons at least to prove the payment at the Crown and Anchor,
+the 10th of December.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;But then how comes the note to remain in plaintiff's
+possession?</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Well put, Jack: but we have a <i>salvo</i> for that;
+plaintiff happened not to have the note in his pocket, but promised
+to deliver it up when called thereunto by defendant.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;That will do rarely.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Let the defense be a secret; for I see we have able
+people to deal with. But come, child, not to lose time, have you
+carefully conned those instructions I gave you?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Yes, sir.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Well, that we shall see. How many points are the
+great object of practice?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Two.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Which are they?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;The first is to put a man into possession of what is
+his right.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5881" id="Page_5881">[Pg 5881]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;The second?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Either to deprive a man of what is <i>really</i> his right, or
+to keep him as long as possible <i>out</i> of possession.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Good boy! To gain the last end, what are the best
+means to be used?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Various and many are the legal modes of delay.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Name them.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Injunctions, demurrers, sham pleas, writs of error,
+rejoinders, sur-rejoinders, rebutters, sur-rebutters, re-plications,
+exceptions, essoigns, and imparlance.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i> [<i>to himself</i>]&mdash;Fine instruments in the hands of a
+man who knows how to use them. But now, Jack, we come to
+the point: if an able advocate has his choice in a cause, which if
+he is in reputation he may readily have, which side should he
+choose, the right or the wrong?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;A great lawyer's business is always to make choice of
+the wrong.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;And prithee, why so?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Because a good cause can speak for itself, whilst a bad
+one demands an able counselor to give it a color.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Very well. But in what respects will this answer
+to the lawyer himself?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;In a twofold way. Firstly, his fees will be large in
+proportion to the dirty work he is to do.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Secondly?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;His reputation will rise, by obtaining the victory in a
+desperate cause.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Right, boy. Are you ready in the case of the cow?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Pretty well, I believe.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Give it, then.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;First of April, anno seventeen hundred and blank, John
+a-Nokes was indicted by blank, before blank, in the county of
+blank, for stealing a cow, <i>contra pacem</i>, etc., and against the
+statute in that case provided and made, to prevent stealing of
+cattle.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Go on.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Said Nokes was convicted upon the said statute.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;What followed upon?</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Motion in arrest of judgment, made by Counselor Puzzle.
+First, because the field from whence the cow was conveyed
+is laid in the indictment <i>as round</i>, but turned out upon proof to
+be <i>square</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5882" id="Page_5882">[Pg 5882]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;That's well. A valid objection.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Secondly, because in said indictment the color of the
+cow is called red; there being no such things <i>in rerum natura</i>
+as red cows, no more than black lions, spread eagles, flying
+griffins, or blue boars.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Well put.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;Thirdly, said Nokes has not offended against form of
+the statute; because stealing of <i>cattle</i> is there provided against:
+whereas we are only convicted of stealing a <i>cow</i>. Now, though
+cattle may be cows, yet it does by no means follow that cows
+must be cattle.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant</i>&mdash;Bravo, bravo! buss me, you rogue; you are your
+father's own son! go on and prosper. I am sorry, dear Jack, I
+must leave thee. If Providence but sends thee life and health, I
+prophesy thou wilt wrest as much land from the owners, and
+save as many thieves from the gallows, as any practitioner since
+the days of King Alfred.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jack</i>&mdash;I'll do my endeavor. [<i>Exit Serjeant.</i>]</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_MISFORTUNE_IN_ORTHOGRAPHY" id="A_MISFORTUNE_IN_ORTHOGRAPHY"></a>A MISFORTUNE IN ORTHOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Lame Lover'</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sir Luke</span>&mdash;A pox o' your law; you make me lose sight of my story. One
+morning a Welsh coach-maker came with his bill to my lord, whose name
+was unluckily Lloyd. My lord had the man up: "You are called, I think,
+Mr. Lloyd?"&mdash;"At your Lordship's service, my lord."&mdash;"What, Lloyd with
+an L?"&mdash;"It was with an L indeed, my lord."&mdash;"Because in your part of
+the world I have heard that Lloyd and Floyd were synonymous, the very
+same names."&mdash;"Very often indeed, my Lord."&mdash;"But you always spell
+yours with an L?"&mdash;"Always."&mdash;"That, Mr. Lloyd, is a little unlucky;
+for you must know I am now paying my debts alphabetically, and in four
+or five years you might have come in with an F; but I am afraid I can
+give you no hopes for your L. Ha, ha, ha!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5883" id="Page_5883">[Pg 5883]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="FROM_THE_MEMOIRS" id="FROM_THE_MEMOIRS"></a>FROM THE 'MEMOIRS'</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">A Cure for Bad Poetry</span></h4>
+
+
+<p>A physician of Bath told him that he had a mind to publish his own
+poems; but he had so many irons in the fire he did not well know what
+to do.</p>
+
+<p>"Then take my advice, doctor," said Foote, "and put your poems where
+your irons are."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Retort Courteous</span></h4>
+
+<p>Following a man in the street, who did not bear the best of
+characters, Foote slapped him familiarly on the shoulder, thinking
+he was an intimate friend. On discovering his mistake he
+cried out, "Oh, sir, I beg your pardon! I really took you for a
+gentleman who&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," said the other, "and am I not a gentleman?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, sir," said Foote, "if you take it in that way, I must
+only beg your pardon a second time."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">On Garrick's Stature</span></h4>
+
+<p>Previously to Foote's bringing out his 'Primitive Puppet
+Show' at the Haymarket Theatre, a lady of fashion asked him,
+"Pray, sir, are your puppets to be as large as life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, madam, no. Not much above the size of Garrick!"</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Cape Wine</span></h4>
+
+<p>Being at the dinner-table one day when the Cape was going
+round in remarkably small glasses, his host was very profuse on
+the excellence of the wine, its age, etc. "But you don't seem to
+relish it, Foote, by keeping your glass so long before you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, my lord, perfectly well. I am only admiring how
+little it is, considering its great age."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Graces</span></h4>
+
+<p>Of an actress who was remarkably awkward with her arms,
+Foote said that "she kept the Graces at arm's-length."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5884" id="Page_5884">[Pg 5884]</a></span></p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Debtor</span></h4>
+
+<p>Of a young gentleman who was rather backward in paying
+his debts, he said he was "a very promising young gentleman."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Affectation</span></h4>
+
+<p>An assuming, pedantic lady, boasting of the many books which
+she had read, often quoted 'Locke Upon Understanding,' a work
+she said she admired above all things, yet there was one word
+in it which, though often repeated, she could not distinctly make
+out; and that was the word ide-a (pronouncing it very long):
+"but I suppose it comes from a Greek derivation."</p>
+
+<p>"You are perfectly right, madam," said Foote, "it comes from
+the word ideaousky."</p>
+
+<p>"And pray, sir, what does that mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"The feminine of idiot, madam."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Arithmetical Criticism</span></h4>
+
+<p>A mercantile man of his acquaintance, who would read a
+poem of his to him one day after dinner, pompously began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hear me, O Ph&#339;bus! and ye Muses nine!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pray be attentive."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"I am," said Foote. "Nine and one are ten: go on."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Dear Wife</span></h4>
+
+<p>A gentleman just married, telling Foote that he had that
+morning laid out three thousand pounds in jewels for his "dear
+wife": "Well," said the other, "you have but done her justice,
+as by your own reckoning she must be a very valuable woman."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Garrick and the Guinea</span></h4>
+
+<p>Foote and Garrick, supping together at the Bedford, the former
+in pulling out his purse to pay the reckoning dropped a
+guinea, which rolled in such a direction that they could not
+readily find it.</p>
+
+<p>"Where the deuce," says Foote, "can it be gone to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gone to the Devil, I suppose," said Garrick.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said, David; you are always what I took you for, ever
+contriving to make a guinea go farther than any other man."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5885" id="Page_5885">[Pg 5885]</a></span></p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Dr. Paul Hifferman</span></h4>
+
+<p>Paul was fond of laying, or rather offering, wagers. One day
+in the heat of argument he cried out, "I'll lay my head you are
+wrong upon that point."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Foote, "I accept the wager. Any trifle, among
+friends, has a value."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Foote and Macklin</span></h4>
+
+<p>One night, when Macklin was formally preparing to begin a
+lecture, hearing Foote rattling away at the lower end of the
+room, and thinking to silence him at once, he called out in his
+sarcastic manner, "Pray, young gentleman, do you know what I
+am going to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," said Foote quickly: "do you?"</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Baron Newman</span></h4>
+
+<p>This celebrated gambler (well known about town thirty years
+ago by the title of the left-handed Baron), being detected in the
+rooms at Bath in the act of secreting a card, the company in the
+warmth of their resentment threw him out of the window of a
+one-pair-of-stairs room, where they were playing. The Baron,
+meeting Foote some time afterward, loudly complained of this
+usage, and asked him what he should do to repair his injured
+honor.</p>
+
+<p>"Do?" said the wit; "why, 'tis a plain case: never play so
+high again as long as you live."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Mrs. Abington</span></h4>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Abington returned from her very first successful
+trip to Ireland, Foote wished to engage her for his summer theatre;
+but in the mean time Garrick secured her for Drury Lane.
+Foote, on hearing this, asked her why she gave Garrick the
+preference.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how it was," said she: "he talked me over
+by telling me that he would make me immortal, so that I did
+not know how to refuse him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! did he so? Then I'll soon outbid him that way; for
+come to me and I will give you two pounds a week more, and
+charge you nothing for immortality."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5886" id="Page_5886">[Pg 5886]</a></span></p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Garlic-Eaters</span></h4>
+
+<p>Laughing at the imbecilities of a common friend one day,
+somebody observed, "It was very surprising; and Tom D &mdash;&mdash; knew
+him very well, and thought him far from being a fool."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, poor Tom!" said Foote, "he is like one of those people
+who eat garlic themselves, and therefore can't smell it in a companion."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Mode of Burying Attorneys in London</span></h4>
+
+<p>A gentleman in the country, who had just buried a rich
+relation who was an attorney, was complaining to Foote, who
+happened to be on a visit with him, of the very great expense of
+a country funeral in respect to carriages, hat-bands, scarves, etc.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, do you bury your attorneys here?" asked Foote
+gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to be sure we do; how else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we never do that in London."</p>
+
+<p>"No?" said the other much surprised, "how do you manage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, when the patient happens to die, we lay him out in a
+room over night by himself, lock the door, throw open the sash,
+and in the morning he is entirely off."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed!" said the other in amazement; "what becomes of
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that we cannot exactly tell, not being acquainted with
+supernatural causes. All that we know of the matter is, that
+there's a strong smell of brimstone in the room the next morning."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Dining Badly</span></h4>
+
+<p>Foote, returning from dinner with a lord of the admiralty,
+was met by a friend, who asked him what sort of a day he had
+had. "Very indifferent indeed; bad company and a worse dinner."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder at that," said the other, "as I thought the admiral
+a good jolly fellow."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, as to that, he may be a good sea lord, but take it from
+me, he is a very bad landlord."</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5887" id="Page_5887">[Pg 5887]</a></span></p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Dibble Davis</span></h4>
+
+<p>Dibble Davis, one of Foote's butts-in-ordinary, dining with
+him one day at North-end, observed that "well as he loved porter,
+he could never drink it without a head."</p>
+
+<p>"That must be a mistake, Dibble," returned his host, "as you
+have done so to my knowledge alone these twenty years."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">An Extraordinary Case</span></h4>
+
+<p>Being at the levee of Lord Townsend, when that nobleman
+was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he thought he saw a person in
+his Excellency's suite whom he had known to have lived many
+years a life of expediency in London. To convince himself of
+the fact, he asked his Excellency who it was.</p>
+
+<p>"That is Mr. T&mdash;&mdash;, one of my gentlemen at large," was the
+answer. "Do you know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes! perfectly well," said Foote, "and what your Excellency
+tells me is doubly extraordinary: first, that he is a gentleman;
+and next, that he is at large."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Mutability of the World</span></h4>
+
+<p>Being at dinner in a mixed company soon after the bankruptcy
+of one friend and the death of another, the conversation
+naturally turned on the mutability of the world. "Can you
+account for this?" said S&mdash;&mdash;, a master builder, who happened
+to sit next to Foote. "Why, not very clearly," said the other;
+"except we could suppose the world was built by contract."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">An Appropriate Motto</span></h4>
+
+<p>During one of Foote's trips to Dublin, he was much solicited
+by a silly young man of fashion to assist him in a miscellany of
+poems and essays which he was about to publish; but when he
+asked to see the manuscript, the other told him "that at present
+he had only conceived the different subjects, but had put none of
+them to paper."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! if that be the state of the case," replied Foote, "I will
+give you a motto from Milton for the work in its present state:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5888" id="Page_5888">[Pg 5888]</a></span></p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Real Friendship</span></h4>
+
+<p>A young gentleman, making an apology to his father for
+coming late to dinner, said "that he had been visiting a poor
+friend of his in St. George's Fields." "Ah! a pretty kind of
+friend indeed," says the father, "to keep us waiting for dinner
+in this manner."</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, and for the best kind, too," said Foote: "as you know,
+my dear sir, a friend in need is a friend indeed."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Anecdote of an Author</span></h4>
+
+<p>An author was boasting that as a reviewer he had the
+power of distributing literary reputations as he liked. "Take
+care," said Foote, "you are not too prodigal of that, or you may
+leave none for yourself."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Dr. Blair</span></h4>
+
+<p>When Foote first heard of Dr. Blair's writing 'Notes on
+Ossian' (a work the reality of which has always been much
+doubted), he observed, "The publishers ought to allow a great
+discount to the purchaser, as the notes required such a stretch of
+credit."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Advice To a Dramatic Writer</span></h4>
+
+<p>A dull dramatic writer, who had often felt the severity of the
+public, was complaining one day to Foote of the injustice done
+him by the critics; but added, "I have, however, one way of
+being even with them, by constantly laughing at all they say."</p>
+
+<p>"You do perfectly right, my friend," said Foote; "for by this
+method you will not only disappoint your enemies, but lead the
+merriest life of any man in England."</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Grafton Ministry</span></h4>
+
+<p>A gentleman coming into the Cocoa-Tree one morning during
+the Duke of Grafton's administration, was observing "that he
+was afraid the poor ministry were at their wits' end."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if it should be so," said Foote, "what reason have
+they to complain of so short a journey?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5889" id="Page_5889">[Pg 5889]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JOHN_FORD" id="JOHN_FORD"></a>JOHN FORD</h2>
+
+<h4>(1586-?)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he dramatic genius of the English Renaissance had well-nigh spent
+itself when the sombre creations of John Ford appeared upon a stage
+over which the clouds of the Civil War were fast gathering. Little is
+known of this dramatist, who represents the decadent period which
+followed the age of Shakespeare. He was born in 1586; entered the
+Middle Temple in 1602; after 1641 he is swallowed up in the turmoil of
+the time. The few scattered records of his life add nothing to, nor do
+they take anything from, the John Ford of 'The Broken Heart' and
+'Perkin Warbeck.'</p>
+
+<p>His plays are infected with a spirit alien to the poise and beauty of
+the best Elizabethan drama. His creations tell of oblique vision; of a
+disillusioned genius, predisposed to abnormal or exaggerated forms of
+human experience. He breaks through the moral order, in his love for
+the eccentricities of passion. He weaves the spell of his genius
+around strange sins.</p>
+
+<p>The problems of despair which Ford propounds but never solves, form
+the plot of 'The Broken Heart'; Calantha, Ithocles, Penthea, Orgilus,
+are wan types of the passive suffering which numbs the soul to death.
+Charles Lamb has eulogized the final scene of this drama. To many
+critics, the self-possession of Calantha savors of the theatrical. The
+scene between Penthea and her brother Ithocles, who had forced her to
+marry Bassanes though she loved Orgilus, is replete with the
+tenderness, the sense of subdued anguish, of which Ford was a master.
+He is the dramatist of broken hearts, whose waste places are
+unrelieved by a touch of sunlight. His love of "passion at war with
+circumstance" again finds expression in 'Love's Sacrifice,' a drama of
+moral confusions. In 'The Lover's Melancholy' sorrow has grown
+pensive. A quiet beauty rests upon the famous scene in which
+Parthenophil strives with the nightingale for the prize of music.</p>
+
+<p>'The Lady's Trial,' 'The Fancies Chaste and Noble,' 'The Sun's
+Darling' (written in conjunction with Dekker), are worthy only of
+passing notice. They leave but a pale impression upon the mind. In
+'Perkin Warbeck,' the one historical play of Ford, he exhibits his
+mastery over straightforward, sinewy verse. 'The Witch of Edmonton,'
+of which he wrote the first act, gives a signal example of his modern
+style and spirit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5890" id="Page_5890">[Pg 5890]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With the exception of 'Perkin Warbeck,' his dramas are destitute of
+outlook. This moral contraction heightens the intensity of passion,
+which in his conception of it has always its ancient significance of
+suffering. His comic scenes are contemptible. He is at his greatest
+when dealing with the subtleties of the human heart. Through him we
+enter into the darker zones of the soul; we apprehend its remoter
+sufferings. Confusion of spiritual vision, blended with the tyranny of
+passion, produce his greatest scenes. His are the tragedies of
+"unfulfilled desire."</p>
+
+<p>The verse of Ford is measured, passionless, polished. There is a
+subtle music in his lines which haunts the memory.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For he is like to something I remember,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A great while since, a long, long time ago."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>With Ford the sun-born radiance of the noblest Elizabethan drama
+fades from the stage. An artificial light, thereafter, replaced it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FROM_PERKIN_WARBECK" id="FROM_PERKIN_WARBECK"></a>FROM 'PERKIN WARBECK'</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[Perkin Warbeck and his followers are presented to King Henry VII. by
+Lord Dawbeny as prisoners.]</p></div>
+
+<p><i>Dawbeny</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Life to the King, and safety fix his throne.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I here present you, royal sir, a shadow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Majesty, but in effect a substance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of pity; a young man, in nothing grown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To ripeness, but th' ambition of your mercy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perkin, the Christian world's strange wonder!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i20">Dawbeny,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We observe no wonder; I behold ('tis true)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An ornament of nature, fine and polished,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A handsome youth, indeed, but not admire him.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How come he to thy hands?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Dawbeny</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">From sanctuary.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At Bewley, near Southampton; registered,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With these few followers, for persons privileged.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I must not thank you, sir! you were to blame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To infringe the liberty of houses sacred;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dare we be irreligious?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Dawbeny</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">Gracious lord!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They voluntarily resigned themselves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without compulsion.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5891" id="Page_5891">[Pg 5891]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">So? 'twas very well<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Twas very well. Turn now thine eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Young man! upon thyself and thy past actions:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What revels in combustion through our kingdom<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A frenzy of aspiring youth has danced;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till wanting breath, thy feet of pride have slipt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To break thy neck.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Warbeck</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">But not my heart; my heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will mount till every drop of blood be frozen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By death's perpetual winter. If the sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Majesty be darkened, let the sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of life be hid from me, in an eclipse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lasting and universal. Sir, remember<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was a shooting in of light when Richmond<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Not aiming at the crown) retired, and gladly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For comfort to the Duke of Bretagne's court.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Richard, who swayed the sceptre, was reputed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A tyrant then; yet then, a dawning glimmer'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To some few wand'ring remnants, promising day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When first they ventur'd on a frightful shore<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At Milford Haven.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Dawbeny</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">Whither speeds his boldness?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Check his rude tongue, great sir.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">Oh, let him range:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The player's on the stage still; 'tis his part:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He does but act.&mdash;What followed?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Warbeck</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">Bosworth Field:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where at an instant, to the world's amazement,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A morn to Richmond and a night to Richard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Appear'd at once. The tale is soon applied:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fate which crowned these attempts, when least assured,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might have befriended others, like resolved.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A pretty gallant! thus your aunt of Burgundy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your duchess aunt, informed her nephew: so<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lesson, prompted, and well conned, was molded<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into familiar dialogue, oft rehearsed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till, learnt by heart, 'tis now received for truth.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Warbeck</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Truth in her pure simplicity wants art<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To put a feigned blush on; scorn wears only<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such fashion as commends to gazers' eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sad ulcerated novelty, far beneath; in such a court<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wisdom and gravity are proper robes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By which the sovereign is best distinguished<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From zanies to his greatness.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5892" id="Page_5892">[Pg 5892]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">Sirrah, shift<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your antic pageantry, and now appear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In your own nature; or you'll taste the danger<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of fooling out of season.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Warbeck</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">I expect<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No less than what severity calls justice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And politicians safety; let such beg<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As feed on alms: but if there can be mercy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a protested enemy, then may it<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Descend to these poor creatures whose engagements<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the bettering of their fortunes have incurred<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A loss of all to them, if any charity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flow from some noble orator; in death<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I owe the fee of thankfulness.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">So brave?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What a bold knave is this!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We trifle time with follies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Urswick, command the Dukeling and these fellows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Digby, the Lieutenant of the Tower.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Warbeck</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i20">Noble thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Meet freedom in captivity: the Tower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our childhood's dreadful nursery!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>King Henry</i>&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Was ever so much impudence in forgery?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The custom, sure, of being styled a king<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath fastened in his thought that he is such.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PENTHEAS_DYING_SONG" id="PENTHEAS_DYING_SONG"></a>PENTHEA'S DYING SONG</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Broken Heart'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Oh, no more, no more,&mdash;too late;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sighs are spent; the burning tapers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of a life as chaste as fate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Pure as are unwritten papers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are burnt out; no heat, no light<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Now remains; 'tis ever night.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love is dead; let lovers' eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Locked in endless dreams,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Th' extremes of all extremes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ope no more, for now Love dies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Now Love dies&mdash;implying<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love's martyrs must be ever, ever dying.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5893" id="Page_5893">[Pg 5893]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="FROM_THE_LOVERS_MELANCHOLY" id="FROM_THE_LOVERS_MELANCHOLY"></a>FROM 'THE LOVER'S MELANCHOLY'</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Amethus and Menaphon</span></h4>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which poets of an elder time have feigned<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To glorify their Temple, bred in me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Desire of visiting that paradise.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Thessaly I came; and living private<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without acquaintance of more sweet companions<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I day by day frequented silent groves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And solitary walks. One morning early<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This accident encountered me: I heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sweetest and most ravishing contention<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That art and nature ever were at strife in.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Amethus&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I cannot yet conceive what you infer<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By art and nature.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">I shall soon resolve ye.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sound of music touched my ears, or rather<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Indeed entranced my soul. As I stole nearer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Invited by the melody, I saw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With strains of strange variety and harmony,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wondering at what they heard: I wondered too.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Amethus&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And so do I: good, on!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">A nightingale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The challenge, and for every several strain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He could not run division with more art<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon his quaking instrument than she,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The nightingale, did with her various notes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reply to: for a voice and for a sound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amethus, 'tis much easier to believe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That such they were than hope to hear again.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Amethus&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How did the rivals part?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5894" id="Page_5894">[Pg 5894]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">You term them rightly;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For they were rivals, and their mistress harmony.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a pretty anger, that a bird,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should vie with him for mastery, whose study<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had busied many hours to perfect practice.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To end the controversy, in a rapture<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So many voluntaries and so quick,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That there was curiosity and cunning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Concord in discord, lines of differing method<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Meeting in one full centre of delight.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Amethus&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now for the bird.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">The bird, ordained to be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Music's first martyr, strove to imitate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These several sounds; which when her warbling throat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see the conqueror upon her hearse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To weep a funeral elegy of tears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That trust me, my Amethus, I could chide<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine own unmanly weakness that made me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fellow mourner with him.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Amethus&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">I believe thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Menaphon&mdash;</i></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He looked upon the trophies of his art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This cruelty upon the author of it;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall never more betray a harmless peace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To an untimely end:" and in that sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As he was pushing it against a tree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I suddenly stept in.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5895" id="Page_5895">[Pg 5895]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FRIEDRICH_BARON_DE_LA_MOTTE_FOUQUE" id="FRIEDRICH_BARON_DE_LA_MOTTE_FOUQUE"></a>FRIEDRICH, BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQU&Eacute;</h2>
+
+<h4>(1777-1843)</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he romantic school had many false and erratic tendencies, but it
+produced some of the most fanciful and poetic creations of literature.
+Fouqu&eacute; was called the Don Quixote of the Romanticists, and his early
+romances of chivalry were devoured by the public as quickly as they
+appeared. But his fame proved to be a passing fancy; and his later
+works scarcely found a publisher. This was owing partly to a change in
+public taste, and partly to his mannerisms. His descriptions often
+deteriorate into tediousness, and the narrative is broken by
+far-fetched digressions. He was so imbued with the spirit of chivalry
+that he became one-sided, and his scenes were always laid in "the
+chapel or the tilt-yard." Critics of his time speak of his medi&aelig;val
+romances as "full of sweet strength and lovely virtue." Others say
+"the heroes are almost absurd, and do not arouse enthusiasm." Heine
+asserts that Fouqu&eacute;'s laurel is genuine; Coleridge places him above
+Walter Scott; Thomas Carlyle compares him to Southey, and describes
+him as a man of genius, with little more than an ordinary share of
+talent. Fouqu&eacute; was introduced to romanticism by Wilhelm von Schlegel,
+and drew his first inspiration from Cervantes. Whatever his
+shortcomings, it cannot be denied that he succeeded in catching the
+spirit of chivalry. His knights may be unreal and quixotic, but he
+delineates his characters with the irresistible touch of a poet, and
+his work displays noble thoughts and depth of feeling.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus059.jpg" width="270" height="332" alt="Fouqu&eacute;" title="Fouqu&eacute;" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Fouqu&eacute;</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqu&eacute;, was descended from a French
+family that had emigrated to Prussia, and his grandfather was a
+general under Frederick the Great. Fouqu&eacute; was born at Brandenburg,
+February 12th, 1777, and was a thorough German at heart. He received a
+military education, and at the age of nineteen proved himself a brave
+soldier in the campaign of the Rhine. He served under the Duke of
+Weimar, and his friend, and comrade in arms was the wonderfully gifted
+but unfortunate Heinrich von Kleist. He was obliged to resign on
+account of ill health, and withdrawing to his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5896" id="Page_5896">[Pg 5896]</a></span>
+estates he devoted himself to literary pursuits. Once again, however, in the exciting
+times of the war against Napoleon, his sword defended his country. He
+enlisted as a volunteer, and was afterwards honorably retired with the
+rank of major and decorated with the Order of St. John. One of his
+patriotic poems, 'Frisch auf zum Fr&ouml;hlichen Jagen' (Come, rouse ye for
+the merry hunt), with reference to the rising against Napoleon, is
+still a popular song. In Halle, Fouqu&eacute; delivered lectures on history
+and poetry which attracted much attention and admiration. In 1842 he
+was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV., but his literary
+efforts were at an end. He died in Berlin, January 23d, 1843.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of this century, Fouqu&eacute; was one of the most
+celebrated authors. At the present day, with a few brilliant
+exceptions, all of his plays, romances, and poems have been relegated
+to oblivion. There is one work, however, a gem in German literature,
+that has won for its author an enduring place in the memory of
+readers; and that is the charming and graceful narrative of 'Undine.'
+It affords an example of the writer's best style of production; it
+breathes the fresh fragrance of the woods, and is animated by the
+beautiful thought that peoples the sea and air with nymphs and
+spirits. With exquisite tenderness Fouqu&eacute; portrays the beautiful
+character of Undine. At first her nature reflects all the
+capriciousness of the elements, then, gradually growing more human
+through her love, her soul expands and she becomes an ideal of womanly
+love, devotion, and unselfishness.</p>
+
+<p>The real and unreal are so perfectly blended in this story, that the
+suffering of Undine excites deep sympathy. Undine, the foster-daughter
+of a good old fisherman and his wife, is a water nymph, and as such is
+born without a soul. The knight Huldbrand von Ringstetten is sent by
+Bertalda in quest of adventure, and riding through an enchanted forest
+he reaches the fisherman's hut, where he is detained by a storm. He
+falls in love with the laughing, wayward Undine, and marries her. At
+once the bewitching maiden gives up her wild pranks, grows gentle, and
+is devoted to the knight with all her heart; for through her marriage
+to a human being she receives a soul. Her uncle K&uuml;hleborn, a forest
+brook, tries to entice her back to her native element the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The bridal couple go to their castle, where Bertalda joins them, doing
+much to disturb their happiness. Huldbrand, though he still loves his
+beautiful wife, cannot at times suppress an instinctive shudder, and
+he is attracted to Bertalda, whose nature is more akin to his own.</p>
+
+<p>One day, while they are sailing on the Danube, K&uuml;hleborn manages to
+steal away a necklace with which Bertalda is playing in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5897" id="Page_5897">[Pg 5897]</a></span>
+water. Undine richly compensates Bertalda for her loss by a much rarer gift,
+but Huldbrand angrily upbraids her for continuing to hold intercourse
+with her uncanny relatives. In tears she parts from him, and vanishes
+in the waves. The knight marries Bertalda, but on the wedding-day,
+Undine, deeply veiled, rises from the sea to claim her husband, and
+with a kiss she takes away his life.</p>
+
+<p>Heine says of 'Undine':&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"A wondrous lovely poem. The genius of Poetry kissed slumbering
+Spring, and smiling he opened his eyes, and all the roses and the
+nightingales sang; and what the fragrant roses said and what the
+nightingales sang, our worthy Fouqu&eacute; put into words and called it
+'Undine.'"</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_MARRIAGE_OF_UNDINE" id="THE_MARRIAGE_OF_UNDINE"></a>THE MARRIAGE OF UNDINE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Undine'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Before the nuptial ceremony, and during its performance, Undine had
+shown a modest gentleness and maidenly reserve; but it now seemed as
+if all the wayward freaks that effervesced within her burst forth with
+an extravagance only the more bold and unrestrained. She teased her
+bridegroom, her foster-parents, and even the priest, whom she had just
+now revered so highly, with all sorts of childish tricks; but when the
+ancient dame was about to reprove her too frolicsome spirit, the
+knight in a few words imposed silence upon her by speaking of Undine
+as his wife.</p>
+
+<p>The knight was himself indeed just as little pleased with Undine's
+childish behavior as the rest; but all his looks and half-reproachful
+words were to no purpose. It is true, whenever the bride observed the
+dissatisfaction of her husband&mdash;and this occasionally happened&mdash;she
+became more quiet, and placed herself beside him, stroked his face
+with caressing fondness, whispered something smilingly in his ear, and
+in this manner smoothed the wrinkles that were gathering on his brow.
+But the moment after, some wild whim would make her resume her antic
+movements; and all went worse than before.</p>
+
+<p>The priest then spoke in a kind although serious tone:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My fair young maiden, surely no one can look on you without pleasure;
+but remember betimes so to attune your soul, that it may produce a
+harmony ever in accordance with the soul of your wedded bridegroom."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5898" id="Page_5898">[Pg 5898]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Soul!" cried Undine, with a laugh. "What you say has a remarkably
+pretty sound; and for most people, too, it may be a very instructive
+and profitable caution. But when a person has no soul at all, how, I
+pray you, can such attuning be then possible? And this in truth is
+just my condition."</p>
+
+<p>The priest was much hurt, but continued silent in holy displeasure,
+and turned away his face from the maiden in sorrow. She went up to
+him, however, with the most winning sweetness, and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, I entreat you, first listen to me, before you are angry with me;
+for your anger is painful to me, and you ought not to give pain to a
+creature that has not hurt you. Only have patience with me, and I will
+explain to you every word of what I meant."</p>
+
+<p>It was evident that she had come to say something important; when she
+suddenly faltered as if seized with inward shuddering, and burst into
+a passion of tears. They were none of them able to understand the
+intenseness of her feelings; and with mingled emotions of fear and
+anxiety, they gazed on her in silence. Then wiping away her tears and
+looking earnestly at the priest, she at last said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There must be something lovely, but at the same time something most
+awful, about a soul. In the name of God, holy man, were it not better
+that we never shared a gift so mysterious?"</p>
+
+<p>Again she paused, and restrained her tears, as if waiting for an
+answer. All in the cottage had risen from their seats, and stepped
+back from her with horror. She, however, seemed to have eyes for no
+one but the holy man; an awful curiosity was painted on her features,
+which appeared terrible to the others.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavily must the soul weigh down its possessor," she pursued, when no
+one returned her any answer&mdash;"very heavily! for already its
+approaching image overshadows me with anguish and mourning. And alas,
+I have till now been so merry and light-hearted!" and she burst into
+another flood of tears and covered her face with her veil.</p>
+
+<p>The priest, going up to her with a solemn look, now addressed himself
+to her, and conjured her, by the name of God most holy, if any spirit
+of evil possessed her, to remove the light covering from her face. But
+she sank before him on her knees, and repeated after him every sacred
+expression he uttered, giving praise to God, and protesting that she
+"wished well to the whole world."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5899" id="Page_5899">[Pg 5899]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The priest then spoke to the knight: "Sir bridegroom, I leave you
+alone with her whom I have united to you in marriage. So far as I can
+discover there is nothing of evil in her, but assuredly much that is
+wonderful. What I recommend to you is prudence, love, and fidelity."</p>
+
+<p>Thus speaking, he left the apartment; and the fisherman with his wife
+followed him, crossing themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Undine had sunk upon her knees. She uncovered her face, and exclaimed,
+while she looked fearfully round upon Huldbrand, "Alas, you will now
+refuse to look upon me as your own; and I still have done nothing
+evil, poor unhappy child that I am!" She spoke these words with a look
+so infinitely sweet and touching, that her bridegroom forgot both the
+confession that had shocked and the mystery that had perplexed him;
+and hastening to her, he raised her in his arms. She smiled through
+her tears; and that smile was like the morning light playing upon a
+small stream. "You cannot desert me!" she whispered confidingly, and
+stroked the knight's cheeks with her little soft hands. He turned away
+from the frightful thoughts that still lurked in the recesses of his
+soul, and were persuading him that he had been married to a fairy, or
+some spiteful and mischievous being of the spirit world. Only the
+single question, and that almost unawares, escaped from his lips:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest Undine, tell me this one thing: what was it you meant by
+'spirits of earth' and 'K&uuml;hleborn,' when the priest stood knocking at
+the door?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tales! mere tales of children!" answered Undine laughing, now quite
+restored to her wonted gayety. "I first frightened you with them, and
+you frightened me. This is the end of my story, and of our nuptial
+evening."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, not so," replied the enamored knight, extinguishing the tapers,
+and a thousand times kissing his beautiful and beloved bride; while,
+lighted by the moon that shone brightly through the windows, he bore
+her into their bridal apartment.</p>
+
+<p>The fresh light of morning woke the young married pair: but Huldbrand
+lay lost in silent reflection. Whenever, during the night, he had
+fallen asleep, strange and horrible dreams of spectres had disturbed
+him; and these shapes, grinning at him by stealth, strove to disguise
+themselves as beautiful females; and from beautiful females they all
+at once assumed the appearance of dragons. And when he started up,
+aroused by the intrusion
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5900" id="Page_5900">[Pg 5900]</a></span>
+of these hideous forms, the moonlight shone
+pale and cold before the windows without. He looked affrighted at
+Undine, in whose arms he had fallen asleep: and she was reposing in
+unaltered beauty and sweetness beside him. Then pressing her rosy lips
+with a light kiss, he again fell into a slumber, only to be awakened
+by new terrors.</p>
+
+<p>When fully awake he had thought over this connection. He reproached
+himself for any doubt that could lead him into error in regard to his
+lovely wife. He also confessed to her his injustice; but she only gave
+him her fair hand, sighed deeply, and remained silent. Yet a glance of
+fervent tenderness, an expression of the soul beaming in her eyes,
+such as he had never witnessed there before, left him in undoubted
+assurance that Undine bore him no ill-will.</p>
+
+<p>He then rose joyfully, and leaving her, went to the common apartment,
+where the inmates of the house had already met. The three were sitting
+round the hearth with an air of anxiety about them, as if they feared
+trusting themselves to raise their voice above a low, apprehensive
+undertone. The priest appeared to be praying in his inmost spirit,
+with a view to avert some fatal calamity. But when they observed the
+young husband come forth so cheerful, they dispelled the cloud that
+remained upon their brows: the old fisherman even began to laugh with
+the knight, till his aged wife herself could not help smiling with
+great good-humor.</p>
+
+<p>Undine had in the mean time got ready, and now entered the room: all
+rose to meet her, but remained fixed in perfect admiration&mdash;she was so
+changed, and yet the same. The priest, with paternal affection beaming
+from his countenance, first went up to her; and as he raised his hand
+to pronounce a blessing, the beautiful bride sank on her knees before
+him with religious awe; she begged his pardon in terms both respectful
+and submissive for any foolish things she might have uttered the
+evening before, and entreated him with emotion to pray for the welfare
+of her soul. She then rose, kissed her foster-parents, and after
+thanking them for all the kindness they had shown her, said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I now feel in my inmost heart how much, how infinitely much, you
+have done for me, you dear, dear friends of my childhood!"</p>
+
+<p>At first she was wholly unable to tear herself away from their
+affectionate caresses; but the moment she saw the good old
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5901" id="Page_5901">[Pg 5901]</a></span>
+mother busy in getting breakfast, she went to the hearth, applied herself to
+cooking the food and putting it on the table, and would not suffer her
+to take the least share in the work.</p>
+
+<p>She continued in this frame of spirit the whole day: calm, kind,
+attentive&mdash;half matronly and half girlish. The three who had been
+longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her
+capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive
+vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as
+mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to
+remove his eyes from her; and he often said to the bridegroom:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The bounty of Heaven, sir, through me its unworthy instrument,
+intrusted to you yesterday an invaluable treasure: cherish it as you
+ought, and it will promote your temporal and eternal welfare."</p>
+
+<p>Toward evening Undine was hanging upon the knight's arm with lowly
+tenderness, while she drew him gently out before the door, where the
+setting sun shone richly over the fresh grass and upon the high
+slender boles of the trees. Her emotion was visible; the dew of
+sadness and love swam in her eyes, while a tender and fearful secret
+seemed to hover upon her lips, but was only made known by hardly
+breathed sighs. She led her husband farther and farther onward without
+speaking. When he asked her questions, she replied only with looks, in
+which, it is true, there appeared to be no immediate answer to his
+inquiries, but a whole heaven of love and timid devotion. Thus they
+reached the margin of the swollen forest stream, and the knight was
+astonished to see it gliding away with so gentle a murmuring of its
+waves, that no vestige of its former swell and wildness was now
+discernible.</p>
+
+<p>"By morning it will be wholly drained off," said the beautiful wife,
+almost weeping, "and you will then be able to travel, without anything
+to hinder you, whithersoever you will."</p>
+
+<p>"Not without you, dear Undine," replied the knight, laughing: "think
+only, were I disposed to leave you, both the Church and the spiritual
+powers, the emperor and the laws of the realm, would require the
+fugitive to be seized and restored to you."</p>
+
+<p>"All this depends on you&mdash;all depends on you," whispered his little
+companion, half weeping and half smiling. "But I still feel sure that
+you will not leave me; I love you too deeply to fear that misery. Now
+bear me over to that little island which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5902" id="Page_5902">[Pg 5902]</a></span> lies before us. There shall
+the decision be made. I could easily, indeed, glide through that mere
+rippling of the water without your aid, but it is so sweet to lie in
+your arms; and should you determine to put me away, I shall have
+rested in them once more, ... for the last time."</p>
+
+<p>Huldbrand was so full of strange anxiety and emotion, that he knew not
+what answer to make her. He took her in his arms and carried her over,
+now first realizing the fact that this was the same little island from
+which he had borne her back to the old fisherman, the first night of
+his arrival. On the farther side he placed her upon the soft grass,
+and was throwing himself lovingly near his beautiful burden; but she
+said to him:&mdash;"Not here, but opposite me. I shall read my doom in your
+eyes, even before your lips pronounce it; now listen attentively to
+what I shall relate to you." And she began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You must know, my own love, that there are beings in the elements
+which bear the strongest resemblance to the human race, and which at
+the same time but seldom become visible to you. The wonderful
+salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the
+meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest spirits
+belong to the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers,
+and streams live the widespread race of water spirits. These last,
+beneath resounding domes of crystal, through which the sky can shine
+with its sun and stars, inhabit a region of light and beauty; lofty
+coral-trees glow with blue and crimson fruits in their gardens; they
+walk over the pure sand of the sea, among exquisitely variegated
+shells, and amid whatever of beauty the old world possessed, such as
+the present is no more worthy to enjoy,&mdash;creations which the floods
+covered with their secret veils of silver; and now these noble
+monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the water,
+which loves them, and calls forth from their crevices delicate
+moss-flowers and enwreathing tufts of sedge.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, the nation that dwell there are very fair and lovely to behold,
+for the most part more beautiful than human beings. Many a fisherman
+has been so fortunate as to catch a view of a delicate maiden of the
+waters, while she was floating and singing upon the deep. He would
+then spread far the fame of her beauty; and to such wonderful females
+men are wont to give the name of Undines.&mdash;But what need of saying
+more? You, my dear husband, now actually behold an Undine before
+you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5903" id="Page_5903">[Pg 5903]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The knight would have persuaded himself that his lovely wife was under
+the influence of one of her odd whims, and that she was only amusing
+herself and him with her extravagant inventions. He wished it might be
+so. But with whatever emphasis he said this to himself, he still could
+not credit the hope for a moment: a strange shivering shot through his
+soul; unable to utter a word, he gazed upon the sweet speaker with a
+fixed eye. She shook her head in distress, sighed from her full heart,
+and then proceeded in the following manner:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We should be far superior to you, who are another race of the human
+family,&mdash;for we also call ourselves human beings, as we resemble them
+in form and features,&mdash;had we not one evil peculiar to ourselves. Both
+we and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other elements
+vanish into air at death and go out of existence, spirit and body, so
+that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake to a purer
+state of being, we shall remain where sand and sparks and wind and
+waves remain. Thus, we have no souls; the element moves us, and again
+is obedient to our will while we live, though it scatters us like dust
+when we die; and as we have nothing to trouble us, we are as merry as
+nightingales, little gold-fishes, and other pretty children of nature.</p>
+
+<p>"But all beings aspire to rise in the scale of existence higher than
+they are. It was therefore the wish of my father, who is a powerful
+water prince in the Mediterranean Sea, that his only daughter should
+become possessed of a soul, although she should have to endure many of
+the sufferings of those who share that gift.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, the race to which I belong have no other means of obtaining a
+soul than by forming with an individual of your own the most intimate
+union of love. I am now possessed of a soul, and my soul thanks you,
+my best beloved, and never shall cease to thank you, if you do not
+render my whole future life miserable. For what will become of me, if
+you avoid and reject me? Still, I would not keep you as my own by
+artifice. And should you decide to cast me off, then do it now, and
+return alone to the shore. I will plunge into this brook, where my
+uncle will receive me; my uncle, who here in the forest, far removed
+from his other friends, passes his strange and solitary existence. But
+he is powerful, as well as revered and beloved by many great rivers;
+and as he brought me hither to the fisherman a light-hearted and
+laughing child, he will take me home to my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5904" id="Page_5904">[Pg 5904]</a></span> parents a woman, gifted
+with a soul, with power to love and to suffer."</p>
+
+<p>She was about to add something more, when Huldbrand with the most
+heartfelt tenderness and love clasped her in his arms, and again bore
+her back to the shore. There amid tears and kisses he first swore
+never to forsake his affectionate wife, and esteemed himself even more
+happy than Pygmalion, for whom Venus gave life to this beautiful
+statue, and thus changed it into a beloved wife. Supported by his arm,
+and in the confidence of affection, Undine returned to the cottage;
+and now she first realized with her whole heart how little cause she
+had for regretting what she had left&mdash;the crystal palaces of her
+mysterious father.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_LAST_APPEARANCE_OF_UNDINE" id="THE_LAST_APPEARANCE_OF_UNDINE"></a>THE LAST APPEARANCE OF UNDINE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Undine'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Should I relate to you how passed the marriage feast at Castle
+Ringstetten, it would be as if you saw a heap of bright and pleasant
+things, but all overspread with a black mourning crape, through whose
+darkening veil their brilliancy would appear but a mockery of the
+nothingness of all earthly joys.</p>
+
+<p>It was not that any spectral delusion disturbed the scene of
+festivity; for the castle, as we well know, had been secured against
+the mischief of the water spirits. But the knight, the fisherman, and
+all the guests were unable to banish the feeling that the chief
+personage of the feast was still wanting, and that this chief
+personage could be no other than the gentle and beloved Undine.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a door was heard to open, all eyes were involuntarily turned
+in that direction; and if it was nothing but the steward with new
+dishes, or the cup-bearer with a supply of wine of higher flavor than
+the last, they again looked down in sadness and disappointment, while
+the flashes of wit and merriment which had been passing at times from
+one to another were extinguished by tears of mournful remembrance.</p>
+
+<p>The bride was the least thoughtful of the company, and therefore the
+most happy; but even to her it sometimes seemed strange that she
+should be sitting at the head of the table, wearing a green wreath and
+gold-embroidered robe, while Undine was lying a corpse, stiff and
+cold, at the bottom of the Danube, or carried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5905" id="Page_5905">[Pg 5905]</a></span> out by the current into
+the ocean. For ever since her father had suggested something of this
+sort, his words were continually sounding in her ear; and this day in
+particular, they would neither fade from her memory nor yield to other
+thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Evening had scarcely arrived when the company returned to their homes;
+not dismissed by the impatience of the bridegroom, as wedding parties
+are sometimes broken up, but constrained solely by heavy sadness and
+forebodings of evil. Bertalda retired with her maidens, and the knight
+with his attendants, to undress; but there was no gay laughing company
+of bridesmaids and bridesmen at this mournful festival.</p>
+
+<p>Bertalda wished to awake more cheerful thoughts: she ordered her
+maidens to spread before her a brilliant set of jewels, a present from
+Huldbrand, together with rich apparel and veils, that she might select
+from among them the brightest and most beautiful for her dress in the
+morning. The attendants rejoiced at this opportunity of pouring forth
+good wishes and promises of happiness to their young mistress, and
+failed not to extol the beauty of the bride with the most glowing
+eloquence. This went on for a long time, until Bertalda at last,
+looking in a mirror, said with a sigh:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but do you not see plainly how freckled I am growing? Look here
+on the side of my neck."</p>
+
+<p>They looked at the place and found the freckles indeed, as their fair
+mistress had said; but they called them mere beauty-spots, the
+faintest touches of the sun, such as would only heighten the whiteness
+of her delicate complexion. Bertalda shook her head, and still viewed
+them as a blemish.</p>
+
+<p>"And I could remove them," she said at last, sighing. "But the castle
+fountain is covered, from which I formerly used to have that precious
+water, so purifying to the skin. Oh, had I this evening only a single
+flask of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" cried an alert waiting-maid, laughing as she glided out
+of the apartment.</p>
+
+<p>"She will not be so foolish," said Bertalda, well pleased and
+surprised, "as to cause the stone cover of the fountain to be taken
+off this very evening?" That instant they heard the tread of men
+already passing along the court-yard, and could see from the window
+where the officious maiden was leading them directly up to the
+fountain, and that they carried levers and other instruments on their
+shoulders.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5906" id="Page_5906">[Pg 5906]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is certainly my will," said Bertalda with a smile, "if it does not
+take them too long." And pleased with the thought that a word from her
+was now sufficient to accomplish what had formerly been refused with a
+painful reproof, she looked down upon their operations in the bright
+moonlit castle court.</p>
+
+<p>The men raised the enormous stone with an effort; some one of the
+number indeed would occasionally sigh, when he recollected that they
+were destroying the work of their former beloved mistress. Their
+labor, however, was much lighter than they had expected. It seemed as
+if some power from within the fountain itself aided them in raising
+the stone.</p>
+
+<p>"It appears," said the workmen to one another in astonishment, "as if
+the confined water had become a springing fountain." And the stone
+rose more and more, and almost without the assistance of the
+workpeople, rolled slowly down upon the pavement with a hollow sound.
+But an appearance from the opening of the fountain filled them with
+awe, as it rose like a white column of water; at first they imagined
+it really to be a fountain, until they perceived the rising form to be
+a pale female, veiled in white. She wept bitterly, raised her hands
+above her head, wringing them sadly as with slow and solemn step she
+moved toward the castle. The servants shrank back, and fled from the
+spring, while the bride, pale and motionless with horror, stood with
+her maidens at the window. When the figure had now come close beneath
+their room, it looked up to them sobbing, and Bertalda thought she
+recognized through the veil the pale features of Undine. But the
+mourning form passed on, sad, reluctant, and lingering, as if going to
+the place of execution. Bertalda screamed to her maids to call the
+knight; not one of them dared to stir from her place; and even the
+bride herself became again mute, as if trembling at the sound of her
+own voice.</p>
+
+<p>While they continued standing at the window, motionless as statues,
+the mysterious wanderer had entered the castle, ascended the
+well-known stairs, and traversed the well-known halls, in silent
+tears. Alas, how differently had she once passed through these rooms!</p>
+
+<p>The knight had in the mean time dismissed his attendants. Half
+undressed and in deep dejection, he was standing before a large
+mirror; a wax taper burned dimly beside him. At this moment some one
+tapped at his door very, very softly. Undine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5907" id="Page_5907">[Pg 5907]</a></span> had formerly tapped in
+this way, when she was playing some of her endearing wiles.</p>
+
+<p>"It is all an illusion!" said he to himself. "I must to my nuptial
+bed."</p>
+
+<p>"You must indeed, but to a cold one!" he heard a voice, choked with
+sobs, repeat from without; and then he saw in the mirror that the door
+of his room was slowly, slowly opened, and the white figure entered,
+and gently closed it behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"They have opened the spring," said she in a low tone; "and now I am
+here, and you must die."</p>
+
+<p>He felt in his failing breath that this must indeed be; but covering
+his eyes with his hands, he cried:&mdash;"Do not in my death-hour, do not
+make me mad with terror. If that veil conceals hideous features, do
+not lift it! Take my life, but let me not see you."</p>
+
+<p>"Alas!" replied the pale figure, "will you not then look upon me once
+more? I am as fair now as when you wooed me on the island!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if it indeed were so," sighed Huldbrand, "and that I might die by
+a kiss from you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Most willingly, my own love," said she. She threw back her veil;
+heavenly fair shone forth her pure countenance. Trembling with love
+and the awe of approaching death, the knight leant towards her. She
+kissed him with a holy kiss; but she relaxed not her hold, pressing
+him more closely in her arms, and weeping as if she would weep away
+her soul. Tears rushed into the knight's eyes, while a thrill both of
+bliss and agony shot through his heart, until he at last expired,
+sinking softly back from her fair arms upon the pillow of his couch a
+corpse.</p>
+
+<p>"I have wept him to death!" said she to some domestics who met her in
+the ante-chamber; and passing through the terrified group, she went
+slowly out, and disappeared in the fountain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5908" id="Page_5908">[Pg 5908]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="SONG_FROM_MINSTREL_LOVE" id="SONG_FROM_MINSTREL_LOVE"></a>SONG FROM 'MINSTREL LOVE'</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh welcome, Sir Bolt, to me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a welcome, Sir Arrow, to thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But wherefore such pride<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In your swift airy ride?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You're but splints of the ashen tree.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When once on earth lying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There's an end of your flying!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But we freshly will wing you<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And back again swing you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And teach you to wend<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To your Moorish friend.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sir Bolt, you have oft been here;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Sir Arrow, you've often flown near;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But still from pure haste<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All your courage would waste<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the earth and the streamlet clear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What! over all leaping,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In shame are you sleeping?<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or if you smote one,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">'Twas but darklingly done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As the grain that winds fling<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the bird on the wing.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5909" id="Page_5909">[Pg 5909]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ANATOLE_FRANCE" id="ANATOLE_FRANCE"></a>ANATOLE FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h4>(1844-)</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capa.png" width="90" height="90" alt="A" title="A" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">natole France, whose real name of Thibault is sunk in his literary
+signature, was born in Paris, April 16th, 1844. His father, a wealthy
+bookseller, seems to have been a thoughtful, meditative man, and his
+mother a woman of great refinement and tenderness. Their son shows the
+result of the double influence. Always fond of books, he early devoted
+himself to literary work, and made his d&eacute;but as writer in 1868 in a
+biographical study of Alfred de Vigny. This was shortly followed by
+two volumes of poetry: 'Les Po&egrave;mes Dor&eacute;s' (Golden Verses) and 'Les
+Noces Corinth&eacute;ennes' (Corinthian Revels). Since this work of his youth
+he has published at least twelve novels and romances, of which the
+most familiar are: 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' (The Crime of
+Sylvestre Bonnard), 'Le Livre de Mon Ami' (My Friend's Book), 'Le Lys
+Rouge' (The Red Lily), and 'Les D&eacute;sirs de Jean Servieu' (Jean
+Servieu's Wishes). Several volumes of essays, critical introductions
+to splendid editions of Racine, Moli&egrave;re, La Fontaine, and Le Sage, of
+'Manon Lescaut' and 'Paul and Virginia,' numberless studies of men and
+books for the reviews and journals,&mdash;these measure the tireless
+industry of an incessant worker. In 1876 M. France became an attach&eacute;
+of the Library of the Senate. In December 1896 he was received as
+member of the French Academy, succeeding to the chair of Ferdinand de
+Lesseps, whose eulogy he pronounced with exquisite taste and grace.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus073.jpg" width="270" height="325" alt="Anatole France" title="Anatole France" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Anatole France</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Like Renan, whose disciple he is, this fine artist was formed in the
+clerical schools. His perfection of style, clear, distinguished,
+scintillating with wit and fancy, furnishes, as a distinguished French
+critic remarks, a strong contrast to the painful and heavy periods of
+the literary products of a State education. He is an enthusiastic
+humanist, a fervent Neo-Hellenist, delicately sensitive to the beauty
+of the antique, the magic of words, and the harmony of phrase.</p>
+
+<p>Outside of France, his best known works are 'Le Crime de Sylvestre
+Bonnard' (crowned by the Academy) and 'Le Livre de Mon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5910" id="Page_5910">[Pg 5910]</a></span> Ami.' The
+first of these expresses the author's Hellenism, sentiment,
+experience, love of form, and gentle pessimism. Into the character of
+Sylvestre Bonnard, that intelligent, contemplative, ironical,
+sweet-natured old philosopher, he has put most of himself. In 'Le
+Livre de Mon Ami' are reflected the childhood and youth of the author.
+It is a living book, made out of the impulses of the heart, holding
+the very essence of moral grace, written with exquisite irony
+absolutely free from bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be regretted that in some of his later writings this charming
+writer has fallen short of the standard of these works, though the
+versatility of talent he displays is great and admirable. In 'Tha&iuml;s'
+he has painted the magnificent Alexandria of the Ptolemies; in 'Le Lys
+Rouge' the Florence of to-day. In 'La R&ocirc;tisserie de la Reine Pedauque'
+(The Cook-Shop of the Queen Pedauque) and in 'Les Opinions de M.
+J&eacute;rome Coignard,' Gil Blas, Rabelais, Wilhelm Meister, and Montaigne
+seem to jostle each other. In 'Le Jardin d'&Eacute;picure' (The Garden of
+Epicurus) a modern Epicurus, discreet, indulgent, listless, listens to
+lively discussions between the shades of Plato, Origen, Augustine,
+Hegel, and Schopenhauer, while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a
+Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin
+agree in their estimate of a future life.</p>
+
+<p>In his own words, M. Anatole France has always been inclined to take
+life as a spectacle, offering no solution of its perplexities,
+proposing no remedies for its ills. His literary quality, as M. Jules
+Lema&icirc;tre observes, owes little or nothing to the spirit or literature
+of the North. His intelligence is the pure and extreme product of
+Greek and Latin tradition.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="IN_THE_GARDENS" id="IN_THE_GARDENS"></a>IN THE GARDENS</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.' Copyright, 1890, by Harper &amp;
+Brothers</h4>
+
+
+<p style='text-align:right'><span class="smcap">April 16.</span></p>
+
+<p>St. Droctoveus and the early abbots of Saint-Germain-des-Pr&eacute;s have
+been occupying me for the past forty years; but I do not know whether
+I shall be able to write their history before I go to join them. It is
+already quite a long time since I became an old man. One day last
+year, on the Pont des Arts, one of my fellow-members at the Institute
+was lamenting before me over the <i>ennui</i> of becoming old.</p>
+
+<p>"Still," Sainte-Beuve replied to him, "it is the only way that has yet
+been found of living a long time."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5911" id="Page_5911">[Pg 5911]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I have tried this way, and I know just what it is worth. The trouble
+of it is not that one lasts too long, but that one sees all about him
+pass away&mdash;mother, wife, friends, children. Nature makes and unmakes
+all these divine treasures with gloomy indifference, and at last we
+find that we have not loved,&mdash;we have only been embracing shadows. But
+how sweet some shadows are! If ever creature glided like a shadow
+through the life of a man, it was certainly that young girl whom I
+fell in love with when&mdash;incredible though it now seems&mdash;I was myself a
+youth.</p>
+
+<p>A Christian sarcophagus from the catacombs of Rome bears a formula of
+imprecation, the whole terrible meaning of which I only learned with
+time. It says:&mdash;"<i>Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may
+he die the last of his own people!</i>" In my capacity of arch&aelig;ologist I
+have opened tombs and disturbed ashes, in order to collect the shreds
+of apparel, metal ornaments, or gems that were mingled with those
+ashes. But I did it only through that scientific curiosity which does
+not exclude the feelings of reverence and of piety. May that
+malediction graven by some one of the first followers of the Apostles
+upon a martyr's tomb never fall upon me! I ought not to fear to
+survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there
+are always some whom one can love.</p>
+
+<p>But the power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with
+age, like all the other energies of man. Example proves it; and it is
+this which terrifies me. Am I sure that I have not myself already
+suffered this great loss? I should surely have felt it, but for the
+happy meeting which has rejuvenated me. Poets speak of the Fountain of
+Youth: it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we
+take. And one passes by without drinking of it!</p>
+
+<p>The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed,
+all gray-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter&mdash;so
+that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now once more
+finds a purpose and a reason for being.</p>
+
+<p>To-day I "take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the
+terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite de
+Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. I sit and
+dream. My thoughts escape from my head like the foam from a bottle of
+beer. They are light, and their fizzing amuses me. I dream; such a
+pastime is certainly permissible to an old fellow who has published
+thirty volumes of texts, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5912" id="Page_5912">[Pg 5912]</a></span> contributed to the Journal des Savants
+for twenty-six years. I have the satisfaction of feeling that I
+performed my task as well as it was possible for me, and that I
+utilized to their fullest extent those mediocre faculties with which
+nature endowed me. My efforts were not all in vain, and I have
+contributed, in my own modest way, to that renaissance of historical
+labors which will remain the honor of this restless century. I shall
+certainly be counted among those ten or twelve who revealed to France
+her own literary antiquities. My publication of the poetical works of
+Gautier de Coincy inaugurated a judicious system and made a date. It
+is in the austere calm of old age that I decree to myself this
+deserved credit, and God, who sees my heart, knows whether pride or
+vanity have aught to do with this self-award of justice.</p>
+
+<p>But I am tired; my eyes are dim; my hand trembles, and I see an image
+of myself in those old men of Homer, whose weakness excluded them from
+the battle, and who, seated upon the ramparts, lifted up their voices
+like crickets among the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>So my thoughts were wandering, when three young men seated themselves
+near me. I do not know whether each one of them had come in three
+boats, like the monkey of La Fontaine, but the three certainly
+displayed themselves over the space of twelve chairs. I took pleasure
+in watching them, not because they had anything very extraordinary
+about them, but because I discerned in them that brave joyous manner
+which is natural to youth. They were from the schools. I was less
+assured of it by the books they were carrying than by the character of
+their physiognomy. For all who busy themselves with the things of the
+mind can be at once recognized by an indescribable something which is
+common to all of them. I am very fond of young people; and these
+pleased me, in spite of a certain provoking wild manner which recalled
+to me my own college days with marvelous vividness. But they did not
+wear velvet doublets and long hair, as we used to do; they did not
+walk about, as we used to do, with a death's-head; they did not cry
+out, as we used to do, "Hell and malediction!" They were quite
+properly dressed, and neither their costume nor their language had
+anything suggestive of the Middle Ages. I must also add that they paid
+considerable attention to the women passing on the terrace, and
+expressed their admiration of some of them in very animated language.
+But their reflections, even on this subject, were not of a character to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5913" id="Page_5913">[Pg 5913]</a></span>
+oblige me to flee from my seat. Besides, so long as youth is
+studious, I think it has a right to its gayeties.</p>
+
+<p>One of them having made some gallant pleasantry which I forget, the
+smallest and darkest of the three exclaimed, with a slight Gascon
+accent:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What a thing to say! Only physiologists like us have any right to
+occupy ourselves about living matter. As for you, G&eacute;lis, who only live
+in the past,&mdash;like all your fellow archivists and paleographers,&mdash;you
+will do better to confine yourself to those stone women over there,
+who are your contemporaries."</p>
+
+<p>And he pointed to the statues of the Ladies of Ancient France which
+towered up, all white, in a half-circle under the trees of the
+terrace. This joke, though in itself trifling, enabled me to know that
+the young man called G&eacute;lis was a student at the &Eacute;cole des Chartes.
+From the conversation which followed I was able to learn that his
+neighbor, blond and wan almost to diaphaneity, taciturn and sarcastic,
+was Boulmier, a fellow-student. G&eacute;lis and the future doctor (I hope he
+will become one some day) discoursed together with much fantasy and
+spirit. In the midst of the loftiest speculations they would play upon
+words, and make jokes after the peculiar fashion of really witty
+persons&mdash;that is to say, in a style of enormous absurdity. I need
+hardly say, I suppose, that they only deigned to maintain the most
+monstrous kind of paradoxes. They employed all their powers of
+imagination to make themselves as ludicrous as possible, and all their
+powers of reasoning to assert the contrary of common-sense. All the
+better for them! I do not like to see young folks too rational.</p>
+
+<p>The student of medicine, after glancing at the title of the book that
+Boulmier held in his hand, exclaimed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What!&mdash;you read Michelet&mdash;you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Boulmier very gravely. "I like novels."</p>
+
+<p>G&eacute;lis, who dominated both by his fine stature, imperious gestures, and
+ready wit, took the book, turned over a few pages rapidly, and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Michelet always had a great propensity to emotional tenderness. He
+wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man who introduced
+<i>la paperasserie</i> into the September massacres. But as emotional
+tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the
+victims. There is no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age.
+The assassin is pitied, but the victim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5914" id="Page_5914">[Pg 5914]</a></span> is considered quite
+unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever
+before. There is no common-sense in it; it is simply wonderful!
+Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies
+and fainting spells and epileptic fits over matters which he never
+deigns to explain. Childish outcries&mdash;<i>envies de femme grosse!</i>&mdash;and a
+style, my friends!&mdash;not a single finished phrase! It is astounding!"</p>
+
+<p>And he handed the book back to his comrade. "This is amusing madness,"
+I thought to myself, "and not quite so devoid of common-sense as it
+appears. This young man, though only playing, has sharply touched the
+defect in the cuirass."</p>
+
+<p>But the Proven&ccedil;al student declared that history was a thoroughly
+despicable exercise of rhetoric. According to him, the only true
+history was the natural history of man. Michelet was in the right path
+when he came in contact with the fistula of Louis XIV., but he fell
+back into the old rut almost immediately afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>After this judicious expression of opinion, the young physiologist
+went to join a party of passing friends. The two archivists, less well
+acquainted in the neighborhood of a garden so far from the Rue
+Paradis-aux-Marais, remained together, and began to chat about their
+studies. G&eacute;lis, who had completed his third class-year, was preparing
+a thesis, on the subject of which he expatiated with youthful
+enthusiasm. Indeed, I thought the subject a very good one,
+particularly because I had recently thought myself called upon to
+treat a notable part of it. It was the 'Monasticum Gallicanum.' The
+young erudite (I give him the name as a presage) wants to describe all
+the engravings made about 1690 for the work which Dom Michel Germain
+would have had printed, but for the one irremediable hindrance which
+is rarely foreseen and never avoided. Dom Michel Germain left his
+manuscript complete, however, and in good order when he died. Shall I
+be able to do as much with mine?&mdash;but that is not the present
+question. So far as I am able to understand, M. G&eacute;lis intends to
+devote a brief arch&aelig;ological notice to each of the abbeys pictured by
+the humble engravers of Dom Michel Germain.</p>
+
+<p>His friend asked him whether he was acquainted with all the
+manuscripts and printed documents relating to the subject. It was then
+that I pricked up my ears. They spoke at first of original sources;
+and I must confess they did so in a satisfactory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5915" id="Page_5915">[Pg 5915]</a></span> manner, despite
+their innumerable and detestable puns. Then they began to speak about
+contemporary studies on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you read," asked Boulmier, "the notice of Courajod?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" I thought to myself.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied G&eacute;lis; "it is accurate."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the article by Tamisey de Larroque in
+the Revue des Questions Historiques?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" I thought to myself, for the second time.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied G&eacute;lis, "it is full of things...."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the 'Tableau des Abbayes B&eacute;n&eacute;dictines
+en 1600,' by Sylvestre Bonnard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" I said to myself, for the third time.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ma foi!</i> no!" replied G&eacute;lis. "Bonnard is an idiot!"</p>
+
+<p>Turning my head, I perceived that the shadow had reached the place
+where I was sitting. It was growing chilly, and I thought to myself
+what a fool I was to have remained sitting there, at the risk of
+getting the rheumatism, just to listen to the impertinence of those
+two young fellows!</p>
+
+<p>"Well! well!" I said to myself as I got up. "Let this prattling
+fledgeling write his thesis, and sustain it! He will find my colleague
+Quicherat, or some other professor at the school, to show him what an
+ignoramus he is. I consider him neither more nor less than a rascal;
+and really, now that I come to think of it, what he said about
+Michelet awhile ago was quite insufferable, outrageous! To talk in
+that way about an old master replete with genius! It was simply
+abominable!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHILD-LIFE" id="CHILD-LIFE"></a>CHILD-LIFE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Book of My Friend'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Everything in immortal nature is a miracle to the little child.</p>
+
+<p>I was happy. A thousand things at once familiar and mysterious filled
+my imagination, a thousand things which were nothing in themselves,
+but which made my life. It was very small, that life of mine; but it
+was a life&mdash;which is to say, the centre of all things, the kernel of
+the world. Do not smile at what I say,&mdash;or smile only in sympathy, and
+reflect: whoever lives, be it only a dog, is at the centre of all
+things.</p>
+
+<p>Deciding to be a hermit and a saint, and to resign the good things of
+this world, I threw my toys out of the window.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5916" id="Page_5916">[Pg 5916]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The child is a fool!" cried my father, closing the window. I felt
+anger and shame at hearing myself thus judged. But immediately I
+considered that my father, not being so holy as I, could never share
+with me the glory of the blessed, and this thought was for me a great
+consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Every Saturday we were taken to confession. If any one will tell me
+why, he will greatly oblige me. The practice inspired me with both
+respect and weariness. I hardly think it probable that M. le Cur&eacute; took
+a lively interest in hearing my sins; but it was certainly
+disagreeable to me to cite them to him. The first difficulty was to
+find them. You can perhaps believe me, when I declare that at ten
+years of age I did not possess the psychic qualities and the methods
+of analysis which would have made it possible rationally to explore my
+inmost conscience. Nevertheless it was necessary to have sins: for&mdash;no
+sins, no confession. I had been given, it is true, a little book which
+contained them all: I had only to choose. But the choice itself was
+difficult. There was so much obscurely said of "larceny, simony,
+prevarication"! I read in the little book, "I accuse myself of having
+despaired; I accuse myself of having listened to evil conversations."
+Even this furnished little wherewith to burden my conscience.
+Therefore ordinarily I confined myself to "distractions." Distractions
+during mass, distractions during meals, distractions in "religious
+assemblies,"&mdash;I avowed all; yet the deplorable emptiness of my
+conscience filled me with deep shame. I was humiliated at having no
+sins....</p>
+
+<p>I will tell you what, each year, the stormy skies of autumn, the first
+dinners by lamplight, the yellowing leaves on the shivering trees,
+bring to my mind; I will tell you what I see as I cross the Luxembourg
+garden in the early October days&mdash;those sad and beautiful days when
+the leaves fall, one by one, on the white shoulders of the statues
+there.</p>
+
+<p>What I see then is a little fellow who with his hands in his pockets
+is going to school, hopping along like a sparrow. I see him in thought
+only, for he is but a shadow, a shadow of the "me" as I was
+twenty-five years ago. Really, he interests me,&mdash;this little fellow.
+When he was living I gave him but little thought, but now that he is
+no more, I love him well. He was worth altogether more than the rest
+of the "me's" that I have been since. He was a happy-hearted boy as he
+crossed the Luxembourg garden in the fresh air of the morning. All
+that he saw then I see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5917" id="Page_5917">[Pg 5917]</a></span> to-day. It is the same sky, and the same
+earth; the same soul of things is here as before,&mdash;that soul that
+still makes me gay, or sad, or troubled: only <i>he</i> is no more! He was
+heedless enough, but he was not wicked; and in justice to him I must
+declare that he has not left me a single harsh memory. He was an
+innocent child that I have lost. It is natural that I should regret
+him; it is natural that I should see him in thought, and delight in
+recalling him to memory....</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is of more value for giving a child a knowledge of the great
+social machine than the life of the streets. He should see in the
+morning the milkwomen, the water carriers, the charcoal men; he should
+look in the shop windows of the grocer, the pork vender, and the
+wine-seller; he should watch the regiments pass, with the music of the
+band. In short, he should suck in the air of the streets, that he may
+learn that the law of labor is Divine, and that each man has his work
+to do in the world....</p>
+
+<p>Oh! ye sordid old Jews of the Rue Cherche-Midi, and you my masters,
+simple sellers of old books on the quays, what gratitude do I owe you!
+More and better than university professors, have you contributed to my
+intellectual life! You displayed before my ravished eyes the
+mysterious forms of the life of the past, and every sort of monument
+of precious human thought. In ferreting among your shelves, in
+contemplating your dusty display laden with the pathetic relics of our
+fathers and their noble thoughts, I have been penetrated with the most
+wholesome of philosophies. In studying the worm-eaten volumes, the
+rusty iron-work, the worn carvings of your stock, I experienced, child
+as I was, a profound realization of the fluent, changing nature of
+things and the nothingness of all, and I have been always since
+inclined to sadness, to gentleness, and pity.</p>
+
+<p>The open-air school taught me, as you see, great lessons; but the home
+school was more profitable still. The family repast, so charming when
+the glasses are clear, the cloth white, and the faces tranquil,&mdash;the
+dinner of each day with its familiar talk,&mdash;gives to the child the
+taste for the humble and holy things of life, the love of loving. He
+eats day by day that blessed bread which the spiritual Father broke
+and gave to the pilgrims in the inn at Emmaus, and says, like them,
+"My heart is warmed within me." Ah! how good a school is the school of
+home!...</p>
+
+<p>The little fellow of whom I spoke but just now to you, with a sympathy
+for which you pardon me, perhaps, reflecting that it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5918" id="Page_5918">[Pg 5918]</a></span> not egotistic
+but is addressed only to a shadow,&mdash;the little fellow who crossed the
+Luxembourg garden, hopping like a sparrow,&mdash;became later an
+enthusiastic humanist.</p>
+
+<p>I studied Homer. I saw Thetis rise like a white mist over the sea, I
+saw Nausicaa and her companions, and the palm-tree of Delos, and the
+sky, and the earth, and the sea, and the tearful smile of Andromache.
+I comprehended, I felt. For six months I lived in the Odyssey. This
+was the cause of numerous punishments: but what to me were <i>pensums</i>?
+I was with Ulysses on his violet sea. Alcestis and Antigone gave me
+more noble dreams than ever child had before. With my head swallowed
+up in the dictionary on my ink-stained desk, I saw divine
+forms,&mdash;ivory arms falling on white tunics,&mdash;and heard voices sweeter
+than the sweetest music, lamenting harmoniously.</p>
+
+<p>This again cost me fresh punishments. They were just; I was "busying"
+myself "with things foreign to the class." Alas! the habit remains
+with me still. In whatever class in life I am put for the rest of my
+days, I fear yet, old as I am, to encounter again the reproach of my
+old professor: "Monsieur Pierre Nozi&egrave;rre, you busy yourself with
+things foreign to the class."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But the evening falls over the plane-trees of the Luxembourg, and the
+little phantom which I have evoked disappears in the shadow. Adieu!
+little "me" whom I have lost, whom I should forever regret, had I not
+found thee again, beautified, in my son!</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FROM_THE_GARDEN_OF_EPICURUS" id="FROM_THE_GARDEN_OF_EPICURUS"></a>FROM 'THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS'</h3>
+
+<p>Irony and pity are two good counselors: the one, who smiles, makes
+life amiable; the other, who weeps, makes it sacred. The Irony that I
+invoke is not cruel. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle
+and benevolent. Her smile calms anger, and it is she who teaches us to
+laugh at fools and sinners whom, but for her, we might be weak enough
+to hate.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5919" id="Page_5919">[Pg 5919]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="ST_FRANCIS_DASSISI" id="ST_FRANCIS_DASSISI"></a>ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI</h3>
+
+<h4>(1182-1226)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capf.png" width="90" height="90" alt="F" title="F" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">rancis d'Assisi was at first called Francis Bernardone. His father
+Pietro was a merchant of Assisi, much given to the pomps and vanities
+of the world, a lover of France and of everything French. It was after
+a visit to France in 1182 that, rejoining his beloved wife Pica in the
+vale of Umbria, he found that God had given to him a little son. Pica
+called the boy John, in honor of the playmate of the little Christ;
+but Pietro commanded that he should be named Francis, because of the
+bright land from whence he drew the rich silks and thick velvets he
+liked to handle and to sell.</p>
+
+<p>The vale of Umbria is the place for poets; it should be visited in the
+summer, when the roses bloom on the trellises which the early Italian
+painters put as backgrounds to their mothers and children. Florence is
+not far away; and near is the birthplace of one of the fathers of the
+sonnet, Fra Guittone, and of another poet, Propertius.</p>
+
+<p>Francis's childhood, boyhood, and later youth were happy. His father
+denied him no luxury in his power to give; he was sent to the priests
+of the church of St. George. They taught him some Latin and much of
+the Proven&ccedil;al tongue,&mdash;for at that time there was no Italian language;
+there were only dialects, and the Proven&ccedil;al was used by the elegant,
+those who loved poetry. Francis Bernardone was one of these; he sang
+the popular Proven&ccedil;al songs of the day to the lute, for he had learned
+music. And so passionately did he long for "excess of it," that, the
+legend says, he stayed up all one night singing a duet with a
+nightingale. The bird conquered; and later, Francis made a poem
+glorifying the Creator who had given such a thrilling voice to it.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the age of twenty-four Francis had been one of the lightest
+hearted and the lightest headed of the rich young men of Assisi. His
+father openly rejoiced in his extravagance, and admired the graceful
+manner with which he wore gay clothes cut in latest fashions of
+France. Madonna Pica, his mother, trembled for his future, while she
+adored him and in spite of herself believed in him. Her neighbors
+reproached her: "Your son throws money away; he is the son of a
+prince!" And Pica, troubled, answered, "He whom you call the child of
+a prince will one day be a child of God."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5920" id="Page_5920">[Pg 5920]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Pietro was delighted to see his son lead in all the sports of the
+<i>corti</i> of Assisi. The <i>corti</i> were associations of young men addicted
+to Proven&ccedil;al poetry and music and all sorts of gayety. Folgore da San
+Gemiano gives, in a series of sonnets, well translated by Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti, descriptions of their sports arranged according to
+the months. March was the season for</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"&mdash;lamprey, salmon, eel, and trout,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dental and dolphin, sturgeon, all the rout<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of fish in all the streams that fill the seas."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In April are dances:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And through hollow brass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sound of German music on the air."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When summer came, Folgore says the <i>corti</i> had other things:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For July, in Siena by the willow-tree<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I give you barrels of white Tuscan wine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In ice far down your cellars stored supine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And morn and eve to eat, in company,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of those vast jellies dear to you and me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of partridges and youngling pheasants sweet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Boiled capons, sovereign kids;&mdash;and let their treat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be veal and garlic, with whom these agree."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Francis was permeated with the ideas of chivalry, and his language was
+its phraseology. So much was he in love with chivalry that he became
+the founder of a new order, whose patroness should be the Lady
+Poverty. Never had there been a time in Europe since the decay of the
+Roman empire, when poverty was more derided. Princes, merchants, even
+many prelates and priests, neglected and contemned the poor. The
+voices of the outcasts and the leper went up to God, and he sent their
+terrible echoes to awaken the heart of Francis.</p>
+
+<p>In Sicily, Frederick II.&mdash;the Julian of the time&mdash;lived among
+fountains and orange blossoms and gorgeous pomegranate arches,&mdash;a type
+of the arrogant voluptuousness of the time, a voluptuousness which
+Dante symbolized later as the leopard. Against this luxury Francis put
+the lady of his love, Poverty. In the 'Po&egrave;tes Franciscains,' Frederick
+Ozanam says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He thus designated what had become for him the ideal of all
+perfection,&mdash;the type of all moral beauty. He loved to personify
+Poverty as the symbolic genius of his time: he imagined her as the
+daughter of Heaven; and he called her by turns the lady of his
+thoughts, his affianced, and his bride."</p>
+
+<p>The towns of Italy were continually at war, in 1206 and thereabout.
+Francis was taken prisoner in a battle of his native townsmen with the
+Perugians. Restless and depressed, unsatisfied by the revelry of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5921" id="Page_5921">[Pg 5921]</a></span>
+his comrades, he threw himself into the train of the Count de Brienne, who
+was making war on the German Emperor for the two Sicilies. About this
+time, he was moved to give his fine military clothes to a shivering
+soldier. At Spoleto, after this act of charity, he dreamed that the
+voice of God asked what he valued most in life. "Earthly fame," he
+said.&mdash;"But which of two is better for you,&mdash;the Master, or the
+servant? And why will you forsake the Master for the servant, the Lord
+for the slave?"&mdash;"O Lord, what shall I do?" asked Francis.&mdash;"Return
+unto the city," said the voice, "and there it will be told you what
+you shall do and how you may interpret this vision."</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed; he left the army; his old companions were glad to see him,
+and again he joined the <i>corti</i>. But he was paler and more silent.
+"You are in love!" his companions said, laughingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I am in truth thinking of a bride more noble, more richly dowered,
+and more beautiful than the world has ever seen."</p>
+
+<p>Pietro was away from home, and his son made donations to the poor. He
+grew more tranquil, though the Voice had not explained its message. He
+knelt at the foot of the crucifix one day in the old chapel of St.
+Damian, and waited. Then the revelation came:&mdash;"Francis, go to rebuild
+my house, which is falling into ruin!"</p>
+
+<p>Francis took this command, which seemed to have come from the lips of
+his crucified Redeemer, literally. It meant that he should repair the
+chapel of St. Damian. Later, he accepted it in a broader sense. More
+important things than the walls of St. Damian were falling into ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Francis was a man of action, and one who took life literally. He went
+to his father's shop, chose some precious stuffs, and sold them with
+his horse at Foliquo, for much below their value. Pietro had brought
+Francis up in a princely fashion: why should he not behave as a
+prince? And surely the father who had not grudged the richest of his
+stuffs for the celebrations of the <i>corti</i>, would not object to their
+sacrifice at the command of the Voice for the repairing of St. Damian!
+Pietro, who had not heard the Voice, vowed vengeance on his son for
+his foolishness. The priest at St. Damian's had refused the money; but
+Francis threw it into the window, and Pietro, finding it, went away
+swearing that his son had kept some of it. Francis wandered about
+begging stones for the rebuilding of St. Damian's. Pietro, maddened by
+the foolishness of his son, appealed to a magistrate. Francis cast off
+all his garments, and gave them to his father. The Bishop of Assisi
+covered his nakedness with his own mantle until the gown of a poor
+laborer was brought to him. Dipping his right hand in a pile of
+mortar, Francis drew a rough cross upon his breast: "Pietro
+Bernardone," he said, "until now I have called you my father;
+henceforth I can truly say, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' for he is
+my wealth, and in him do I place all my hope."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5922" id="Page_5922">[Pg 5922]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Francis went away, to build his chapel and sing in the Proven&ccedil;al
+speech hymns in honor of God and of love for his greatness. In June
+1208 he began to preach. He converted two men, one rich and of rank,
+the other a priest. They gave all to the poor, and took up their abode
+near a hospital for lepers. They had no home but the chapel of the
+Angels, near the Portiuncula. This was the beginning of the great
+order of the Friars Minors, the Franciscans.</p>
+
+<p>Francis was the first poet to use the Italian speech&mdash;a poet who was
+inspired to change the fate of Europe. "He would never," the author of
+a recent monograph on St. Francis says, "destroy or tread on a written
+page. If it were Christian writing, it might contain the name of God;
+even if it were the work of a pagan, it contained the letters that
+make up the sacred name. When St. Francis, of the people and singing
+for the people, wrote in the vernacular, he asked Fra Pacifico, who
+had been a great poet in the world, to reduce his verses to the rules
+of metre."</p>
+
+<p>St. Bonaventura, Jacomino di Verona, and Jacopone di Todi, the author
+of the 'Stabat Mater,' were Franciscans who followed in his footsteps.
+"The Crusades were," to quote again, "defensive as well as offensive.
+The Sultan, whom St. Francis visited and filled with respect, was not
+far from Christendom." Frederick of Sicily, with his Saracens, menaced
+Assisi itself. Hideous doctrines and practices were rife; and the
+thirty thousand friars who soon enrolled themselves in the band of
+Francis gained the love of the people, preached Christianity anew,
+symbolized it rudely for folk that could not read, and, as St. Francis
+had done, they appealed to the imagination. The legends of St.
+Francis&mdash;one can find them in the 'Little Flowers,' of which there are
+at least two good English translations&mdash;became the tenderest poems of
+the poor.</p>
+
+<p>If St. Francis had been less of a poet, he would have been less of a
+saint. He died a poet, on October 4, 1226: he asked to be buried on
+the Infernal Hill of Assisi, where the crusaders were laid to rest;
+"and," he said, "sing my 'Canticle of the Sun,' so that I may add a
+song in praise of my sister Death. The lines," he added, "will be
+found at the end of the 'Cantico del Sole.'"</p>
+
+<p>Paul Sabatier's 'Life of St. Francis,' and Mrs. Oliphant's, are best
+known to English-speaking readers. The most exhaustive 'Life' is by
+the Abb&eacute; Leon Le Monnier, in two volumes. It has lately been
+translated into English.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 525px;">
+<img src="images/sign086.png" width="525" height="75" alt="Maurice Francis Egan" title="Maurice Francis Egan" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5923" id="Page_5923">[Pg 5923]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="ORDER" id="ORDER"></a>ORDER</h3>
+
+<h4>[<i>Our Lord Speaks</i>]</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And though I fill thy heart with hottest love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Yet in true order must thy heart love me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For without order can no virtue be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By thine own virtue, then, I from above<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stand in thy soul; and so, most earnestly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Must love from turmoil be kept wholly free:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The life of fruitful trees, the seasons of<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The circling year move gently as a dove:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I measured all the things upon the earth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love ordered them, and order kept them fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And love to order must be truly wed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O soul, why all this heat of little worth?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why cast out order with no thought of care?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For by love's heat must love be governed?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_CANTICLE_OF_THE_SUN" id="THE_CANTICLE_OF_THE_SUN"></a>THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[The title is 'Incipiunt Laudes Creaturarum quas fecit Franciscus ad Laudem
+et Honorem Dei cum esset Infirmus ad Sanctum Damianum.' It is
+sometimes called the 'Canticle of the Creatures.' It is in Italian, and it
+opens with these words:&mdash;"Altissimi, omnipotente, bon Signore, tue so le
+laude la gloria e l'onore et omne benedictione."]</p></div>
+
+<p>O Most High, Almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise,
+glory, honor, and all blessing.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord God, with all his creatures, and
+specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day and who
+brings us the light; fair is he, and he shines with a very great
+splendor. O Lord, he signifies to us thee!</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars,
+the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and
+clouds, calms and all weather, by which thou upholdest life in all
+creatures.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable
+to us, and humble and precious and clean.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5924" id="Page_5924">[Pg 5924]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou
+givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant,
+and very mighty and strong.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth
+sustain us and keep us, and bringest forth divers fruits, and
+flowers of many colors, and grass.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for
+love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are
+they who peacefully shall endure, for thou, O Most High, wilt
+give them a crown.</p>
+
+<p>Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from
+which no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin.
+Blessed are those who die in thy most holy will, for the second
+death shall have no power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless
+the Lord, and give thanks to him and serve him with great
+humility.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[The last stanza, in praise of death, was added to the poem on the
+day St. Francis left the world, October 4th, 1225.]</p></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 724px;">
+<a name="PFranklin" id="PFranklin"></a>
+<img src="images/franklin.jpg" width="724" height="1024" alt="B. FRANKLIN." title="B. FRANKLIN." />
+<span class="caption"><big>B. FRANKLIN.</big></span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5925" id="Page_5925">[Pg 5925]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="BENJAMIN_FRANKLIN" id="BENJAMIN_FRANKLIN"></a>BENJAMIN FRANKLIN</h2>
+
+<h4>(1706-1790)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY JOHN BIGELOW</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he youngest son of the seventeen children of a Boston tallow-chandler
+named Franklin was born a subject of Queen Anne of England, on the 6th
+of January, 1706; and on the same day received the baptismal name of
+Benjamin at the Old South Church in that city. He continued for more
+than seventy of the eighty-four years of his life a subject of four
+successive British monarchs. During that period, neither Anne nor
+either of the three Georges who succeeded her had a subject of whom
+they had more reason to be proud, nor one whom at his death their
+people generally supposed they had more reason to detest. No
+Englishman of his generation can now be said to have established a
+more enduring fame, in any way, than Franklin established in many
+ways. As a printer, as a journalist, as a diplomatist, as a statesman,
+as a philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is no disparagement of the services of any of
+his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, to say that no one
+of his generation contributed more effectually to the dissolution of
+the bonds which united the principal British-American colonies to the
+mother country, and towards conferring upon them independence and a
+popular government.</p>
+
+<p>As a practical printer Franklin was reported to have had no superiors;
+as a journalist he exerted an influence not only unrivaled in his day,
+but more potent, on this continent at least, than either of his
+sovereigns or their Parliaments. The organization of a police, and
+later of the militia, for Philadelphia; of companies for extinguishing
+fires; making the sweeping and paving of the streets a municipal
+function; the formation of the first public library for Philadelphia,
+and the establishment of an academy which has matured into the now
+famous University of Pennsylvania, were among the conspicuous reforms
+which he planted and watered in the columns of the Philadelphia
+Gazette. This journal he founded; upon the earnings of it he mainly
+subsisted during a long life, and any sheet of it to-day would bring a
+larger price in the open market probably than a single sheet of any
+other periodical ever published.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5926" id="Page_5926">[Pg 5926]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Franklin's Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism,
+published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,&mdash;better known since
+as Poor Richard,&mdash;is still one of the marvels of modern literature.
+Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication,
+exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue
+having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers,
+probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any
+other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the
+first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in
+foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being
+the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity
+entirely to its literary merit.</p>
+
+<p>What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and
+fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its
+reputation was established by its first number, and when its author
+was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years,
+and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward
+to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more
+impatience than now awaits a President's annual message to Congress.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin graduated from journalism into diplomacy as naturally as
+winter glides into spring. This was simply because he was by common
+acclaim the fittest man for any kind of public service the colony
+possessed, and especially for any duty requiring talents for
+persuasion, in which he proved himself to be unquestionably past
+master among the diplomatists of his time.</p>
+
+<p>The question of taxing the Penn proprietary estates in Pennsylvania,
+for the defense of the province from the French and Indians, had
+assumed such an acute stage in 1757 that the Assembly decided to
+petition the King upon the subject; and selected Franklin, then in the
+forty-first year of his age, to visit London and present their
+petition. The next forty-one years of his life were practically all
+spent in the diplomatic service. He was five years absent on this his
+first mission. Every interest in London was against him. He finally
+surmounted all obstacles by a compromise, which pledged the Assembly
+to pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed lands of the
+Penn estate,&mdash;the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the
+usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never
+forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The
+question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust
+upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out
+again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he
+remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the
+surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5927" id="Page_5927">[Pg 5927]</a></span>colonies would never be
+made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III.
+Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for
+Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his
+arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the
+Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies,
+placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first
+Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the
+imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the
+empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people
+and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on
+ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up
+the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September
+following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to
+be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and
+the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance
+of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly
+favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science.
+While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity,
+which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an
+English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of
+these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the
+Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent
+natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore,
+he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe,
+one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the
+eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three
+editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these
+advantages must be added another of even greater weight: his errand
+there was to assist in dismembering the British Empire, than which
+nothing of a political nature was at this time much nearer every
+Frenchman's heart.</p>
+
+<p>The history of this mission, and how Franklin succeeded in procuring
+from the French King financial aid to the amount of twenty-six
+millions of francs, at times when the very existence of the republic
+depended upon them, and finally a treaty of peace more favorable to
+his country than either England or France wished to concede, has been
+often told; and there is no chapter in the chronicles of this republic
+with which the world is more familiar.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin's reputation grew with his success. "It was," wrote his
+colleague John Adams, "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton,
+Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and
+esteemed than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the
+gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5928" id="Page_5928">[Pg 5928]</a></span>eighteenth century, a
+greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon <i>le grand Franklin</i>
+would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever
+lived."</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty of peace in 1783,
+Franklin renewed an application which he had previously made just
+after signing the preliminary treaty, to be relieved of his mission;
+but it was not until the 7th of March, 1785, that Congress adopted a
+resolution permitting "the Honorable Benjamin Franklin to return to
+America as soon as convenient." Three days later, Thomas Jefferson was
+appointed to succeed him.</p>
+
+<p>On the 13th of September, 1785, and after a sojourn of nearly nine
+years in the French capital, first in the capacity of commissioner and
+subsequently of minister plenipotentiary, Franklin once more landed in
+Philadelphia, on the same wharf on which, sixty-two years before, he
+had stepped, a friendless and practically penniless runaway apprentice
+of seventeen.</p>
+
+<p>Though now in his seventy-ninth year, and a prey to infirmities not
+the necessary incidents of old age, he had scarcely unpacked his
+trunks after his return when he was chosen a member of the municipal
+council of Philadelphia, and its chairman. Shortly after, he was
+elected president of Pennsylvania, his own vote only lacking to make
+the vote unanimous. "I have not firmness," he wrote to a friend, "to
+resist the unanimous desire of my countryfolks; and I find myself
+harnessed again into their service another year. They engrossed the
+prime of my life; they have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to
+pick my bones."</p>
+
+<p>He was unanimously re-elected to this dignity for the two succeeding
+years, and while holding that office was chosen a member of the
+convention which met in May 1787 to frame the Constitution under which
+the people of the United States are still living.</p>
+
+<p>With the adoption of that instrument, to which he probably contributed
+as much as any other individual, he retired from official life; though
+not from the service of the public, to which for the remaining years
+of his stay on earth his genius and his talents were faithfully
+consecrated.</p>
+
+<p>Among the fruits of that unfamiliar leisure, always to be remembered
+among the noblest achievements of his illustrious career, was the part
+he had in organizing the first anti-slavery society in the world; and
+as its president, writing and signing the first remonstrance against
+slavery ever addressed to the Congress of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>In surveying the life of Dr. Franklin as a whole, the thing that most
+impresses one is his constant study and singleness of purpose to
+promote the welfare of human society. It was his daily theme as a
+journalist, and his yearly theme as an almanac-maker. It is that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5929" id="Page_5929">[Pg 5929]</a></span>which first occurs to us when we recall his career as a member of the
+Colonial Assembly; as an agent of the provinces in England; as a
+diplomatist in France; and as a member of the conventions which
+crowned the consistent labors of his long life. Nor are there any now
+so bold as to affirm that there was any other person who could have
+been depended upon to accomplish for his country or the world, what
+Franklin did in any of the several stages of his versatile career.</p>
+
+<p>Though holding office for more than half of his life, the office
+always sought Franklin, not Franklin the office. When sent to England
+as the agent of the colony, he withdrew from business with a modest
+competence judiciously invested mostly in real estate. He never seems
+to have given a thought to its increase. Frugal in his habits, simple
+in his tastes, wise in his indulgences, he died with a fortune neither
+too large nor too small for his fame as a citizen or a patriot. For
+teaching frugality and economy to the colonists, when frugality and
+economy were indispensable to the conservation of their independence
+and manhood, he has been sneered at as the teacher of a
+"candle-end-saving philosophy," and his 'Poor Richard' as a
+"collection of receipts for laying up treasures on earth rather than
+in heaven." Franklin never taught, either by precept or example, to
+lay up treasures on earth. He taught the virtues of industry, thrift,
+and economy, as the virtues supremely important in his time, to keep
+people out of debt and to provide the means of educating and
+dignifying society. He never countenanced the accumulation of wealth
+for its own sake, but for its uses,&mdash;its prompt convertibility into
+social comforts and refinements. It would be difficult to name another
+man of any age to whom an ambition to accumulate wealth as an end
+could be imputed with less propriety. Though probably the most
+inventive genius of his age, and thus indirectly the founder of many
+fortunes, he never asked a patent for any of his inventions or
+discoveries. Though one of the best writers of the English language
+that his country has yet produced, he never wrote a line for money
+after he withdrew from the calling by which he made a modest provision
+for his family.</p>
+
+<p>For the remaining half of his life both at home and abroad, though
+constantly operating upon public opinion by his pen, he never availed
+himself of a copyright or received a penny from any publisher or
+patron for any of these labors. In none of the public positions which
+he held, even when minister plenipotentiary, did his pay equal his
+expenditures. He was three years president of Pennsylvania after his
+return from France, and for his services declined to appropriate to
+his own use anything beyond his necessary expenditures for stationery,
+postage, and transportation. It is not by such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5930" id="Page_5930">[Pg 5930]</a></span>methods that men
+justly incur the implied reproach of "laying up treasures on earth,"
+or of teaching a candle-end-saving philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin courted fame no more than fortune. The best of his writings,
+after his retirement from journalism, he never gave to the press at
+all; not even his incomparable autobiography, which is still
+republished more frequently than any of the writings of Dickens or of
+Thackeray. He always wrote for a larger purpose than mere personal
+gratification of any kind. Even his bagatelles and <i>jeux d'esprit</i>
+read in the salons of Paris, though apparently intended for the eyes
+of a small circle, were inspired by a desire to make friends and
+create respect for the struggling people and the great cause he
+represented. Few if any of them got into print until many years after
+his decease.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he
+entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as
+agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too
+eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not
+to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of
+every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly
+correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any
+distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say
+planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long
+resist.</p>
+
+<p>Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from
+his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least
+printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose
+names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about
+him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his
+autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official
+correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and
+correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr.
+Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson,
+Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters,
+Voltaire, the habitu&eacute;s of the Helv&eacute;tius salon, the Marquis de S&eacute;gur,
+the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le
+Veillard, the <i>maire</i> of Passy,&mdash;all that we learn of his
+achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or
+many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might
+be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater
+obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and
+except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written
+anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written
+in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began
+to be published a quarter of a century after his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5931" id="Page_5931">[Pg 5931]</a></span>death) that we must
+turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this
+last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his
+correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a
+necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the
+posthumous fame to which his correspondence during that period was
+destined to contribute so much. Hence, all the biographies&mdash;and they
+are numberless&mdash;owe almost their entire interest and value to his own
+pen. All, so far as they are biographies, are autobiographies; and for
+that reason it may be fairly said that all of them are interesting.</p>
+
+<p>It is also quite remarkable that though Franklin's life was a
+continuous warfare, he had no personal enemies. His extraordinary and
+even intimate experience of every phase of human life, from the very
+lowest to the very highest, had made him so tolerant that he regarded
+differences of opinion and of habits much as he regarded the changes
+of the weather,&mdash;as good or bad for his purposes, but which, though he
+might sometimes deplore, he had no right to quarrel with or assume
+personal responsibility for. Hence he never said or did things
+personally offensive. The causes that he represented had enemies, for
+he was all his life a reformer. All men who are good for anything have
+such enemies. "I have, as you observe," wrote Franklin to John Jay the
+year that he retired from the French mission, "some enemies in
+England, but they are my enemies as an American; I have also two or
+three in America who are my enemies as a minister; but I thank God
+there are not in the whole world any who are my enemies as a man: for
+by his grace, through a long life, I have been enabled so to conduct
+myself that there does not exist a human being who can justly say,
+'Ben Franklin has wronged me.' This, my friend, is in old age a
+comfortable reflection. You too have or may have your enemies; but let
+not that render you unhappy. If you make a right use of them, they
+will do you more good than harm. They point out to us our faults; they
+put us upon our guard and help us to live more correctly."</p>
+
+<p>Franklin's place in literature as a writer has not been generally
+appreciated, probably because with him writing was only a means, never
+an end, and his ends always dwarfed his means, however effective. He
+wrote to persuade others, never to parade his literary skill. He never
+wrote a dull line, and was never <i>nimious</i>. The longest production of
+his pen was his autobiography, written during the closing years of his
+life. Nearly all that he wrote besides was in the form of letters,
+which would hardly average three octavo pages in length. And yet
+whatever the subject he touched upon, he never left the impression of
+incompleteness or of inconclusiveness. Of him may be said, perhaps
+with as much propriety as of any other man, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5932" id="Page_5932">[Pg 5932]</a></span>that he never said a word
+too soon, nor a word too late, nor a word too much. Tons of paper have
+been devoted to dissuasives from dueling, but the argument was never
+put more effectively than Franklin put it in these dozen lines of a
+letter to a Mr. Percival, who had sent him a volume of literary and
+moral dissertations.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"A gentleman in a coffee-house desired another to sit further from
+him. 'Why so?'&mdash;'Because you stink.'&mdash;'That is an affront, and you
+must fight me.'&mdash;'I will fight you if you insist upon it, but I do not
+see how that will mend the matter. For if you kill me, I shall stink
+too; and if I kill you, you will stink, if possible, worse than at
+present.' How can such miserable sinners as we are, entertain so much
+pride as to conceit that every offense against our imagined honor
+merits death? These petty princes, in their opinion, would call that
+sovereign a tyrant who should put one of them to death for a little
+uncivil language, though pointed at his sacred person; yet every one
+of them makes himself judge in his own cause, condemns the offender
+without a jury, and undertakes himself to be the executioner."</p></div>
+
+<p>Some one wrote him that the people in England were abusing the
+Americans and speaking all manner of evil against them. Franklin
+replied that this was natural enough:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"They impute to us the evil they wished us. They are angry with us,
+and speak all manner of evil of us; but we flourish notwithstanding.
+They put me in mind of a violent High Church factor, resident in
+Boston when I was a boy. He had bought upon speculation a Connecticut
+cargo of onions which he flattered himself he might sell again to
+great profit; but the price fell, and they lay upon his hands. He was
+heartily vexed with his bargain, especially when he observed they
+began to grow in his store he had filled with them. He showed them one
+day to a friend. 'Here they are,' said he, 'and they are growing too.
+I damn them every day, but I think they are like the Presbyterians;
+the more I curse them, the more they grow.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Jefferson tells us that Franklin was sitting by his side in the
+convention while the delegates were picking his famous declaration
+of Independence to pieces, and seeing how Jefferson was squirming
+under their mutilations, comforted him with the following stories, the
+rare excellence of which has given them a currency which has long
+since worn off their novelty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"'I have made it a rule,' said he, 'whenever in my power, to avoid
+becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I
+took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you.</p>
+
+<p>"'When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an
+apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop
+for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome sign-board with
+the proper inscription. He composed it in these words: <i>John Thompson,
+Hatter, makes and sells Hats for ready Money</i>, with a figure of a hat
+subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their
+amendments. The first he showed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5933" id="Page_5933">[Pg 5933]</a></span>it to thought the word <i>hatter</i>
+tautologous, because followed by the words <i>makes hats</i>, which showed
+he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word
+<i>makes</i> might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care
+who made the hats; if good and to their mind, they would buy, by
+whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words
+<i>for ready money</i> were useless, as it was not the custom of the place
+to sell on credit: every one who purchased expected to pay. They were
+parted with, and the inscription now stood, <i>John Thompson sells
+hats</i>. "<i>Sells</i> hats," says his next friend; "why, nobody will expect
+you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?" It was
+stricken out, and <i>hats</i> followed, the rather as there was one painted
+on the board. So his inscription was ultimately reduced to <i>John
+Thompson</i>, with the figure of a hat subjoined.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>When the members were about to sign the document, Mr. Hancock
+is reported to have said, "We must be unanimous; there must
+be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together." "Yes,"
+replied Franklin, "we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly
+we shall all hang separately."</p>
+
+<p>The Doric simplicity of his style; his incomparable facility of condensing
+a great principle into an apologue or an anecdote, many of
+which, as he applied them, have become the folk-lore of all nations;
+his habitual moderation of statement, his aversion to exaggeration,
+his inflexible logic, and his perfect truthfulness,&mdash;made him one of
+the most persuasive men of his time, and his writings a model which
+no one can study without profit. A judicious selection from Franklin's
+writings should constitute a part of the curriculum of every
+college and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure
+style and correct literary taste.</p>
+
+<p>There was one incident in Franklin's life, which, though more frequently
+referred to in terms of reproach than any other, will probably
+count for more in his favor in the Great Assize than any other of
+his whole life. While yet in his teens he became a father before he
+was a husband. He never did what men of the loftiest moral pretensions
+not unfrequently do,&mdash;shirk as far as possible any personal
+responsibility for this indiscretion. On the contrary, he took the
+fruit of it to his home; gave him the best education the schools of
+the country then afforded. When he went abroad, this son accompanied
+him, was presented as his son wherever he went, was presented
+in all the great houses in which he himself was received; he
+entered him at the Inns of Court, and in due time had him admitted
+to the English bar; made him his private secretary, and at an early
+age caused him to be appointed by the Crown, Governor of New
+Jersey. The father not only did everything to repair the wrong he
+had done his son, but at a time when he was at the zenith of his
+fame and official importance, publicly proclaimed it as one of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5934" id="Page_5934">[Pg 5934]</a></span>great errors of his life. The world has always abounded with bastards;
+but with the exception of crowned heads claiming to hold
+their sceptres by Divine right, and therefore beyond the reach of
+popular criticism or reproach, it would be difficult to name another
+parent of his generation of anything like corresponding eminence
+with Franklin, who had the courage and the magnanimity to expiate
+such a wrong to his offspring so fully and effectively.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin was not a member of the visible Church, nor did he
+ever become the adherent of any sect. He was three years younger
+than Jonathan Edwards, and in his youth heard his share of the then
+prevailing theology of New England, of which Edwards was regarded,
+and perhaps justly, as the most eminent exponent. The extremes to
+which Edwards carried those doctrines at last so shocked the people
+of Massachusetts that he was rather ignominiously expelled from his
+pulpit at Northampton; and the people of Massachusetts, in very
+considerable proportions, gradually wandered over into the Unitarian
+communion. To Jonathan Edwards and the inflexible law of action
+and reaction, more than to Priestley or any one else of their generation,
+that sect owes to this day its numerical strength, its influence,
+and its dignity, in New England. With the creed of that sect Dr.
+Franklin had more in common than with any other, though he was
+much too wise a man to suppose that there was but one gate of
+admission to the Holy City. He believed in one God; that Jesus was
+the best man that ever lived, and his example the most profitable
+one ever given us to follow. He never succeeded in accepting the
+doctrine that Jehovah and Jesus were one person, or that miracles
+attributed to the latter in the Bible were ever worked. He thought
+the best service and sufficient worship of God was in doing all the
+good we can to his creatures. He therefore never occupied himself
+much with ecclesiastical ceremonies, sectarian differences, or theological
+subtleties. A reverend candidate for episcopal orders wrote to
+Franklin, complaining that the Archbishop of Canterbury had refused
+to ordain him unless he would take the oath of allegiance, which he
+was too patriotic a Yankee to do. Franklin, in reply, asked what
+necessity there was for his being connected with the Church of England;
+if it would not be as well were it the Church of Ireland. Perhaps
+were he to apply to the Bishop of Derry, who was a man of
+liberal sentiments, he might give him orders, as of that Church.
+Should both England and Ireland refuse, Franklin assumed that the
+Bishops of Sweden and Norway would refuse also, unless the candidates
+embraced Lutheranism. He then added:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Next to becoming Presbyterians, the Episcopalian clergy of America,
+in my humble opinion, cannot do better than to follow the example of
+the first clergy of Scotland, soon after the conversion of that
+country to Christianity. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5935" id="Page_5935">[Pg 5935]</a></span>When the King had built the cathedral of St.
+Andrew's, and requested the King of Northumberland to lend his bishops
+to ordain one for them, that their clergy might not as heretofore be
+obliged to go to Northumberland for orders, and their request was
+refused, they assembled in the cathedral, and the mitre, crosier, and
+robes of a bishop being laid upon the altar, they after earnest
+prayers for direction in their choice elected one of their own number;
+when the King said to him, "<i>Arise, go to the altar, and receive your
+office at the hand of God.</i>" His brethren led him to the altar, robed
+him, put the crosier in his hand and the mitre on his head, and he
+became the first Bishop of Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>"If the British islands were sunk in the sea (and the surface of this
+globe has suffered great changes), you would probably take some such
+method as this; and if they persist in denying your ordination, it is
+the same thing. A hundred years hence, when people are more
+enlightened, it will be wondered at that men in America, qualified by
+their learning and piety to pray for and instruct their neighbors,
+should not be permitted to do it till they had made a voyage of six
+thousand miles out and home, to ask leave of a cross old gentleman at
+Canterbury."</p></div>
+
+<p>Franklin, however, was in no sense an agnostic. What he could
+not understand he did not profess to understand or believe; neither
+was he guilty of the presumption of holding that what he could not
+understand, he might not have understood if he had been a wiser and
+better man. Though impatient of cant and hypocrisy, especially in
+the pulpit, he never spoke lightly of the Bible, or of the Church and
+its offices. When his daughter Sally was about to marry, he wrote
+to her:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"My dear child, the natural prudence and goodness of heart God has
+blest you with, make it less necessary for me to be particular in
+giving you advice. I shall therefore only say, that the more
+attentively dutiful and tender you are towards your good mamma, the
+more you will recommend yourself to me. But why should I mention <i>me</i>,
+when you have so much higher a promise in the Commandments, that such
+conduct will recommend you to the favor of God? You know I have many
+enemies, all indeed on the public account (for I cannot recollect that
+I have in a private capacity given just cause of offense to any one
+whatever): yet they are enemies, and very bitter ones; and you must
+expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you, so that your
+slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the
+more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more
+necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior,
+that no advantage may be given to their malevolence.</p>
+
+<p>"Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the
+Common Prayer Book is your principal business there, and if properly
+attended to will do more towards amending the heart than sermons
+generally can do. For they were composed by men of much greater piety
+and wisdom than our common composers of sermons can pretend to be; and
+therefore I wish you would never miss the prayer days: yet I do not
+mean you should <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5936" id="Page_5936">[Pg 5936]</a></span>despise sermons, even of the preachers you dislike,
+for the discourse is often much better than the man, as sweet and
+clear waters come through very dirty earth. I am the more particular
+on this head, as you seemed to express a little before I came away
+some inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you do."</p></div>
+
+<p>I cannot more fitly close this imperfect sketch of America's most
+illustrious citizen, than by quoting from a touching and most affectionate
+letter from Mrs. Hewson (Margaret Stevenson),&mdash;one of Franklin's
+worthiest, most faithful, and most valued friends,&mdash;addressed to
+one of Franklin's oldest friends in England.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"We have lost that valued, venerable, kind friend whose knowledge
+enlightened our minds and whose philanthropy warmed our hearts. But we
+have the consolation to think that if a life well spent in acts of
+universal benevolence to mankind, a grateful acknowledgment of Divine
+favor, a patient submission under severe chastisement, and an humble
+trust in Almighty mercy, can insure the happiness of a future state,
+our present loss is his gain. I was the faithful witness of the
+closing scene, which he sustained with that calm fortitude which
+characterized him through life. No repining, no peevish expression
+ever escaped him during a confinement of two years, in which, I
+believe, if every moment of ease could be added together, would not
+amount to two whole months. When the pain was not too violent to be
+amused, he employed himself with his books, his pen, or in
+conversation with his friends; and upon every occasion displayed the
+clearness of his intellect and the cheerfulness of his temper. Even
+when the intervals from pain were so short that his words were
+frequently interrupted, I have known him to hold a discourse in a
+sublime strain of piety. I say this to you because I know it will give
+you pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"I never shall forget one day that I passed with our friend last
+summer. I found him in bed in great agony; but when that agony abated
+a little I asked if I should read to him. He said yes; and the first
+book I met with was Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.' I read the 'Life
+of Watts,' who was a favorite author with Dr. Franklin; and instead of
+lulling him to sleep, it roused him to a display of the powers of his
+memory and his reason. He repeated several of Watts's 'Lyric Poems,'
+and descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of them and of
+their pious author. It is natural for us to wish that an attention to
+some ceremonies had accompanied that religion of the heart which I am
+convinced Dr. Franklin always possessed; but let us who feel the
+benefit of them continue to practice them, without thinking lightly of
+that piety which could support pain without a murmur, and meet death
+without terror."</p></div>
+
+<p>Franklin made a somewhat more definite statement of his views
+on the subject of religion, in reply to an inquiry from President
+Styles of Yale College, who expressed a desire to know his opinion
+of Jesus of Nazareth. Franklin's reply was written the last year of
+his life, and in the eighty-fourth of his age:&mdash;</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5937" id="Page_5937">[Pg 5937]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I
+have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss,
+and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I
+believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs it by
+his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most
+acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other
+children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with
+justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take
+to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them
+as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.</p>
+
+<p>"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire,
+I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us,
+the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has
+received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the
+present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; though
+it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and
+think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an
+opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm,
+however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good
+consequence, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more
+respected and more observed; especially as I do not perceive that the
+Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his
+government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having experienced the
+goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long
+life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without
+the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness. My sentiments on this
+head you will see in the copy of an old letter inclosed, which I wrote
+in answer to one from an old religionist whom I had relieved in a
+paralytic case by electricity, and who, being afraid I should grow
+proud upon it, sent me his serious though rather impertinent caution."</p></div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 250px;">
+<img src="images/sign103.png" width="250" height="100" alt="John Bigelow" title="John Bigelow" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="OF_FRANKLINS_FAMILY_AND_EARLY_LIFE" id="OF_FRANKLINS_FAMILY_AND_EARLY_LIFE"></a>OF FRANKLIN'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works</h4>
+
+<p>Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with three
+children into New England about 1682. The conventicles having been
+forbidden by law and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable
+men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was
+prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy
+their mode of religion with freedom. By the same wife he had four
+children more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5938" id="Page_5938">[Pg 5938]</a></span> born there, and by a second wife ten more, in all
+seventeen; of which I remember thirteen sitting at one time at his
+table, who all grew up to be men and women, and married. I was the
+youngest son and the youngest child but two, and was born in Boston,
+New England. My mother, the second wife, was Abiah Folger, daughter of
+Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom
+honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in his church history of
+that country, entitled 'Magnalia Christi Americana,' as "<i>a goodly,
+learned Englishman</i>," if I remember the words rightly. I have heard
+that he wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was
+printed, which I saw now many years since....</p>
+
+<p>My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was
+put to the grammar school at eight years of age, my father intending
+to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.
+My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very
+early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of
+all his friends that I should certainly make a good scholar,
+encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin too approved
+of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of
+sermons,&mdash;I suppose as a stock to set up with,&mdash;if I would learn his
+character. I continued, however, at the grammar school not quite one
+year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the
+class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was removed into
+the next class above it, in order to go with that into the third at
+the end of the year. But my father in the mean time,&mdash;from a view of
+the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he
+could not well afford, and the mean living many so educated were
+afterwards able to obtain,&mdash;reasons that he gave to his friends in my
+hearing,&mdash;altered his first intention, took me from the grammar
+school, and sent me to a school for writing and arithmetic, kept by a
+then famous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his
+profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging methods. Under him
+I acquired fair writing pretty soon, but I failed in the arithmetic,
+and made no progress in it. At ten years old I was taken home to
+assist my father in his business, which was that of a tallow-chandler
+and soap-boiler,&mdash;a business he was not bred to, but had assumed on
+his arrival in New England, and on finding his dyeing trade would not
+maintain his family, being in little request.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5939" id="Page_5939">[Pg 5939]</a></span> Accordingly I was
+employed in cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping-mold and
+the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands, etc.</p>
+
+<p>I disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my
+father declared against it: however, living near the water, I was much
+in and about it, learnt early to swim well and to manage boats; and
+when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to
+govern, especially in any case of difficulty; and upon other occasions
+I was generally a leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into
+scrapes, of which I will mention one instance, as it shows an early
+projecting public spirit, though not then justly conducted.</p>
+
+<p>There was a salt-marsh that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge
+of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much
+trampling we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a
+wharf there, fit for us to stand upon; and I showed my comrades a
+large heap of stones which were intended for a new house near the
+marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the
+evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number of my
+playfellows, and working with them diligently like so many emmets,
+sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought them all away and built
+our little wharf. The next morning the workmen were surprised at
+missing the stones, which were found in our wharf. Inquiry was made
+after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of
+us were corrected by our fathers, and though I pleaded the usefulness
+of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not
+honest.</p>
+
+<p>I continued thus employed in my father's business for two years, that
+is, till I was twelve years old; and my brother John, who was bred to
+that business, having left my father, married, and set up for himself
+at Rhode Island, there was all appearance that I was destined to
+supply his place and become a tallow-chandler. But my dislike to the
+trade continuing, my father was under apprehensions that if he did not
+find one for me more agreeable, I should break away and get to sea, as
+his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation. He therefore sometimes
+took me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners,
+braziers, etc., at their work, that he might observe my inclination,
+and endeavor to fix it on some trade or other on land. It has ever
+since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5940" id="Page_5940">[Pg 5940]</a></span> handle their tools;
+and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it as to be
+able to do little jobs myself in my house when a workman could not
+readily be got, and to construct little machines for my experiments,
+while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my
+mind. My father at last fixed upon the cutler's trade, and my uncle
+Benjamin's son Samuel, who was bred to that business in London, being
+about that time established in Boston, I was sent to be with him some
+time on liking. But his expectations of a fee with me displeasing my
+father, I was taken home again.</p>
+
+<p>From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came
+into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's
+Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate
+little volumes. I afterward sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton's
+'Historical Collections'; they were small chapmen's books, and cheap,
+40 or 50 in all. My father's little library consisted chiefly of books
+in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often
+regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more
+proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved I
+should not be a clergyman. Plutarch's Lives there was, in which I read
+abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage.
+There was also a book of De Foe's, called 'An Essay on Projects,' and
+another of Dr. Mather's, called 'Essays To Do Good,' which perhaps
+gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the
+principal future events of my life.</p>
+
+<p>This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a
+printer, though he had already one son (James) of that profession. In
+1717 my brother James returned from England with a press and letters,
+to set up his business in Boston. I liked it much better than that of
+my father, but still had a hankering for the sea. To prevent the
+apprehended effect of such an inclination, my father was impatient to
+have me bound to my brother. I stood out some time, but at last was
+persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve years
+old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of
+age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year.
+In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became
+a useful hand to my brother. I now had access to better books. An
+acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes
+to borrow a small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5941" id="Page_5941">[Pg 5941]</a></span> one, which I was careful to return soon and clean.
+Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when
+the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the
+morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FRANKLINS_JOURNEY_TO_PHILADELPHIA_HIS_ARRIVAL_THERE" id="FRANKLINS_JOURNEY_TO_PHILADELPHIA_HIS_ARRIVAL_THERE"></a>FRANKLIN'S JOURNEY TO PHILADELPHIA: HIS ARRIVAL THERE</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works</h4>
+
+<p>I proceeded on my journey on foot, having fifty miles to Burlington,
+where I was told I should find boats that would carry me the rest of
+the way to Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>It rained very hard all the day; I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon
+a good deal tired; so I stopt at a poor inn, where I stayed all night,
+beginning now to wish that I had never left home. I cut so miserable a
+figure too that I found, by the questions asked me, I was suspected to
+be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that
+suspicion. However, I proceeded the next day, and got in the evening
+to an inn within eight or ten miles of Burlington, kept by one Dr.
+Brown. He entered into conversation with me while I took some
+refreshment; and finding I had read a little, became very sociable and
+friendly. Our acquaintance continued as long as he lived. He had been,
+I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England or
+country in Europe of which he could not give a very particular
+account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an
+unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travestie the
+Bible in doggrel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he
+set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt
+weak minds if his work had been published, but it never was.</p>
+
+<p>At his house I lay that night, and the next morning reached
+Burlington, but had the mortification to find that the regular boats
+were gone a little before my coming, and no other expected to go
+before Tuesday, this being Saturday; wherefore I returned to an old
+woman in the town, of whom I had bought ginger-bread to eat on the
+water, and asked her advice. She invited me to lodge at her house till
+a passage by water should offer; and being tired with my
+foot-traveling, I accepted the invitation. She, understanding I was a
+printer, would have had me stay at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5942" id="Page_5942">[Pg 5942]</a></span> that town and follow my business,
+being ignorant of the stock necessary to begin with. She was very
+hospitable, gave me a dinner of ox-cheek with great good-will,
+accepting only of a pot of ale in return; and I thought myself fixed
+till Tuesday should come. However, walking in the evening by the side
+of the river, a boat came by, which I found was going towards
+Philadelphia, with several people in her. They took me in, and as
+there was no wind, we rowed all the way; and about midnight, not
+having yet seen the city, some of the company were confident we must
+have passed it, and would row no farther; the others knew not where we
+were; so we put toward the shore, got into a creek, landed near an old
+fence, with the rails of which we made a fire,&mdash;the night being cold,
+in October,&mdash;and there we remained till daylight. Then one of the
+company knew the place to be Cooper's Creek, a little above
+Philadelphia, which we saw as soon as we got out of the creek, and
+arrived there about eight or nine o'clock on the Sunday morning, and
+landed at the Market Street wharf.</p>
+
+<p>I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and
+shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your
+mind compare such unlike beginnings with the figure I have since made
+there. I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round
+by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with
+shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for
+lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I
+was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch
+dollar and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of
+the boat for my passage, who at first refused it, on account of my
+rowing, but I insisted on their taking it; a man being sometimes more
+generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty,
+perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.</p>
+
+<p>Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house
+I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and inquiring
+where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to,
+in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in
+Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I
+asked for a threepenny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not
+considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater
+cheapness nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5943" id="Page_5943">[Pg 5943]</a></span> the names of his bread, I bade him give me threepenny
+worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I
+was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and having no room in my
+pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm and eating the other.
+Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the
+door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the
+door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward,
+ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and
+part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way, and coming round
+found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to
+which I went for a draught of the river water; and being filled with
+one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came
+down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther.</p>
+
+<p>Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had
+many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I
+joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the
+Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and after looking
+round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labor
+and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and
+continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to
+rouse me. This was therefore the first house I was in, or slept in, in
+Philadelphia.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FRANKLIN_AS_A_PRINTER" id="FRANKLIN_AS_A_PRINTER"></a>FRANKLIN AS A PRINTER</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works</h4>
+
+<p>I now began to think of getting a little money beforehand, and
+expecting better work, I left Palmer's to work at Watts's, near
+Lincoln's Inn Fields, a still greater printing-house. Here I continued
+all the rest of my stay in London.</p>
+
+<p>At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at
+press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been used
+to in America, where presswork is mixed with composing. I drank only
+water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of
+beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types
+in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered
+to see, from this and several instances, that the <i>Water American</i>, as
+they called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5944" id="Page_5944">[Pg 5944]</a></span> me, was <i>stronger</i> than themselves, who drank <i>strong</i>
+beer! We had an alehouse boy, who attended always in the house to
+supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint
+before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a
+pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the
+afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's
+work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he
+supposed, to drink <i>strong</i> beer that he might be <i>strong</i> to labor. I
+endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer
+could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley
+dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour
+in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a
+pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.
+He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his
+wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was
+free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.</p>
+
+<p>Watts after some weeks desiring to have me in the composing-room, I
+left the pressmen: a new <i>bien venu</i> or sum for drink, being five
+shillings, was demanded of me by the compositors. I thought it an
+imposition, as I had paid below: the master thought so too, and
+forbade my paying it. I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly
+considered as an excommunicate, and had so many little pieces of
+private mischief done me, by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages,
+breaking my matter, etc., etc., if I were ever so little out of the
+room,&mdash;and all ascribed to the chappel ghost, which they said ever
+haunted those not regularly admitted,&mdash;that notwithstanding the
+master's protection I found myself obliged to comply and pay the
+money, convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is
+to live with continually.</p>
+
+<p>I was now on a fair footing with them, and soon acquired considerable
+influence. I proposed some reasonable alterations in their chappel
+laws, and carried them against all opposition. From my example, a
+great part of them left their muddling breakfast of beer and bread and
+cheese, finding they could with me be supplied from a neighboring
+house with a large porringer of hot water-gruel sprinkled with pepper,
+crumbed with bread, and a bit of butter in it, for the price of a pint
+of beer; viz., three half-pence. This was a more comfortable as well
+as cheaper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5945" id="Page_5945">[Pg 5945]</a></span> breakfast, and kept their heads clearer. Those who
+continued sotting with beer all day were often, by not paying, out of
+credit at the alehouse, and used to make interest with me to get beer;
+their <i>light</i>, as they phrased it, <i>being out</i>. I watched the
+pay-table on Saturday night, and collected what I stood engaged for
+them, having to pay sometimes near thirty shillings a week on their
+account. This, and my being esteemed a pretty good <i>rigile</i>,&mdash;that is,
+a jocular verbal satirist,&mdash;supported my consequence in the society.
+My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to
+the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being
+put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid. So I
+went on now very agreeably.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="RULES_OF_HEALTH" id="RULES_OF_HEALTH"></a>RULES OF HEALTH</h3>
+
+<h4>From Poor Richard's Almanack: 1742</h4>
+
+<p>Eat and drink such an exact quantity as the constitution of thy
+body allows of, in reference to the services of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>They that study much ought not to eat as much as those
+that work hard, their digestion being not so good.</p>
+
+<p>The exact quantity and quality being found out, is to be kept
+to constantly.</p>
+
+<p>Excess in all other things whatever, as well as in meat and
+drink, is also to be avoided.</p>
+
+<p>Youth, age, and sick require a different quantity.</p>
+
+<p>And so do those of contrary complexions; for that which is too
+much for a phlegmatic man, is not sufficient for a choleric.</p>
+
+<p>The measure of food ought to be (as much as possibly may
+be) exactly proportionable to the quality and condition of the
+stomach, because the stomach digests it.</p>
+
+<p>That quantity that is sufficient, the stomach can perfectly concoct
+and digest, and it sufficeth the due nourishment of the body.</p>
+
+<p>A greater quantity of some things may be eaten than of others,
+some being of lighter digestion than others.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty lies in finding out an exact measure; but eat
+for necessity, not pleasure: for lust knows not where necessity
+ends.</p>
+
+<p>Wouldst thou enjoy a long life, a healthy body, and a vigorous
+mind, and be acquainted also with the wonderful works of
+God, labor in the first place to bring thy appetite to reason.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5946" id="Page_5946">[Pg 5946]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_WAY_TO_WEALTH" id="THE_WAY_TO_WEALTH"></a>THE WAY TO WEALTH</h3>
+
+<h4>From Poor Richard's Almanack</h4>
+
+<p>Courteous reader, I have heard that nothing gives an author so great
+pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by others. Judge,
+then, how much I must have been gratified by an incident I am going to
+relate to you. I stopped my horse lately where a great number of
+people were collected at an auction of merchants' goods. The hour of
+the sale not being come, they were conversing on the badness of the
+times; and one of the company called to a plain, clean old man with
+white locks: "Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the times? Will
+not these heavy taxes quite ruin the country? How shall we ever be
+able to pay them? What would you advise us to?" Father Abraham stood
+up and replied, "If you would have my advice, I will give it you in
+short; for 'A word to the wise is enough,' as Poor Richard says." They
+joined in desiring him to speak his mind, and gathering round him, he
+proceeded as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those
+laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might
+more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more
+grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness,
+three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly;
+and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by
+allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and
+something may be done for us: 'God helps them that help themselves,'
+as Poor Richard says....</p>
+
+<p>"Beware of little expenses: 'A small leak will sink a great ship,' as
+Poor Richard says; and again, 'Who dainties love, shall beggars
+prove;' and moreover, 'Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.'</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are all got together at this sale of fineries and
+knick-knacks. You call them <i>goods</i>; but if you do not take care, they
+will prove <i>evils</i> to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap,
+and perhaps they may, for less than they cost; but if you have no
+occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor
+Richard says: 'Buy what thou hast no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5947" id="Page_5947">[Pg 5947]</a></span> need of, and ere long thou shalt
+sell thy necessaries.' And again, 'At a great pennyworth pause a
+while.' He means that perhaps the cheapness is apparent only and not
+real; or the bargain, by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee
+more harm than good. For in another place he says, 'Many have been
+ruined by buying good pennyworths.' Again, 'It is foolish to lay out
+money in a purchase of repentance;' and yet this folly is practiced
+every day at auctions, for want of minding the Almanack. Many a one,
+for the sake of finery on the back, have gone with a hungry belly and
+half starved their families. 'Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets,
+put out the kitchen fire,' as Poor Richard says.</p>
+
+<p>"These are not the necessaries of life; they can scarcely be called
+the conveniences: and yet, only because they look pretty, how many
+want to have them! By these and other extravagances the genteel are
+reduced to poverty, and forced to borrow of those whom they formerly
+despised, but who through industry and frugality have maintained their
+standing; in which case it appears plainly that 'A plowman on his legs
+is higher than a gentleman on his knees,' as poor Richard says.
+Perhaps they have had a small estate left them, which they knew not
+the getting of; they think, 'It is day, and will never be night;' that
+a little to be spent out of so much is not worth minding; but 'Always
+taking out of the meal-tub and never putting in, soon comes to the
+bottom,' as Poor Richard says; and then, 'When the well is dry, they
+know the worth of water.' But this they might have known before, if
+they had taken his advice. 'If you would know the value of money, go
+and try to borrow some: for he that goes a-borrowing goes
+a-sorrowing,' as Poor Richard says; and indeed, so does he that lends
+to such people, when he goes to get it in again. Poor Dick further
+advises and says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Fond pride of dress is sure a very curse;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere fancy you consult, consult your purse.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And again, 'Pride is as loud a beggar as Want, and a great deal more
+saucy.' When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more,
+that your appearance may be all of a piece; but Poor Dick says, 'It is
+easier to suppress the first desire, than to satisfy all that follow
+it.' And it is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the
+frog to swell in order to equal the ox.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5948" id="Page_5948">[Pg 5948]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Vessels large may venture more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But little boats should keep near shore.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is however a folly soon punished; for, as Poor Richard says, 'Pride
+that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. Pride breakfasted with Plenty,
+dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy.' And after all, of what
+use is this pride of appearance, for which so much is risked, so much
+is suffered? It cannot promote health nor ease pain; it makes no
+increase of merit in the person; it creates envy; it hastens
+misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>"But what madness must it be to <i>run in debt</i> for these superfluities!
+We are offered by the terms of this sale six months' credit; and that
+perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare
+the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But ah! think
+what you do when you run in debt: you give to another power over your
+liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see
+your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will
+make poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your
+veracity and sink into base downright lying; for 'The second vice is
+lying, the first is running in debt,' as Poor Richard says: and again
+to the same purpose, 'Lying rides upon Debt's back;' whereas a
+free-born Englishman ought not to be ashamed nor afraid to see or
+speak to any man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all
+spirit and virtue. 'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'</p>
+
+<p>"What would you think of that prince or of that government who should
+issue an edict forbidding you to dress like a gentleman or a
+gentlewoman, on pain of imprisonment or servitude? Would you not say
+that you were free, have a right to dress as you please; and that such
+an edict would be a breach of your privileges, and such a government
+tyrannical? And yet you are about to put yourself under such tyranny,
+when you run in debt for such dress! Your creditor has authority, at
+his pleasure, to deprive you of your liberty by confining you in jail
+till you shall be able to pay him. When you have got your bargain, you
+may perhaps think little of payment; but as Poor Richard says,
+'Creditors have better memories than debtors; creditors are a
+superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.' The day
+comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you
+are prepared to satisfy it; or if you bear your debt in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5949" id="Page_5949">[Pg 5949]</a></span> mind, the
+term which at first seemed so long will, as it lessens, appear
+extremely short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as
+well as his shoulders. 'Those have a short Lent who owe money to be
+paid at Easter.' At present, perhaps, you may think yourselves in
+thriving circumstances, and that you can bear a little extravagance
+without injury, but&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'For age and want save while you may;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No morning sun lasts a whole day.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Gain may be temporary and uncertain, but ever while you live,
+expense is constant and certain; and 'It is easier to build two
+chimneys than to keep one in fuel,' as Poor Richard says; so,
+'Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Get what you can, and what you get hold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And when you have got the Philosopher's Stone, sure you will
+no longer complain of bad times or the difficulty of paying
+taxes.</p>
+
+<p>"This doctrine, my friends, is reason and wisdom: but after all, do
+not depend too much upon your own industry and frugality and prudence,
+though excellent things; for they may all be blasted, without the
+blessing of Heaven; and therefore ask that blessing humbly, and be not
+uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it; but comfort and
+help them. Remember, Job suffered and was afterwards prosperous.</p>
+
+<p>"And now, to conclude, 'Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will
+learn in no other,' as Poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it
+is true, 'We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.' However,
+remember this: 'They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped;'
+and further, that 'If you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap
+your knuckles,' as Poor Richard says."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5950" id="Page_5950">[Pg 5950]</a></span></p><p>Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and
+approved the doctrine; and immediately practiced the contrary, just as
+if it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened and they began
+to buy extravagantly. I found the good man had thoroughly studied my
+Almanacks, and digested all I had dropped on these topics during the
+course of twenty-five years. The frequent mention he made of me must
+have tired any one else; but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with
+it, though I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my
+own, which he had ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings that I had
+made of the sense of all ages and nations. However, I resolved to be
+the better for the echo of it; and though I had at first determined to
+buy stuff for a new coat, I went away resolved to wear my old one a
+little longer. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy profit will be as
+great as mine. I am, as ever, thine to serve thee,</p>
+
+<p style='text-align:right'><span class="smcap">Richard Saunders.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SPEECH_IN_THE_FEDERAL_CONVENTION_IN_FAVOR_OF_OPENING" id="SPEECH_IN_THE_FEDERAL_CONVENTION_IN_FAVOR_OF_OPENING"></a>SPEECH IN THE FEDERAL CONVENTION, IN FAVOR OF OPENING
+ITS SESSIONS WITH PRAYER</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>Mr. President:</i></p>
+
+<p>The small progress we have made, after four or five weeks'
+close attendance and continual reasons with each other, our
+different sentiments on almost every question, several of
+the last producing as many <i>Noes</i> as <i>Ayes</i>, is, methinks, a
+melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding.
+We indeed seem to <i>feel</i> our own want of political wisdom,
+since we have been running all about in search of it. We have
+gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined
+the different forms of those republics, which, having been
+originally formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now
+no longer exist; and we have viewed modern States all round
+Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our circumstances.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5951" id="Page_5951">[Pg 5951]</a></span></p><p>In this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the
+dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it
+when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have
+not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of
+Lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of
+the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we
+had daily prayers in this room for the Divine protection. Our
+prayers, sir, were heard; and they were graciously answered. All
+of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent
+instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To
+that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting
+in peace on the means of establishing our future national
+felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or
+do we imagine we no longer need its assistance? I have lived,
+sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing
+proofs I see of this truth, <i>that</i> <span class="smcap">God</span> <i>governs in the affairs of
+men</i>. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his
+notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?
+We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that "except
+the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." I
+firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring
+aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the
+builders of Babel: we shall be divided by our little partial local
+interests, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall
+become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. And
+what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate
+instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom,
+and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.</p>
+
+<p>I therefore beg leave to move,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>That henceforth prayers, imploring the assistance of Heaven
+and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly
+every morning before we proceed to business; and that one or
+more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that
+service.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="ON_WAR" id="ON_WAR"></a>ON WAR</h3>
+
+
+<p>I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war. Abstracted
+from the inhumanity of it, I think it wrong in point of human
+prudence; for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another,
+whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with
+them, free passage on their rivers, etc., it would be much cheaper to
+purchase such advantage with ready money than to pay the expense of
+acquiring it by war. An army is a devouring monster; and when you have
+raised it, you have, in order to subsist it, not only the fair charges
+of pay, clothing, provisions, arms, and ammunition, with numberless
+other contingent and just charges to answer and satisfy, but you have
+all the additional knavish charges of the numerous tribe of
+contractors to defray, with those of every other dealer who furnishes
+the articles wanted for your army, and takes advantage of that want to
+demand exorbitant prices. It seems to me that if statesmen had a
+little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars
+would be much less frequent. I am confident<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5952" id="Page_5952">[Pg 5952]</a></span> that Canada might have
+been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money England spent
+in the conquest of it. And if instead of fighting with us for the
+power of taxing us, she had kept us in good humor by allowing us to
+dispose of our own money, and now and then giving us a little of hers,
+by way of donation to colleges, or hospitals, or for cutting canals,
+or fortifying ports, she might have easily drawn from us much more by
+our occasional voluntary grants and contributions than ever she could
+by taxes. Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry
+pump, that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for.
+Her ministry were deficient in that little point of common-sense; and
+so they spent one hundred millions of her money and after all lost
+what they contended for.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="REVENGE" id="REVENGE"></a>REVENGE</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letter to Madame Helv&eacute;tius</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>Mortified at the barbarous resolution pronounced by you so positively
+yesterday evening,&mdash;that you would remain single the rest of your
+life, as a compliment due to the memory of your husband,&mdash;I retired to
+my chamber. Throwing myself upon my bed, I dreamt that I was dead, and
+was transported to the Elysian Fields.</p>
+
+<p>I was asked whether I wished to see any persons in particular; to
+which I replied that I wished to see the philosophers.&mdash;"There are two
+who live here at hand in this garden; they are good neighbors, and
+very friendly towards one another."&mdash;"Who are they?"&mdash;"Socrates and
+Helv&eacute;tius."&mdash;"I esteem them both highly; but let me see Helv&eacute;tius
+first, because I understand a little French, but not a word of Greek."
+I was conducted to him: he received me with much courtesy, having
+known me, he said, by character, some time past. He asked me a
+thousand questions relative to the war, the present state of religion,
+of liberty, of the government in France. "You do not inquire, then,"
+said I, "after your dear friend, Madame Helv&eacute;tius; yet she loves you
+exceedingly: I was in her company not more than an hour ago." "Ah,"
+said he, "you make me recur to my past happiness, which ought to be
+forgotten in order to be happy here. For many years I could think of
+nothing but her, though at length I am consoled. I have taken another
+wife, the most like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5953" id="Page_5953">[Pg 5953]</a></span> her that I could find; she is not indeed
+altogether so handsome, but she has a great fund of wit and good
+sense; and her whole study is to please me. She is at this moment gone
+to fetch the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me; stay here awhile
+and you will see her." "I perceive," said I, "that your former friend
+is more faithful to you than you are to her; she has had several good
+offers, but refused them all. I will confess to you that I loved her
+extremely; but she was cruel to me, and rejected me peremptorily for
+your sake." "I pity you sincerely," said he, "for she is an excellent
+woman, handsome and amiable. But do not the Abb&eacute; de la Roche and the
+Abb&eacute; Morellet visit her?"&mdash;"Certainly they do; not one of your friends
+has dropped her acquaintance."&mdash;"If you had gained the Abb&eacute; Morellet
+with a bribe of good coffee and cream, perhaps you would have
+succeeded: for he is as deep a reasoner as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas:
+he arranges and methodizes his arguments in such a manner that they
+are almost irresistible. Or if by a fine edition of some old classic
+you had gained the Abb&eacute; de la Roche to speak <i>against</i> you, that would
+have been still better; as I always observed that when he recommended
+anything to her, she had a great inclination to do directly the
+contrary." As he finished these words the new Madame Helv&eacute;tius entered
+with the nectar, and I recognized her immediately as my former
+American friend Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she answered me
+coldly:&mdash;"I was a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four
+months,&mdash;nearly half a century; let that content you. I have formed a
+new connection here, which will last to eternity."</p>
+
+<p>Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately resolved to
+quit those ungrateful shades, and return to this good world again, to
+behold the sun and you! Here I am: let us <i>avenge ourselves</i>!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_EPHEMERA_AN_EMBLEM_OF_HUMAN_LIFE" id="THE_EPHEMERA_AN_EMBLEM_OF_HUMAN_LIFE"></a>THE EPHEMERA; AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letter to Madame Brillon of Passy, written in 1778</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy
+day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I
+stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the
+company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little
+fly, called an ephemera,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5954" id="Page_5954">[Pg 5954]</a></span> whose successive generations, we were told,
+were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living
+company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation.
+You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great
+application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the
+little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened
+through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as
+they in their natural vivacity spoke three, or four together, I could
+make but little of their conversation. I found however by some broken
+expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on
+the merit of two foreign musicians, one a <i>cousin</i>, the other a
+<i>moscheto</i>; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as
+regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living
+a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise,
+just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to
+complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and
+imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old
+gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to
+himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in
+hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the
+most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly
+harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race
+who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world,
+the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours;
+and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the
+apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature,
+and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the
+ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be
+extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in
+cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and
+destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no
+less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
+continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
+My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends
+of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them;
+for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect
+to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my
+toil and labor in amassing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5955" id="Page_5955">[Pg 5955]</a></span> honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot
+live to enjoy? What the political struggles I have been engaged in for
+the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my
+philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general? for in
+politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of
+ephemer&aelig; will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of
+other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in
+philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is
+short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I
+shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to
+nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no
+longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth
+hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to
+its end, and be buried in universal ruin?"</p>
+
+<p>To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but
+the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible
+conversation of a few good lady ephemer&aelig;, and now and then a kind
+smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_PROPHECY" id="A_PROPHECY"></a>A PROPHECY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letter to Lord Kames, January 3d, 1760</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of
+Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a
+Briton. I have long been of opinion that <i>the foundations of the
+future grandeur and stability of the British empire lie in America</i>;
+and though like other foundations they are low and little now, they
+are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest
+political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected. I am therefore
+by no means for restoring Canada. If we keep it, all the country from
+the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled
+with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous,
+by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic sea will be
+covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence
+continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole
+globe, and awe the world! If the French remain in Canada they will
+continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede if not
+prevent their growth; your progress to greatness will at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5956" id="Page_5956">[Pg 5956]</a></span> best be
+slow, and give room for many accidents that may forever prevent it.
+But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant,
+and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="EARLY_MARRIAGES" id="EARLY_MARRIAGES"></a>EARLY MARRIAGES</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letter to John Alleyne, dated Craven Street, August 9th, 1768</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>You desire, you say, my impartial thoughts on the subject of an early
+marriage, by way of answer to the numberless objections that have been
+made by numerous persons to your own. You may remember, when you
+consulted me on the occasion, that I thought youth on both sides to be
+no objection. Indeed, from the marriages that have fallen under my
+observation, I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the
+best chance of happiness. The temper and habits of the young are not
+become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life; they
+form more easily to each other, and hence many occasions of disgust
+are removed. And if youth has less of that prudence which is necessary
+to manage a family, yet the parents and elder friends of young married
+persons are generally at hand to afford their advice, which amply
+supplies that defect; and by early marriage, youth is sooner formed to
+regular and useful life; and possibly some of those accidents or
+connections that might have injured the constitution or reputation, or
+both, are thereby happily prevented.</p>
+
+<p>Particular circumstances of particular persons may possibly sometimes
+make it prudent to delay entering into that state; but in general,
+when nature has rendered our bodies fit for it, the presumption is in
+nature's favor, that she has not judged amiss in making us desire it.
+Late marriages are often attended, too, with this further
+inconvenience: that there is not the same chance that the parents will
+live to see their offspring educated. "<i>Late children</i>," says the
+Spanish proverb, "<i>are early orphans</i>." A melancholy reflection to
+those whose case it may be! With us in America, marriages are
+generally in the morning of life; our children are therefore educated
+and settled in the world by noon: and thus, our business being done,
+we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves;
+such as our friend at present enjoys. By these early marriages we are
+blessed with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5957" id="Page_5957">[Pg 5957]</a></span> more children; and from the mode among us, founded by
+nature, every mother suckling and nursing her own child, more of them
+are raised. Thence the swift progress of population among us,
+unparalleled in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>In fine, I am glad you are married, and congratulate you most
+cordially upon it. You are now in the way of becoming a useful
+citizen; and you have escaped the unnatural state of celibacy for
+life, the fate of many here who never intended it, but who, having too
+long postponed the change of their condition, find at length that it
+is too late to think of it, and so live all their lives in a situation
+that greatly lessens a man's value. An odd volume of a set of books
+bears not the value of its proportion to the set. What think you of
+the odd half of a pair of scissors? It cannot well cut anything; it
+may possibly serve to scrape a trencher.</p>
+
+<p>Pray make my compliments and best wishes acceptable to your bride. I
+am old and heavy, or I should ere this have presented them in person.
+I shall make but small use of the old man's privilege, that of giving
+advice to younger friends. Treat your wife always with respect: it
+will procure respect to you, not only from her, but from all that
+observe it. Never use a slighting expression to her, even in jest; for
+slights in jest, after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry
+earnest. Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be
+industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate,
+and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be
+happy: at least, you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for
+such consequences. I pray God to bless you both; being ever your
+affectionate friend.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ART_OF_VIRTUE" id="THE_ART_OF_VIRTUE"></a>THE ART OF VIRTUE</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works</h4>
+
+
+<p>We have an English proverb that says, "<i>He that would thrive must ask
+his wife</i>." It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to
+industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me cheerfully in my
+business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing
+old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc. We kept no idle
+servants; our table was plain and simple, our furniture of the
+cheapest. For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and milk
+(no tea), and I ate it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5958" id="Page_5958">[Pg 5958]</a></span> out of a twopenny earthen porringer, with a
+pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families, and make a
+progress, in spite of principle: being called one morning to
+breakfast, I found it in a china bowl, with a spoon of silver! They
+had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife, and had cost
+her the enormous sum of three-and-twenty shillings, for which she had
+no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought <i>her</i> husband
+deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his
+neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate and china in our
+house, which afterward, in a course of years, as our wealth increased,
+augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value.</p>
+
+<p>I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and though some of
+the dogmas of that persuasion, such as <i>the eternal decrees of God,
+election, reprobation</i>, etc., appeared to me unintelligible, others
+doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of
+the sect (Sunday being my studying day), I never was without some
+religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of
+the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence;
+that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man;
+that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished and
+virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the
+essentials of every religion; and being to be found in all the
+religions we had in our country, I respected them all, though with
+different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mixed with
+other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or
+confirm morality, served principally to divide us and make us
+unfriendly to one another. This respect to all, with an opinion that
+the worst had some good effects, induced me to avoid all discourse
+that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his
+own religion; and as our province increased in people, and new places
+of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary
+contribution, my mite for such purpose, whatever might be the sect,
+was never refused.</p>
+
+<p>Though I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of
+its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I
+regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only
+Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He used to
+visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to attend his
+administrations; and I was now and then prevailed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5959" id="Page_5959">[Pg 5959]</a></span> on to do so, once
+for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a good
+preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion
+I had for the Sunday's leisure in my course of study; but his
+discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of
+the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry,
+uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was
+inculcated or enforced; their aim seeming to be rather to make us
+Presbyterians than good citizens.</p>
+
+<p>At length he took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of
+Philippians, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest,
+just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue or any
+praise, think on these things." And I imagined, in a sermon on such a
+text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confined
+himself to five points only, as meant by the Apostle, viz.:&mdash;1.
+Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy
+Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the public worship. 4. Partaking of the
+Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God's ministers.&mdash;These might be
+all good things; but as they were not the kind of good things that I
+expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from
+any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more. I had
+some years before composed a little liturgy, or form of prayer, for my
+own private use (viz., in 1728), entitled 'Articles of Belief and Acts
+of Religion.' I returned to the use of this, and went no more to the
+public assemblies. My conduct might be blamable, but I leave it,
+without attempting further to excuse it; my present purpose being to
+relate facts, and not to make apologies for them.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of
+arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any
+fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural
+inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or
+thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might
+not always do the one and avoid the other....</p>
+
+<p>I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the
+virtues. I ruled each page with red ink so as to have seven columns,
+one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for
+the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the
+beginning of each line with the first letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5960" id="Page_5960">[Pg 5960]</a></span> of one of the virtues,
+on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little
+black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been
+committed respecting that virtue upon that day.</p>
+
+<p>And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom, I thought it right
+and necessary to solicit his assistance for obtaining it; to this end
+I formed the following little prayer, which was prefixed to my tables
+of examination, for daily use:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase
+in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen
+my resolutions to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my
+kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my power for
+thy continual favors to me."</p></div>
+
+<p>I used also sometimes a little prayer which I took from Thomson's
+Poems, viz.:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Father of light and life, thou Good supreme!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O teach me what is good; teach me thyself!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From every low pursuit; and fill my soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I entered upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and
+continued it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was
+surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined;
+but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.</p>
+
+<p>My scheme of <i>Order</i> gave me the most trouble; and I found that though
+it might be practicable where a man's business was such as to leave
+him the disposition of his time,&mdash;that of a journeyman printer, for
+instance,&mdash;it was not possible to be exactly observed by a master, who
+must mix with the world, and often receive people of business at their
+own hours. <i>Order</i>, too, with regard to places for things, papers,
+etc., I found extremely difficult to acquire. I had not been early
+accustomed to it; and having an exceeding good memory, I was not so
+sensible of the inconvenience attending want of method. This article,
+therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it
+vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had
+such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the
+attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5961" id="Page_5961">[Pg 5961]</a></span> respect;
+like the man who in buying an axe of a smith, my neighbor, desired to
+have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith
+consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he
+turned, while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard and
+heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The
+man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went
+on, and at length would take his axe as it was without farther
+grinding. "No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have it
+bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes," says the man,
+"<i>but I think I like a speckled axe best</i>." And I believe this may
+have been the case with many who, having for want of some such means
+as I employed, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad
+habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle
+and concluded that "<i>a speckled axe was best</i>": for something that
+pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that
+such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery
+in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a
+perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being
+envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults
+in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.</p>
+
+<p>In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to order; and now I
+am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.
+But on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been
+so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the
+endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been
+if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by
+imitating the engraved copies, though they never reach the wished-for
+excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and
+is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little
+artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor owed the constant
+felicity of his life down to his 79th year, in which this is written.
+What reverses may attend the remainder is in the hand of Providence;
+but if they arrive, the reflection on past happiness enjoyed ought to
+help his bearing them with more resignation. To Temperance he ascribes
+his long-continued health, and what is still left to him of a good
+constitution; to Industry and Frugality, the early easiness of his
+circumstances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5962" id="Page_5962">[Pg 5962]</a></span> and acquisition of his fortune, with all that knowledge
+that enabled him to be a useful citizen, and obtained for him some
+degree of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice, the
+confidence of his country, and the honorable employs it conferred upon
+him; and to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even
+in the imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that evenness
+of temper, and that cheerfulness in conversation, which makes his
+company still sought for, and agreeable even to his younger
+acquaintance. I hope therefore that some of my descendants may follow
+the example and reap the benefit.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remarked that though my scheme was not wholly without
+religion, there was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets
+of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for being fully
+persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it
+might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some
+time or other to publish it, I would not have anything in it that
+should prejudice any one of any sect against it.</p>
+
+<p>In this piece it was my design to explain and enforce this doctrine:
+that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but
+forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
+considered; that it was therefore every one's interest to be virtuous,
+who wished to be happy even in this world; and I should from this
+circumstance (there being always in the world a number of rich
+merchants, nobility, States, and princes who have need of honest
+instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so
+rare) have endeavored to convince young persons that no qualities were
+so likely to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and
+integrity.</p>
+
+<p>My list of virtues contained at first but twelve: but a Quaker friend
+having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my
+pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content
+with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing
+and rather insolent, of which he convinced me by mentioning several
+instances;&mdash;I determined endeavoring to cure myself, if I could, of
+this vice or folly among the rest, and I added <i>Humility</i> to my list,
+giving an extensive meaning to the word.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the <i>reality</i> of this
+virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the <i>appearance</i> of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5963" id="Page_5963">[Pg 5963]</a></span> it.
+I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments
+of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself,
+agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or
+expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as
+<i>certainly</i>, <i>undoubtedly</i>, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, <i>I
+conceive</i>, <i>I apprehend</i>, or <i>I imagine</i> a thing to be so or so; or it
+<i>so appears to me at present</i>. When another asserted something that I
+thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him
+abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his
+proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain
+cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present
+case there <i>appeared</i> or <i>seemed</i> to me some difference, etc. I soon
+found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I
+engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed
+my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction;
+I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I
+more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join
+with me when I happened to be in the right.</p>
+
+<p>And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural
+inclination, became at length so easy and so habitual to me, that
+perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical
+expression escape me. And to this habit (after my character of
+integrity) I think it principally owing that I had early so much
+weight with my fellow-citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
+alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when
+I became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent,
+subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in
+language: and yet I generally carried my points.</p>
+
+<p>In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to
+subdue as <i>pride</i>. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle
+it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will
+every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it perhaps
+often in this history; for even if I could conceive that I had
+completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 625px;">
+<a name="PMSA" id="PMSA"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>MUSIC, SCIENCE AND ART.</i></big><br />
+Photogravure from a Painting by Francois Lafon.</span>
+<img src="images/music.jpg" width="625" height="1024" alt="MUSIC, SCIENCE AND ART." title="MUSIC, SCIENCE AND ART." />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5964" id="Page_5964">[Pg 5964]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="LOUIS_HONORE_FRECHETTE" id="LOUIS_HONORE_FRECHETTE"></a>LOUIS HONOR&Eacute; FRECHETTE</h2>
+
+<h4>(1839-)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capl.png" width="90" height="89" alt="L" title="L" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">ouis Honor&eacute; Fr&eacute;chette, the best known of the French-Canadian poets,
+was born near the forties, at L&eacute;vis, a suburb of Quebec. He is
+patriotic; his genius is plainly that of New France, while the form of
+it is of that older France which produced the too exquisite sonnets of
+Voiture; and what counts greatly with the Canadians, he has received
+the approbation of the Academy; he is a personage in Paris, where he
+spends a great deal of time. From 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary
+Workers: Montreal, 1873), we learn that the father of M. Fr&eacute;chette was
+a man of business, and that he did not encourage his son's poetic
+tendencies to the detriment of the practical side of his character.</p>
+
+<p>L&eacute;vis has traditions which are part of that stirring French-Canadian
+history now being made known to us by Mrs. Catherwood and Gilbert
+Parker. And the great St. Lawrence spoke to him in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All those nameless voices, which are<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beating at the heart."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At the age of eight he began to write verses. He was told by his
+careful father that poets never become rich; but he still continued to
+make verses. He grew to be a philosopher as well as a poet, and a
+little later became firmly of Horace's opinion, that a poet to be
+happy does not need riches gained by work. His father, who no doubt
+felt that a philosopher of this cult was not fit for the world, sent
+him to the Seminary at Quebec. At the Seminary he continued to write
+verses. The teachers there found merit in the verses. The "nameless
+voices" still beat at his heart, though the desks of the preparatory
+college had replaced the elms of the St. Lawrence. But poets are so
+rare that even when one is caught young, his captors doubt his
+species. The captors in this case determined to see whether Pegasus
+could trot as well as gallop. "Transport yourself, little Fr&eacute;chette,"
+they said, "to the Council of Clermont and be a troubadour." What is
+time to the poet? He became a troubadour: but this was not enough; his
+preceptors were still in doubt; they locked him in a room and gave him
+as a subject the arrival of Mgr. de Laval in Canada. An hour passed;
+the first sufferings of the young poet having abated, he produced his
+verses. It was evident <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5965" id="Page_5965">[Pg 5965]</a></span>that Pegasus could acquire any pace. His
+talent was questioned no more.</p>
+
+<p>As he became older, Fr&eacute;chette had dreams of becoming a man of action,
+and began to learn telegraphy at Ogdensburg; but he found the art too
+long and life too brief. He went back to the seminary and contributed
+'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare Hours) to the college paper. From the
+seminary&mdash;the <i>Petit Seminaire</i>, of course,&mdash;he went to the College of
+Ste. Anne, to Nicolet, and finally to Laval University, "singing, and
+picking up such crumbs of knowledge as suited his taste."</p>
+
+<p>In 1864 M. Fr&eacute;chette was admitted to practice at the bar of Quebec. He
+was a poet first and always; but just at this time he was second a
+journalist, third a politician, and perhaps fourth a barrister. He
+began to publish a paper, Le Journal de L&eacute;vis. It failed: disgusted,
+he bade farewell to Canada, and began in Chicago the publication of
+L'Observateur: it died in a day. He poured forth his complaints in
+'Voix d'un Exil&eacute;' (The Voice of an Exile). "Never," cries M. Darveau
+in 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary Workers), "did Juvenal scar the
+faces of the corrupt Romans as did Fr&eacute;chette lash the shoulders of our
+wretched politicians." His L'Am&eacute;rique, a journal started in Chicago,
+had some success, but it temporarily ruined Fr&eacute;chette, as the Swiss
+whom he had placed in charge of it suddenly changed its policy, and
+made it sympathize with Germany in the Franco-Prussian war.</p>
+
+<p>Fr&eacute;chette's early prose is fiery and eloquent; his admirers compared
+it to that of Louis Veuillot and Junius, for the reason, probably,
+that he used it to denounce those whom he hated politically.
+Fr&eacute;chette's verse has the lyrical ring. And although M. Camille Doucet
+insisted that the French Academy in crowning his poems honored a
+Frenchman, it must be remembered that Fr&eacute;chette is both an American
+and a British subject; and these things, not likely to disarm
+Academical conservatism, made the action the more significant of the
+poet's value.</p>
+
+<p>There is strong and noble passion in 'La Voix d'un Exil&eacute;' and in the
+'Ode to the Mississippi.' His arraignment of the Canadian politicians
+may be forgotten without loss,&mdash;no doubt he has by this time forgiven
+them,&mdash;but the real feeling of the poet, who finds in the Mississippi
+the brother of his beloved St. Lawrence, is permanent:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Adieu, vallons ombreux, mes campagnes fleuries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mes montagnes d'azur et mes blondes prairies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mon fleuve harmonieux, mon beau del embaum&eacute;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans les grandes cit&eacute;s, dans les bois, sur les gr&ecirc;ves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ton image flottera dans mes r&ecirc;ves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">O mon Canada, bien aim&eacute;.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5966" id="Page_5966">[Pg 5966]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Je n'&eacute;couterai plus, dans nos for&ecirc;ts profondes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans nos pr&egrave;s verdoyants, et sur nos grandes ondes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Toutes ces voix sans nom qui font battre le coeur."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[Farewell, shaded valleys, my flowery meadows, my azure mountains and
+my pale prairies, my musical stream, my fair sky! In the great towns, in
+the wood, along the water-sides, thy scenes will float on in my dreams, O
+Canada, my beloved!</p>
+
+<p>I shall hear no more, in our deep forests, in our verdant meads and upon
+our broad waters, all those nameless voices which make one's heart throb.]</p></div>
+
+<p>In 1865 the first book of poems which appealed to the world from
+French Canada appeared. It was Fr&eacute;chette's 'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare
+Hours). Later came 'P&ecirc;le-M&ecirc;le' (Pell-Mell), full of fine cameo-like
+poems,&mdash;but like cameos that are flushed by an inner and vital fire.
+Longfellow praised 'P&ecirc;le-M&ecirc;le': it shows the influence of Hugo and
+Lamartine; it has the beauty of De Musset, with more freshness and
+"bloom" than that poet of a glorious past possessed; but there are
+more traces of Lamartine in 'P&ecirc;le-M&ecirc;le' than of Hugo.</p>
+
+<p>"Fr&eacute;chette's imagination," says an admiring countryman of his, "is a
+chisel that attacks the soulless block; and with it he easily forms a
+column or a flower." His poems have grown stronger as he has become
+more mature. There is a great gain in dramatic force, so that it has
+surprised none of his readers that he should have attempted tragedy
+with success. He lost some of that quality of daintiness which
+distinguished 'Le Matin' (Morning), 'La Nuit' (Night), and 'Fleurs
+Fan&eacute;es' (Faded Flowers). The 'Pens&eacute;es d'Hiver' (Winter Reflections)
+had this quality, but 'La Derni&egrave;re Iroquoise' (The Last Iroquois) rose
+above it, and like much of 'Les Fleurs Bor&eacute;ales' (Boreal Flowers) and
+his latest work, it is powerful in spirit, yet retains the greatest
+chastity of form.</p>
+
+<p>M. Fr&eacute;chette translated several of Shakespeare's plays for the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre
+Fran&ccedil;ais. After 'Les Fleurs Bor&eacute;ales' was crowned by the Academy,
+there appeared 'Les Oiseaux de Neige' (The Snow-Birds), 'Feuilles
+Volantes' (Leaves in the Wind), and 'La For&ecirc;t Vierge' (The Virgin
+Forest). The volume which shows the genius of Fr&eacute;chette at its highest
+is undoubtedly 'La L&eacute;gende d'un Peuple' (The Legend of a Race), which
+has an admirable preface by Jules Claretie.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 525px;">
+<img src="images/sign134.png" width="525" height="75" alt="Maurice Francis Egan" title="Maurice Francis Egan" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5967" id="Page_5967">[Pg 5967]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="OUR_HISTORY" id="OUR_HISTORY"></a>OUR HISTORY</h3>
+
+<h4>Fragments from 'La L&eacute;gende d'un Peuple': translated by Maurice Francis Egan</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O history of my country,&mdash;set with pearls unknown,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With love I kiss thy pages venerated.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O register immortal, poem of dazzling light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Written by France in purest of her blood!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drama ever acting, records full of pictures<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of high facts heroic, stories of romance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Annals of the giants, archives where we follow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As each leaf we turn, a life resplendent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And find a name respected or a name beloved,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of men and women of the antique time!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where the hero of the past and the hero of the future<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give the hand of friendship and the kiss of love;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the crucifix and sword, the plowshare and the volume,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Everything that builds and everything that saves,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shine, united, living glories of past time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And of time that is to be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The glories of past time, serene and pure before you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O virtues of our day!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hail first to thee, O Cartier, brave and hardy sailor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose footstep sounded on the unexplored shores<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of our immense St. Lawrence. Hail, Champlain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maisonneuve, illustrious founders of two cities,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who show above our waves their rival beauties.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was at first only a group of Bretons<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brandishing the sword-blade and the woodman's axe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sea-wolves bronzed by sea-winds at the port of St. Malo;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cradled since their childhood beneath the sky and water.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Men of iron and high of heart and stature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They, under eye of God, set sail for what might come.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Seeking, in the secrets of the foggy ocean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not the famous El Dorados, but a soil where they might plant,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As symbols of their saving, beside the cross of Christ,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The flag of France.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">After them came blond-haired Normans<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And black-eyed Pontevins, robust colonists,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To make the path a road, and for this holy work<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To offer their strong arms: the motive was the same;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dangers that they fronted brought out prodigies of courage.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5968" id="Page_5968">[Pg 5968]</a></span><span class="i0">They seemed to know no dangers; or rather,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They seemed to seek the ruin that they did not meet.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Frightful perils vainly rose before them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And each element against them vainly had conspired:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These children of the furrow founded an empire!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then, conquering the waves of great and stormy lakes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crossing savannahs with marshes of mud,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Piercing the depths of the forests primeval,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here see our founders and preachers of Faith!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Apostles of France, princes of our God,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Having said farewell to the noise of the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They came to the bounds of the New World immense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To sow the seed of the future,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to bear, as the heralds of eternal law,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the end of the world the torch of progress.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Leaning on his bow, ferociously calm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The child of the forest, bitter at heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A hunted look mingling with his piercing glance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sees the strangers pass,&mdash;encamped on the plain or ambushed in the woods,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thinks of the giant spirits he has seen in his dreams.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the first time he trembles and fears&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then casting off his deceitful calm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He will rush forth, uttering his war-cry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To defend, foot by foot, his soil so lately virgin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ferocious, tomahawk in hand, bar this road to civilization!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A cowardly king, tool of a more cowardly court,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Satyr of the <i>Parc aux cerfs</i>, slave at the Trianon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Plunged in the horrors of nameless debauches,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At the caprice of Pompadour dancing like an atom,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blood of his soldiers and the honor of his kingdom,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of our dying heroes hearing he no voice.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Montcalm, alas! conquered for the first time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Falling on the field of battle, wrapped in his banner.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">L&eacute;vis, last fighter of the last fight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tears&mdash;avenging France and her pride!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A supreme triumph from fate.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That was all. In front of our tottering towers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The stranger planted his insolent colors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And an old flag, wet with bitter tears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Closed its white wings and went across the sea!<br /></span></div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5969" id="Page_5969">[Pg 5969]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="CAUGHNAWAGA" id="CAUGHNAWAGA"></a>CAUGHNAWAGA</h3>
+
+<h4>Paraphrased by Maurice Francis Egan</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A world in agony breathes its last sigh!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Gaze on the remnants of an ancient race,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Great kings of desert terrible to face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crushed by the new weights that upon them lie;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Stand near the Falls, and at this storied place<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You see a humble hamlet;&mdash;by-and-by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You'll talk of ambuscades and treacherous chase.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Can history or sight a traitor be?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where are the red men of the rolling plains?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ferocious Iroquois,&mdash;ah, where is he?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without concealment (this for all our pains!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Chief sells groceries for paltry gains,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With English tang in speech of Normandy!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LOUISIANA" id="LOUISIANA"></a>LOUISIANA</h3>
+
+<h4>Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Land of the Sun! where Fancy free<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Weaveth her woof beneath a sky of gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Another Andalusia, thee I see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy charming memories my heart-strings hold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As if the song of birds had o'er them rolled.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In thy fresh groves, where scented orange glows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Circle vague loves about my longing heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy dark banana-trees, when soft wind flows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In concert weird take up their sombre part,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As evening shadows, listening, float and dart.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Neath thy green domes, where the lianas cling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Show tropic flowers with wide-opened eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With arteries afire till morn-birds sing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">More than old Werthier, in new love's surprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Stand on the threshold of thy Paradise.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Son of the North, I, of the realm of snows,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Vision afar, but always still a power,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In these soft nights and in the days of rose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dreaming I feel, e'en in the saddest hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within my heart unclose a golden flower.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5970" id="Page_5970">[Pg 5970]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_DREAM_OF_LIFE" id="THE_DREAM_OF_LIFE"></a>THE DREAM OF LIFE</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">To My Son</span></h3>
+
+<h4>Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At twenty years, a poet lone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I, when the rosy season came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Walked in the woodland, to make moan<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For some fair dame;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And when the breezes brought to me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The lilac spent in fragrant stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wove her infidelity<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In love's young dream.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A lover of illusions, I!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Soon other dreams quite filled my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And other loves as suddenly<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Took old love's part.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One Glory, a deceitful fay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Who flies before a man can stir,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Surprised my poor heart many a day,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I dreamed of her!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But now that I have grown so old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">At lying things I grasp no more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My poor, deceived heart takes hold<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of other lore.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Another life before us glows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Casts on all faithful souls its gleam:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Late, late, my heart its glory knows,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of it I dream!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5971" id="Page_5971">[Pg 5971]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HAROLD_FREDERIC" id="HAROLD_FREDERIC"></a>HAROLD FREDERIC</h2>
+
+<h4>(1856-)</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capm.png" width="90" height="90" alt="M" title="M" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">r. Frederic was born in Utica, New York, August 19th, 1856. He spent
+his boyhood in that neighborhood, and was educated in its schools. The
+rural Central New York of a half-century ago was a region of rich
+farms, of conservative ideas, and of strong indigenous types of
+character. These undoubtedly offered unconscious studies to the future
+novelist.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus139.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="Harold Frederic" title="Harold Frederic" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Harold Frederic</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Like many of his guild he began writing on a newspaper, rising by
+degrees from the position of reporter to that of editor. The drill and
+discipline taught him to make the most of time and opportunity, and he
+contrived leisure enough to write two or three long stories. Working
+at journalism in Utica, Albany, and New York, in 1884 he became chief
+foreign correspondent of the New York Times, making his headquarters
+in London, where he has since lived.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Frederic's reputation rests on journalistic correspondence of the
+higher class, and on his novels, of which he has published six. His
+stories are distinctively American. He has caught up contrasting
+elements of local life in the eastern part of the United States, and
+grouped them with ingenuity and power. His first important story was
+'Seth's Brother's Wife,' originally appearing as a serial in
+Scribner's Magazine. Following this came 'The Lawton Girl,' a study of
+rustic life; 'In the Valley,' a semi-historical novel, turning on
+aspects of colonial times along the Mohawk River; 'The Copperhead,' a
+tale of the Civil War; 'Mukena and Other Stories,' graphic character
+sketches, displaying humor and insight; 'The Damnation of Theron
+Ware,' the most serious and carefully studied of his books; and 'March
+Hares,' a sketch of contemporary society.</p>
+
+<p>A student of the life about him, possessing a dramatic sense and a
+saving grace of humor, Mr. Frederic in his fiction is often
+photographic and minute in detail, while he does not forget the
+importance of the mass which the detail is to explain or embellish.
+He likes to deal with types of that mixed population peculiar to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5972" id="Page_5972">[Pg 5972]</a></span>farming valleys of Central New York,&mdash;German, Irish, and
+American,&mdash;bringing out by contrast their marked social and individual
+traits. Not a disciple of realism, his books are emphatically "human
+documents."</p>
+
+<p>There is always moreover a definite plot, often a dramatic
+development. But it is the attrition of character against character
+that really interests him. 'Seth's Brother's Wife' and 'The Lawton
+Girl' leave a definite ethical intention. In the 'Damnation of Theron
+Ware' is depicted the tragedy of a weak and crude character suddenly
+put in touch with a higher intellectual and emotional life, which it
+is too meagre and too untrained to adopt, and through which it suffers
+shipwreck. In 'In the Valley' the gayety and seriousness of homely
+life stand out against a savage and martial background.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Frederic profoundly respects his art, is never careless, and never
+unconscientious. Of his constructive instinct a distinguished English
+critic has said that it "ignores nothing that is significant; makes
+use of nothing that is not significant; and binds every element of
+character and every incident together in a consistent, coherent,
+dramatic whole."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_LAST_RITE" id="THE_LAST_RITE"></a>THE LAST RITE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Copyright 1896, by Stone &amp; Kimball</h4>
+
+
+<p>Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk, and his
+mind all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work and
+impatience to be at it, Theron Ware came abruptly upon a group of men
+and boys who occupied the whole path, and were moving forward so
+noiselessly that he had not heard them coming. He almost ran into the
+leader of this little procession, and began a stammering apology, the
+final words of which were left unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him
+and his talk were all the faces he saw.</p>
+
+<p>In the centre of the group were four workingmen, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured
+across them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by
+another blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From
+beneath its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown
+upward at such an angle as to hide everything beyond those in front.
+The tall young minister, stepping aside and standing tiptoe, could see
+sloping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5973" id="Page_5973">[Pg 5973]</a></span> downward, behind this hedge of beard, a pinched and
+chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull
+lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.</p>
+
+<p>Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter,
+a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in
+whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's
+workmen in the wagonshops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree
+in front of his employer's house, and being unused to such work, had
+fallen from the top and broken all his bones. They would have cared
+for him at Madden's house, but he insisted upon being taken home. His
+name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's
+and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause, the lad, a bright-eyed,
+freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information
+that his big brother had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance
+that he might be in time to administer "extry munction."</p>
+
+<p>The way of the silent little procession led through back
+streets,&mdash;where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the
+gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the
+passers-by,&mdash;and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy
+lane, before one of a half-dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps
+and d&eacute;bris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.</p>
+
+<p>A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some
+messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were
+whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster
+of women of the neighborhood; some of the more elderly of whom,
+shriveled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their
+eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently
+should rise into the <i>keen</i> of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no
+moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than
+sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an
+instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked&mdash;one could have sworn
+impassively&mdash;into his staring eyes. Then, still without a word, she
+waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.</p>
+
+<p>Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself a minute later inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved
+by the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze
+upon the open door of the only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5974" id="Page_5974">[Pg 5974]</a></span> other apartment, the bedchamber.
+Through this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and
+standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife
+and old Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his
+crushed limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these
+proceedings, they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured
+man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home
+to his wife, and the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended
+to his religious duties. They admitted freely that by the light of his
+example, their own husbands and sons left much to be desired; and from
+this wandered easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But
+all the while their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron
+made out, after he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell,
+that many of them were telling their beads even while they kept the
+muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention to him,
+or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a
+different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through
+the throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the
+owner of this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and
+pleasing spring attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized
+silver handle of a quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that
+her face was of a lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin,
+full red lips, and big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She
+made a grave little inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed
+in response. Since her arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others
+had entirely ceased.</p>
+
+<p>"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling
+that at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence
+in this Romish house was due. "I hope they won't feel that I have
+intruded."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded her head as if she quite understood.</p>
+
+<p>"They'll take the will for the deed," she whispered back. "Father
+Forbes will be here in a minute. Do you know, is it too late?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5975" id="Page_5975">[Pg 5975]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding
+bulk of a new-comer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the
+deferential way in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a
+passage, made his identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an
+unaccustomed way as this priest of a strange Church advanced across
+the room,&mdash;a broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height,
+with a shapely, strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm,
+commanding tread. He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small
+leather-bound case. To this and to him the women curtsied and bowed
+their heads as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol, to Theron;
+and he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted
+the priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on
+the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Just to tell you that I am here," she said. The priest nodded with a
+grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.</p>
+
+<p>"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. "Stay here
+for a minute."</p>
+
+<p>She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among
+the crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table,
+covered with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a
+basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in
+readiness before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared
+space were kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the
+click of beads on their rosaries.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway
+with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over
+his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender
+light.</p>
+
+<p>One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by
+Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and
+overflowed now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing
+with the others to receive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5976" id="Page_5976">[Pg 5976]</a></span> the sprinkled holy water from the priest's
+white fingers; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in
+impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the
+priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears,
+nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil
+with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the
+invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all
+he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest
+rolled it forth in the 'Asperges me, Domine,' and 'Misereatur vestri
+omnipotens Deus,' with its soft Continental vowels and liquid <i>r</i>'s.
+It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the
+astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the 'Confiteor'
+vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a
+different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still
+dominated the murmured undertone of the other's prayers the last
+moment came.</p>
+
+<p>Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bed-sides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the
+girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names,&mdash;'beatum Michaelem Archangelum,' 'beatum Joannem Baptistam,'
+'sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,'&mdash;invoked with such proud
+confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected
+him.</p>
+
+<p>He came out with the others at last,&mdash;the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind,&mdash;and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it
+had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all
+this.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5977" id="Page_5977">[Pg 5977]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EDWARD_AUGUSTUS_FREEMAN" id="EDWARD_AUGUSTUS_FREEMAN"></a>EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN</h2>
+
+<h4>(1823-1892)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY JOHN BACH M<sup>c</sup>MASTER</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/cape.png" width="90" height="90" alt="E" title="E" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">dward Augustus Freeman, one of the most prolific of recent English
+historians, was born at Harborne in Staffordshire, England, on August
+2d, 1823. His early education was received at home and in private
+schools, from which at the age of eighteen he went up to Oxford, where
+he was elected a scholar of Trinity College. Four years later (1845)
+he took his degree and was elected a Fellow of Trinity, an honor which
+he held till his marriage in 1847 forced him to relinquish it.</p>
+
+<p>Long before this event, Freeman was deep in historical study. His
+fortune was easy. The injunction that he should eat bread in the sweat
+of his face had not been laid on him. His time was his own, and was
+devoted with characteristic zeal and energy to labor in the field of
+history, which in the course of fifty years was made to yield him a
+goodly crop.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus145.jpg" width="270" height="315" alt="Edward A. Freeman" title="Edward A. Freeman" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Edward A. Freeman</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Year after year he poured forth a steady stream of Essays, Thoughts,
+Remarks, Suggestions, Lectures, Short Histories on matters of current
+interest, little monographs on great events or great men,&mdash;all
+covering a range of subjects which bear evidence to most astonishing
+versatility and learning. Sometimes his topic was a cathedral church,
+as that of Wells or Leominster Priory; or a cathedral city, as Ely or
+Norwich. At others it was a grave historical theme, as the 'Unity of
+History'; or 'Comparative Politics'; or the 'Growth of the English
+Constitution from the Earliest Times'; or 'Old English History for
+Children.' His 'General Sketch of European History' is still a
+standard text book in our high schools and colleges. His 'William the
+Conqueror' in Macmillan's 'Twelve English Statesmen'; his 'Short
+History of the Norman Conquest of England' in the Clarendon Press
+Series; his studies of Godwin, Harold, and the Normans, in the
+'Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica,' are the best of their kind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5978" id="Page_5978">[Pg 5978]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His contributions to the reviews and magazines make a small library,
+encyclop&aelig;dic in character. Thirty-one essays were published in the
+Fortnightly Review; thirty in the Contemporary Review; twenty-seven in
+Macmillan's Magazine; twelve in the British Quarterly, and as many
+more in the National Review; while such as are scattered through the
+other periodicals of Great Britain and the United States swell the
+list to one hundred and fifty-seven titles. Every conceivable subject
+is treated,&mdash;politics, government, history, field sports,
+architecture, archaeology, books, linguistics, finance, great men
+living and dead, questions of the day. But even this list does not
+comprise all of Freeman's writings, for regularly every week, for more
+than twenty years, he contributed two long articles to the Saturday
+Review.</p>
+
+<p>Taken as a whole, this array of publications represents an industry
+which was simply enormous, and a learning as varied as it was immense.
+If classified according to their subjects, they fall naturally into
+six groups. The antiquarian and architectural sketches and addresses
+are the least valuable and instructive. They are of interest because
+they exhibit a strong bent of mind which appears constantly in
+Freeman's works, and because it was by the aid of such remains that he
+studied the early history of nations. Then come the studies in
+politics and government, such as the essays on presidential
+government; on American institutional history; on the House of Lords;
+the growth of commonwealths, and such elaborate treatises as the six
+lectures on 'Comparative Politics,' and the 'History of Federal
+Government,'&mdash;all notable because of the liberal spirit and breadth of
+view that mark them, and because of a positiveness of statement and
+confidence in the correctness of the author's judgments. Then come the
+historical essays; then the lectures and addresses; then his
+occasional pieces, written at the request of publishers or editors to
+fill some long-felt want; and finally the series of histories on
+which, in the long run, the reputation of Freeman must rest. These, in
+the order of merit and value, are the 'Norman Conquest'; the 'Reign of
+William Rufus,' which is really a supplement to the 'Conquest'; the
+'History of Sicily,' which the author did not live to finish.</p>
+
+<p>The roll of his works is enough to show that the kind of history which
+appealed to Freeman was that of the distant past, and that which dealt
+with politics rather than with social life. Of ancient history he had
+a good mastery; English history from its dawn to the thirteenth
+century he knew minutely: European history of the same period he knew
+profoundly. After the thirteenth century his interest grew less and
+less as modern times were approached, and his knowledge smaller and
+smaller till it became that of a man very well read in history and no
+more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5979" id="Page_5979">[Pg 5979]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Freeman was therefore essentially a historian of the far past; and as
+such had, it is safe to say, no living superior in England. But in his
+treatment of the past he presents a small part of the picture. He is
+concerned with great conquerors, with military leaders, with battles
+and sieges and systems of government. The mass of the people have no
+interest for him at all. His books abound in battle-pieces of the age
+of the long-bow and the javelin, of the battle-axe, the mace, and the
+spear; of the age when brain went for little and when brawn counted
+for much; and when the fate of nations depended less on the skill of
+individual commanders than on the personal prowess of those who met in
+hand-to-hand encounters. He delights in descriptions of historic
+buildings; he is never weary of drawing long analogies between one
+kind of government and another; but for the customs, the manner, the
+usages, the daily life of the people, he has never a word. "History,"
+said he on one occasion, "is past politics; politics is present
+history," and to this epigram he is strictly faithful. The England of
+the serf and the villein, the curfew and the monastery, is brushed
+aside to leave room for the story of the way in which William of
+Normandy conquered the Saxons, and of the way in which William Rufus
+conducted his quarrels with Bishop Anselm.</p>
+
+<p>With all of this no fault is to be found. It was his cast of mind, his
+point of view; and the questions which alone concern us in any
+estimate of his work are: Did he do it well? What is its value? Did he
+make a real contribution to historical knowledge? What are its merits
+and defects? Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief
+merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an
+intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost;
+a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every
+man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to
+reproduce the past most graphically.</p>
+
+<p>From these merits comes Freeman's chief defect,&mdash;prolixity. His
+earnest desire to be accurate made him not only say the same thing
+over and over again, but say it with an unnecessary and useless
+fullness of detail, and back up his statement with a profusion of
+notes, which in many cases amount to more than half the text. Indeed,
+were they printed in the same type as the text, the space they occupy
+would often exceed it. Thus, in the first volume of the 'Norman
+Conquest' there are 528 pages of text, with foot-notes occupying from
+a third to a half of almost every page, and an appendix of notes of
+244 pages; in the second volume, the text and foot-notes amount to
+512, and the appendix 179; in the third, the text covers 562 and the
+appendix 206 pages. These notes are always interesting and always
+instructive. But the end of a volume is not the place for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5980" id="Page_5980">[Pg 5980]</a></span>an
+exhibition of the doubts and fears that have tormented the historian,
+for a statement of the reasons which have led him to one conclusion
+rather than another, nor for the denunciation or reputation of the
+opinions of his predecessors. When the building is finished, we do not
+want to see the lumber used as the scaffolding piled in the back yard.
+Mr. Freeman's histories would be all the better for a condensation of
+the text and an elimination of the long appendices.</p>
+
+<p>With these exceptions, the workmanship is excellent. He entered so
+thoroughly into the past that it became to him more real and
+understandable than the present. He was not merely the contemporary
+but the companion of the men he had to deal with. He knew every spot
+of ground, every Roman ruin, every medi&aelig;val castle, that came in any
+way to be connected with his story, as well as he knew the topography
+of the country that stretched beneath his study window, or the
+arrangement of the house in which he lived.</p>
+
+<p>In his histories, therefore, we are presented at every turn with
+life-like portraits of the illustrious dead, bearing all the marks of
+having been taken from life; with descriptions of castles and towers,
+minsters and abbeys, and of the scenes that have made them memorable;
+with comparisons of one ruler with another, always sane and just; and
+with graphic pictures of coronations, of battles, sieges, burnings,
+and all the havoc and pomp of war.</p>
+
+<p>The essays and studies in politics show Mr. Freeman in a yet more
+interesting light; many are elaborate reviews of historical works, and
+therefore cover a wide range of topics, both ancient and of the
+present time. Now his subject is Mr. Bryce's 'Holy Roman Empire'; now
+the Flavian C&aelig;sars; now Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer and the Homeric Age';
+now Kirk's 'Charles the Bold'; now presidential government; now
+Athenian democracy; now the Byzantine Empire; now the Eastern Church;
+now the growth of commonwealths; now the geographical aspects of the
+Eastern Question.</p>
+
+<p>By so wide a range of topics, an opportunity is afforded for a variety
+of remarks, analogies, judgments of men and times, far greater than
+the histories could give. In the main, these judgments may be
+accepted; but so thoroughly was Freeman a historian of the past, that
+some of his estimates of contemporary men and things were singularly
+erroneous. While our Civil War was still raging he began a 'History of
+Federal Government,' which was to extend from the Achaean League "to
+the disruption of the United States." A prudent historian would not
+have taken up the role of prophet. He would have waited for the end of
+the struggle. But absolute self-confidence in his own good judgment
+was one of Freeman's most conspicuous traits. His estimate of Lincoln
+is another instance of inability to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5981" id="Page_5981">[Pg 5981]</a></span>understand the times in which he
+lived. In the 'Essay on Presidential Government,' published in the
+National Review in 1864 and republished in the first series of
+'Historical Essays' in 1871, the greatest President and the grandest
+public character the United States has yet produced is declared
+inferior to each and all the Presidents from Washington to John Quincy
+Adams. A comparison of Lincoln with Monroe or Madison or Jefferson by
+Freeman would have been entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>Two views of history as set forth in the essays are especially
+deserving of notice. He is never weary of insisting on the unity and
+the continuity of history in general and that of England in
+particular, and he attaches unreasonable importance to the influence
+of the Teutonic element in English history. This latter was the
+inevitable result of his method of studying the past along the lines
+of philology and ethnology, and has carried him to extremes which
+taken by anybody else he would have been quick to see.</p>
+
+<p>An examination of Freeman's minor contributions to the reviews&mdash;such
+essays, sketches, and discussions as he did not think important enough
+to republish in book form&mdash;is indicative of his interest in current
+affairs. They made little draft on his learning, yet the point of view
+is generally the result of his learning. He believed, for instance,
+that a sound judgment on the Franco-Prussian War could not be found
+save in the light of history. "The present war," he wrote to the Pall
+Mall Gazette, "has largely risen out of a misconception of history,
+out of the dream of a frontier of the Rhine which never existed. The
+war on the part of Germany is in truth a vigorous setting forth of the
+historical truth that the Rhine is, and always has been, a German
+river."</p>
+
+<p>Freeman was still busy with his 'History of Sicily' from the earliest
+times, and had just finished the preface to the third volume, when he
+died at Alicante in Spain, March 16th, 1892. Since his death a fourth
+volume, prepared from his notes, has been published.</p>
+
+<p>But one biography of Freeman has yet appeared, 'The Life and Letters
+of Edward A. Freeman,' by W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols., 1895.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 620px;">
+<img src="images/sign149.png" width="620" height="100" alt="John Bach McMartin" title="John Bach McMartin" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5982" id="Page_5982">[Pg 5982]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_ALTERED_ASPECTS_OF_ROME" id="THE_ALTERED_ASPECTS_OF_ROME"></a>THE ALTERED ASPECTS OF ROME</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' Third Series. London,
+Macmillan &amp; Co., 1879</h4>
+
+
+<p>The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are
+the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the
+general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are
+fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that
+the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard&mdash;a sack and fire done in the
+cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor&mdash;was the immediate cause
+of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction
+which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were
+at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than
+dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could
+keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no
+resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on
+the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest
+itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient
+ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual
+amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without
+seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient
+wall on every side,&mdash;when we stumble at every step on fragments of
+marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,&mdash;we are apt to think that
+they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places.
+The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and
+fragments&mdash;again setting aside the more perfect monuments&mdash;proves that
+destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any
+other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly
+swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin.
+But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former
+existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly
+Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman
+cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare
+those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome
+as the dwelling-places of her own C&aelig;sars,&mdash;Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier
+itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and
+some pieces of wall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5983" id="Page_5983">[Pg 5983]</a></span> through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier
+is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her <i>Porta Nigra</i>, one
+monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as
+Trier&mdash;the second Rome&mdash;is, she is certainly not richer in proportion
+than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a
+single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is
+something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick
+Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than
+Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,&mdash;Christian Roman,
+Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is
+no trace&mdash;no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no
+amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the
+city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of
+Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial
+residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is&mdash;even
+proportionally&mdash;far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman
+remains than Italy herself; but even the Proven&ccedil;al cities are hardly
+so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is
+nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued
+prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to
+the standard of each age, which has been always building and
+rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a
+gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the
+havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few
+special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state;
+but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered
+with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the
+perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman
+scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of
+the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their
+prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings,
+temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number
+were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble
+columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the
+loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with
+the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of
+the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes
+from another cause. As the buildings became disused,&mdash;and if we
+rejoice at the disuse of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5984" id="Page_5984">[Pg 5984]</a></span> amphitheatre, we must both mourn and
+wonder at the disuse of the baths,&mdash;they were sometimes turned into
+fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses.
+Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the
+ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his
+brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the
+slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator.
+Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came
+whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful
+government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the
+building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of
+robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and
+Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle
+Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric
+undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious
+objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any
+buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to
+Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of
+Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and
+accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the
+ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient
+Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from
+Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way
+towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman
+hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian
+were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.</p>
+
+<p>But the barons of medi&aelig;val Rome, great and sad as was the destruction
+which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the
+basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome
+have had to suffer. The medi&aelig;val barons simply did according to their
+kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings
+or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one
+purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic
+destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of
+Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and
+their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may
+have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews. Who
+that looks on the ruined Coliseum,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5985" id="Page_5985">[Pg 5985]</a></span> who that looks on the palace
+raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?</p></div>
+
+<p>And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of
+the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same
+evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so
+sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age
+of the <i>Renaissance</i>, the time when men turned away from all reverence
+for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the
+feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times
+when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed.
+Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand
+or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed
+to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in
+the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could
+to efface their truest interest, their local and historical
+association.</p>
+
+<p>A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds
+of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places,
+and which need special scientific classification, such collections are
+necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot
+where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far
+nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had
+been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he
+had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the
+Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a
+private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the
+recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that
+sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead;
+that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and
+that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more
+instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of
+the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of
+"Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the
+light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and
+<i>gentiles</i> laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican,
+numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5986" id="Page_5986">[Pg 5986]</a></span> fulsome
+inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber
+who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a
+heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of
+ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of
+heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.</p>
+
+<p>Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St.
+Constantia&mdash;be her legend true or false, it makes no difference&mdash;to
+trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian
+worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned
+about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see
+the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the
+central point of the building, with the series of images which is
+begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn
+away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as
+number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is
+the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities,
+pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their
+destroying will.</p>
+
+<p>In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other
+cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city
+itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome
+is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts
+of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in
+common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and
+of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond
+both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field
+of Mars&mdash;both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city
+largely beyond the wall of Aurelian&mdash;together make up the greater part
+of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no
+space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine,
+Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been
+spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined
+fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a
+Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre
+of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia;
+above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of
+Augustus has been brought down,&mdash;if they enable the moralist to point
+a lesson, are far more offensive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5987" id="Page_5987">[Pg 5987]</a></span> to the student of history than the
+utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of
+Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive
+transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most
+living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at
+such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the
+days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which
+adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is
+a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the
+Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at
+work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work
+in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is
+only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And
+wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be
+allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the
+Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of
+such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_CONTINUITY_OF_ENGLISH_HISTORY" id="THE_CONTINUITY_OF_ENGLISH_HISTORY"></a>THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan &amp; Co., 1871</h4>
+
+
+<p>A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany, as
+regards their political development, would be a subject well worth
+working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common
+to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly
+different. The distinctive character of English history is its
+continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there
+is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be
+drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a
+superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,&mdash;at the Norman
+invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate us
+from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the
+history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor
+Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest.
+Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign
+kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a
+foreign army, and its native sons shut out from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5988" id="Page_5988">[Pg 5988]</a></span> every position of
+wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real
+and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the
+greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages
+before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England
+has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon
+kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and
+Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The
+England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all
+external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age
+immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely
+removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a
+conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and
+slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of
+power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is
+an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and
+circumstance of our own.</p>
+
+<p>When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its
+beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be
+drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great
+creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia&mdash;the
+thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England
+which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is
+essentially the still living England in which we have our own being.
+Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries;
+from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King
+&AElig;lfred's Witenagem&oacute;t is a valuable link in the chain of our political
+progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by
+the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A
+statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be
+shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good
+to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we
+may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our
+political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see
+the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in
+wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought
+improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others
+capable of further improvement still.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5989" id="Page_5989">[Pg 5989]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since
+the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never
+known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly,
+Witenagem&oacute;t, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been,
+capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more
+or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria,
+England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary
+constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken
+it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English
+Witenagem&oacute;ts, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian
+research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries
+fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a
+veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In
+the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional
+principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the
+seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything
+new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is
+on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our
+rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or
+proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ,
+conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point
+which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special
+continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most
+instructive part of the comparison between English history and the
+history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the
+many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one
+Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and
+barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every
+institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth
+century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young
+indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,&mdash;the very
+things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a
+King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor
+impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high
+hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of
+the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen,
+and into whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5990" id="Page_5990">[Pg 5990]</a></span> order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons
+still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons
+whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual
+changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard
+questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take
+their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great
+offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have
+assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character
+they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun;
+doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but
+statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions
+of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is
+rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few
+great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy
+yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but
+both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent
+extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal
+status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.</p>
+
+<p>With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes,
+and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at
+least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language
+was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible
+at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it
+was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England
+at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest,
+ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a
+purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he
+could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could
+not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled
+over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds.
+The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems
+truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more
+on the throne of Cerdic and of &AElig;lfred. The modern English nation is
+now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French
+dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and
+fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of
+our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character
+for good and for evil.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5991" id="Page_5991">[Pg 5991]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and
+institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before
+said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the
+early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagem&oacute;t. The latter
+institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been
+substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be
+ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of
+ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to
+obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands
+the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all
+its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its medi&aelig;val, and in all its
+modern forms&mdash;Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics
+without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories,
+Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments;
+all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of
+them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by
+year; his successors in the Eastern <i>Francia</i>, the Kings of the
+Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in
+Western <i>Francia</i>, after it fell away from the common centre, no such
+assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments;
+every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and
+Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to
+contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair,
+for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the
+States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish
+Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe,
+in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From
+that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful
+course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of
+England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of
+political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive
+measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King
+could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If
+they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked
+minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit
+reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from
+magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both
+were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5992" id="Page_5992">[Pg 5992]</a></span> centuries
+as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the
+States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France
+generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their
+extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791
+to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year,
+made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our
+liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected
+nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old
+Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their
+constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian
+curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National
+Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen
+and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of
+Commons have gone on undisturbed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="RACE_AND_LANGUAGE" id="RACE_AND_LANGUAGE"></a>RACE AND LANGUAGE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan &amp; Co., 1871</h4>
+
+
+<p>Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the
+working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups
+in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has
+grown,&mdash;how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to
+mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
+qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
+classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
+unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
+only; and that that test is language.</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined
+by the merely political arrangements which group men under various
+governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes
+of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this
+standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe
+for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer
+to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without
+their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national
+divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political
+divisions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5993" id="Page_5993">[Pg 5993]</a></span> That is to say, <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> a nation and a government
+should coincide. I say only <i>prim&acirc; facie</i>, for this is assuredly no
+inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be
+otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good
+reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a
+government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the
+less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That
+is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it
+as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause;
+so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by
+asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation
+should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of
+governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of
+nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing,
+something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government
+should as far as possible conform. How then do we define the nation
+which is, if there is no special reason to the contrary, to fix the
+limits of a government? Primarily, I say, as a rule,&mdash;but a rule
+subject to exceptions,&mdash;as a <i>prim&acirc; facie</i> standard, subject to
+special reasons to the contrary,&mdash;we define the nation by language. We
+may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule
+that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality;
+but we may safely say that where there is not community of language,
+there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that
+without community of language there may be an artificial nationality,
+a nationality which may be good for all political purposes, and which
+may engender a common national feeling. Still, this is not quite the
+same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is
+community of language.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of
+nationality. We so far take it as the badge, that we instinctively
+assume community of language as a nation as the rule, and we set down
+anything that departs from that rule as an exception. The first idea
+suggested by the word Frenchman, or German, or any other national
+name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother
+tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us
+think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a
+speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise,
+we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5994" id="Page_5994">[Pg 5994]</a></span>
+Again, the rule is none the less the rule nor the exceptions the
+exceptions, because the exceptions may easily outnumber the instances
+which conform to the rule. The rule is still the rule, because we take
+the instances which conform to it as a matter of course, while in
+every case which does not conform to it we ask for the explanation.
+All the larger countries of Europe provide us with exceptions; but we
+treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask why a native of France
+speaks French. But when a native of France speaks as his mother tongue
+some other tongue than French, when French, or something which
+popularly passes for French, is spoken as his mother tongue by some
+one who is not a native of France, we at once ask the reason. And the
+reason will be found in each case in some special historical cause,
+which withdraws that case from the operation of the general law. A
+very good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly
+passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose
+inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be
+given, and it may fairly be asked.</p>
+
+<p>In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the
+bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,
+we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In
+a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken
+which differ alike from English and from French, but which are
+strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of
+a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the
+settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other
+tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find
+islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as
+French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the
+English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems
+so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people
+which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did
+not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by
+force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part
+of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually
+became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave
+to their connection with the land which their forefathers had
+conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never
+became French in feeling. This last case, that of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5995" id="Page_5995">[Pg 5995]</a></span>
+Norman Islands, is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically
+connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union
+between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy,
+where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography
+together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a
+Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong,
+political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against
+language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not
+become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone
+remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached
+to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage.
+Between States of the relative size of England and the Norman Islands,
+the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of
+the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our
+forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman
+Islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.</p>
+
+<p>These instances and countless others bear out the position, that while
+community of language is the most obvious sign of common
+nationality,&mdash;while it is the main element, or something more than an
+element, in the formation of nationality,&mdash;the rule is open to
+exceptions of all kinds; and that the influence of language is at all
+times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the
+exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases
+which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases
+which do conform to it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_NORMAN_COUNCIL_AND_THE_ASSEMBLY_OF_LILLEBONNE" id="THE_NORMAN_COUNCIL_AND_THE_ASSEMBLY_OF_LILLEBONNE"></a>THE NORMAN COUNCIL AND THE ASSEMBLY OF LILLEBONNE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The History of the Norman Conquest of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his
+own people, on the minds of the neighboring countries whence he
+invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes
+whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and above all,
+on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these
+various negotiations is not very clear, and in all probability all
+were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that
+William's first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5996" id="Page_5996">[Pg 5996]</a></span> crown,&mdash;or whatever else was the exact purport of the English
+King's answer,&mdash;was to lay the matter before a select body of his most
+trusted counselors. The names of most of the men whom William thus
+honored with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They
+were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful
+vassals who had fought at his side against French invaders and Norman
+rebels. There was his brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, the lord of
+the castle by the waterfalls, the spoil of the banished Warling. And
+there was one closer than a brother,&mdash;the proud William the son of
+Osborn, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood. There,
+perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other
+brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of
+heart and as strong of arm as any of his race. There too, not
+otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of
+William, Robert, and Odo. There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate
+succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself,&mdash;Richard of
+Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the
+Fearless. There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the
+frontier fortress of Eu, the brother of the traitor Busac and of the
+holy prelate of Lisieux. There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the
+world of Roger of Toesny, and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old
+foe of Normandy and mankind. There was Ralph's companion in
+banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil, and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal
+son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle. There too were
+the other worthies of the day of Mortemar, Walter Giffard and Hugh of
+Montfort, and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received
+the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush. These men, chiefs of
+the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater
+houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign's
+bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the
+enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the
+land which with so many in that assembly was to become a second home,
+a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of
+their own right hands.</p>
+
+<p>To this select Council the duke made his first appeal. He told them,
+what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he
+had suffered from Harold of England. It was his purpose to cross the
+sea, in order to assert his rights and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5997" id="Page_5997">[Pg 5997]</a></span> chastise the wrong-doer.
+With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful
+Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed. He had
+gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they
+approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power?
+Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to recover his
+right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and
+friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved
+his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power
+of Normandy to accomplish. The valor of the Norman knighthood, the
+wealth of the Norman Church, was fully enough to put their duke in
+possession of all that he claimed. Their own personal service they
+pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge,
+they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But
+they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work,
+all ought to share in the counsel. Those whom the duke had gathered
+together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other
+wise and brave men in the duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose
+counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he
+spoke. Let the duke call a larger meeting of all the barons of his
+duchy, and lay his designs before them.</p>
+
+<p>The duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons
+for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we
+come across any details of the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And
+we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed
+from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or
+more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of
+political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the
+war against England was a widely different body from the Great Cem&oacute;r
+which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his
+speech before the King and all the people of the land. That people had
+met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city
+of the realm. But in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons.
+The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories
+of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand.
+The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution
+of the medi&aelig;val States had not yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5998" id="Page_5998">[Pg 5998]</a></span> arisen. There was no Third Estate,
+because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether
+vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular
+privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And if the Third Order was
+wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in
+other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as
+an important element in the duke's ways and means, and both the wealth
+and the personal prowess of the Norman clergy were, when the day came,
+freely placed at William's disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman
+Assemblies, which shut out the clergy from all share in the national
+deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied rather
+than asserted that the bishops of Normandy were present in the
+Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the
+debates fell on the lay barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly
+was a spirit which was especially theirs.</p>
+
+<p>Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it
+met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary
+boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of
+Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the
+people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the
+virtues and the vices of a real Popular Assembly. William had already
+consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by
+their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in
+Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman
+people. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were
+valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of
+what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the
+privileges of their order. The duke laid his case before them. He told
+once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had
+done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force
+of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on
+which they had entered. But without their help he could do nothing. Of
+his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an
+enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a
+cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how
+many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a
+free-will offering.</p>
+
+<p>A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent,
+even when the craft and the eloquence of William<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5999" id="Page_5999">[Pg 5999]</a></span> was brought to bear
+upon it. The barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They
+would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the
+conclusion to which they came. William was obliged to consent to this
+delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each
+eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty,
+thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic
+speaker. Some professed their readiness to follow the duke; others
+were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards. Other
+speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise.
+Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land
+would be ruined by the attempt. The conquest of England was an
+undertaking beyond the power of a Roman emperor. Harold and his land
+were rich; they had wealth to take foreign kings and dukes into their
+service; their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could
+not hope to strive against. They had abundance of tried soldiers, and
+above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other
+men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea. How could a fleet
+be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they
+be taught, within a year's space, to cope with such an enemy? The
+feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an
+enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and
+schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning
+through the opposition of his own subjects.</p>
+
+<p>A daring though cunning attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern,
+the duke's nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an
+assent to his master's will. He appealed to their sense of feudal
+honor; they owed the duke service for their fiefs: let them come
+forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their
+tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven
+to implore the services of his subjects. Let them rather forestall his
+will; let them win his favor by ready offerings even beyond their
+power to fulfill. He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom
+they had to deal. William's jealous temper would not brook
+disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the
+end, if the duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his
+enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.</p>
+
+<p>The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and
+perplexed even the stout hearts with whom he had to deal.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6000" id="Page_6000">[Pg 6000]</a></span>
+The barons prayed him to be their spokesman with the duke. He knew their minds
+and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said.
+But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to
+the duke's demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way;
+they feared the sea,&mdash;so changed was the race which had once manned
+the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand,&mdash;and they were not bound to
+serve beyond it.</p>
+
+<p>A point seemed to have been gained, by the seeming license given by
+the Assembly to the duke's most intimate friend to speak as he would
+in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to
+the duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty,
+setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for
+their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not
+willingly undergo in his service. But the orator soon overshot his
+mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man
+would not only cross the sea with the duke, but would bring with him
+double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of
+twenty knights' fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a
+hundred with two hundred. He himself, of his love and zeal, would
+furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.</p>
+
+<p>The barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly
+the same case as the king against whom they were called on to march.
+They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to
+speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond
+all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to
+engagements which had never entered into their minds. Loud shouts of
+dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the
+regular contingent awakened special indignation. With a true
+parliamentary instinct, the Norman barons feared lest a consent to
+this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs
+should be forever burthened with this double service. The shouts grew
+louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no
+man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.</p>
+
+<p>The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of
+a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is
+possible that the duke gained in the end<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6001" id="Page_6001">[Pg 6001]</a></span> by the hazardous experiment
+of his seneschal. It is even possible that the man&#339;uvre may have been
+concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely
+that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree
+to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth
+by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on
+a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the
+seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly,
+in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and
+the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy
+had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one,
+within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign.
+William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on
+minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd,
+could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the
+doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's
+fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from
+time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way
+within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to
+promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill.
+William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the
+formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won
+over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And
+wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should
+draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and
+the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once
+set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up
+in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday
+of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William
+of England in his royal palace at Winchester.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6002" id="Page_6002">[Pg 6002]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FERDINAND_FREILIGRATH" id="FERDINAND_FREILIGRATH"></a>FERDINAND FREILIGRATH</h2>
+
+<h4>(1810-1876)</h4>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capi.png" width="90" height="90" alt="I" title="I" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">n times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from
+their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the
+glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands.
+Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and
+Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of
+the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the
+Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful
+'Gaselen,' R&uuml;ckert sang in Persian measure and translated the Indian
+'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of
+"Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon
+his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant
+climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea),
+written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai'
+(The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der L&ouml;wenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in
+these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to
+which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an
+illustrated Bible in his childhood.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus170.jpg" width="270" height="325" alt="Ferdinand Freiligrath" title="Ferdinand Freiligrath" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Ferdinand Freiligrath</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a
+patriot. The revolution of 1848 had brought fresh breezes into the
+stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again,
+the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams
+that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission,
+and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.</p>
+
+<p>Freiligrath was a schoolmaster's son; he was born at Detmold on June
+17th, 1810, and much against his private inclinations, he was sent in
+his sixteenth year to an uncle in Soest to prepare himself for a
+mercantile career. The death of his father threw him upon his own
+resources, and he took a position in an Amsterdam bank. Here the
+inspiration of the sea widened the range of his poetic fancy. To
+Chamisso is due the credit of introducing the poet to the general
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6003" id="Page_6003">[Pg 6003]</a></span>
+public through the pages of the Musenalmanach. This was in 1835. In
+1838 appeared the first volume of his poems, and it won instant and
+unusual favor; Gutzkow called him the German Hugo. With this
+encouragement Freiligrath definitely abandoned mercantile life. In
+1841 he married. At the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt, the King
+of Prussia granted him a royal pension; and as no conditions were
+attached, it was accepted. This was a bitter disappointment to the
+ardent revolutionary poets, who had counted Freiligrath as one of
+themselves; but the turbulent times which preceded the revolution soon
+forced him into an open declaration of principles, and although he had
+said in one of his poems that the poet was above all party, in 1844,
+influenced by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he resigned his pension,
+announced his position, and in May published a volume of revolutionary
+poems entitled 'Mein Glaubensbekenntniss' (My Confession of Faith).
+This book created the wildest enthusiasm, and placed its author at
+once in the front rank of the people's partisans. He fled to Brussels,
+and in 1846 published under the title of '&Ccedil;a Ira' six new songs, which
+were a trumpet-call to revolution. The poet deemed it prudent to
+retire to London, and he was about to accept an invitation from
+Longfellow to cross the ocean when the revolution broke out, and he
+returned to D&uuml;sseldorf to put himself at the head of the democratic
+party on the Rhine. But he was a poet and not a leader, and he
+indiscreetly exposed himself to arrest by an inflammatory poem, 'Die
+Todten an die Lebenden' (The Dead to the Living). The jury however
+acquitted him, and he at once assumed the management of the New
+Rhenish Gazette at Cologne.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious fact that during this agitated time Freiligrath wrote
+some of his tenderest poetry. In the collection which appeared in 1849
+with the title 'Zwischen den Garben' (Between the Sheaves), was
+included that exquisite hymn to love: 'Oh, Love So Long as Love Thou
+Canst,' perhaps the most perfect of all his lyrical productions, and
+certainly evidence that the poet could touch the strings to deep
+emotions. In the following year both volumes of his 'New Political and
+Social Poems' were ready. Once more he prudently retired to London;
+his fears were confirmed by the immediate confiscation of these new
+volumes, and by the publication of a letter of apprehension. By way of
+reprisal he wrote his poem 'The Revolution,' which was published in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>In 1867 the Swiss bank with which Freiligrath was connected closed its
+London branch, and the poet again faced an uncertain future. His
+friends on the Rhine, hearing of his difficulties, raised a generous
+subscription, and taking advantage of a general amnesty, he returned
+to the fatherland and became associated with the Stuttgart Illustrated
+Magazine. In 1870 appeared a complete collection of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6004" id="Page_6004">[Pg 6004]</a></span>
+poems; in 1876, 'New Poems'; and in the latter year, on March 18th,
+he died at Cannstatt in W&uuml;rtemburg.</p>
+
+<p>The question which Freiligrath asks the emigrants in his early poem of
+that name,&mdash;'O say, why seek ye other lands?'&mdash;was destined to find
+frequent and bitter answer in his own checkered career; but he never
+swerved from the liberal principles which he had publicly announced.
+His political poems were among the most powerful influences of his
+time, and they have a permanent value as the expression of the spirit
+of freedom. His translations are marvels of fidelity and beauty. His
+'Hiawatha' and 'The Ancient Mariner,' together with his versions of
+Victor Hugo, are perhaps the best examples of his surpassing skill.
+His own works have been for the most part excellently translated into
+English. His daughter published during her father's lifetime a volume
+of his poems, in which were collected all the best English
+translations then available. The exotic subjects of his early poems
+make them seem the most original, as for example 'Der Mohrenf&uuml;rst'
+(The Moorish Prince) and 'Der Blumen Rache' (The Revenge of the
+Flowers); the unusual rhymes hold the attention, and the sonorous
+melody of the verse delights the ear: but it is in a few of his superb
+love lyrics that he touches the highest point of his genius, although
+his fame continues to rest upon his impassioned songs of freedom and
+his name to be associated with the rich imagery of the Orient.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_EMIGRANTS" id="THE_EMIGRANTS"></a>THE EMIGRANTS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I cannot take my eyes away<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From you, ye busy, bustling band,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your little all to see you lay<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each in the waiting boatman's hand.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ye men, that from your necks set down<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your heavy baskets on the earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of bread, from German corn baked brown<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By German wives on German hearth,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And you, with braided tresses neat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Black-Forest maidens, slim and brown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How careful on the sloop's green seat<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You set your pails and pitchers down!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah! oft have home's cool shady tanks<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Those pails and pitchers filled for you;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6005" id="Page_6005">[Pg 6005]</a></span><span class="i0">By far Missouri's silent banks<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall these the scenes of home renew,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The stone-rimmed fount in village street<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where oft ye stooped to chat and draw,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hearth, and each familiar seat,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The pictured tiles your childhood saw.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Soon, in the far and wooded West<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall log-house walls therewith be graced;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Soon many a tired tawny guest<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall sweet refreshment from them taste.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From them shall drink the Cherokee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Faint with the hot and dusty chase;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No more from German vintage, ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall bear them home, in leaf-crowned grace.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O say, why seek ye other lands?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The Neckar's vale hath wine and corn;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full of dark firs the Schwarzwald stands;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In Spessart rings the Alp-herd's horn.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah, in strange forests you will yearn<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For the green mountains of your home,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Deutschland's yellow wheat-fields turn,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In spirit o'er her vine-hills roam.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How will the form of days grown pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In golden dreams float softly by,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like some old legendary tale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Before fond memory's moistened eye!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The boatman calls,&mdash;go hence in peace!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">God bless you,&mdash;wife, and child, and sire!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bless all your fields with rich increase,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And crown each faithful heart's desire!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of C.T. Brooks.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6006" id="Page_6006">[Pg 6006]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_LIONS_RIDE" id="THE_LIONS_RIDE"></a>THE LION'S RIDE</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What! wilt thou bind him fast with a chain?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wilt bind the king of the cloudy sands?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Idiot fool! he has burst from thy hands and bands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And speeds like Storm through his far domain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">See! he crouches down in the sedge,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">By the water's edge,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Making the startled sycamore boughs to quiver!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gazelle and giraffe, I think, will shun that river.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not so! The curtain of evening falls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the Caffre, mooring his light canoe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the shore, glides down through the hushed karroo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the watch-fires burn in the Hottentot kraals,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the antelope seeks a bed in the bush<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Till dawn shall blush,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the zebra stretches his limbs by the tinkling fountain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the changeful signals fade from the Table Mountain.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now look through the dusk! What seest thou now?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Seest such a tall giraffe! She stalks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All majesty, through the desert walks,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In search of water to cool her tongue and brow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From tract to tract of the limitless waste<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Behold her haste!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till, bowing her long neck down, she buries her face in<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The reeds, and kneeling, drinks from the river's basin.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But look again! look! see once more<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Those globe-eyes glare! The gigantic reeds<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lie cloven and trampled like puniest weeds,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lion leaps on the drinker's neck with a roar!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, what a racer! Can any behold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">'Mid the housings of gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the stables of kings, dyes half so splendid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As those on the brindled hide of yon wild animal blended?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Greedily fleshes the lion his teeth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the breast of his writhing prey; around<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Her neck his loose brown mane is wound.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6007" id="Page_6007">[Pg 6007]</a></span><span class="i0">Hark, that hollow cry! She springs up from beneath<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And in agony flies over plains and heights.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">See, how she unites,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Even under such monstrous and torturing trammel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the grace of the leopard, the speed of the camel!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She reaches the central moon-lighted plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That spreadeth around all bare and wide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Meanwhile, adown her spotted side<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dusky blood-gouts rush like rain&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And her woeful eyeballs, how they stare<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">On the void of air!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet on she flies&mdash;on, on; for her there is no retreating;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the desert can hear the heart of the doomed one beating!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And lo! A stupendous column of sand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A sand-spout out of that sandy ocean, upcurls<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Behind the pair in eddies and whirls;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Most like some colossal brand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or wandering spirit of wrath<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">On his blasted path,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the dreadful pillar that lighted the warriors and women<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Israel's land through the wilderness of Yemen.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And the vulture, scenting a coming carouse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sails, hoarsely screaming, down the sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The bloody hyena, be sure, is nigh,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fierce pillager, he, of the charnel-house!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The panther, too, who strangles the Cape-Town sheep<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">As they lie asleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Athirst for his share in the slaughter, follows;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While the gore of their victim spreads like a pool in the sandy hollows!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She reels,&mdash;but the king of the brutes bestrides<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His tottering throne to the last: with might<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He plunges his terrible claws in the bright<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And delicate cushions of her sides.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Yet hold!&mdash;fair play!&mdash;she rallies again!<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">In vain, in vain!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her struggles but help to drain her life-blood faster;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She staggers, gasps, and sinks at the feet of her slayer and master!<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6008" id="Page_6008">[Pg 6008]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She staggers, she falls; she shall struggle no more!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The death-rattle slightly convulses her throat;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Mayest look thy last on that mangled coat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Besprent with sand, and foam, and gore!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Adieu! The orient glimmers afar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">And the morning-star<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anon will rise over Madagascar brightly.&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So rides the lion in Afric's deserts nightly.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="REST_IN_THE_BELOVED" id="REST_IN_THE_BELOVED"></a>REST IN THE BELOVED</h3>
+
+<h3>(<span class="smcap">Ruhe in der Geliebten</span>)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>From 'Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and Other German Poets.' Copyright
+1892, by Frances Hellman. Reprinted by permission of G.P. Putnam's
+Sons, publishers, New York.</p></div>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, here forever let me stay, love!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Here let my resting-place e'er be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And both thy tender palms then lay, love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Upon my hot brow soothingly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here at thy feet, before thee kneeling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In heavenly rapture let me rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And close my eyes, bliss o'er me stealing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within thine arms, upon thy breast.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I'll open them but to the glances<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That from thine own in radiance fall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The look that my whole soul entrances,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O thou who art my life, my all!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I'll open them but at the flowing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of burning tears that upward swell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And joyously, without my knowing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From under drooping lashes well.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thus am I meek, and kind, and lowly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And good and gentle evermore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have thee&mdash;now I'm blessed wholly;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I have thee&mdash;now my yearning's o'er.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By thy sweet love intoxicated,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within thine arms I'm lulled to rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And every breath of thine is freighted<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With slumber songs that soothe my breast.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6009" id="Page_6009">[Pg 6009]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A life renewed each seems bestowing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, thus to lie day after day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hearken with a blissful glowing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To what each other's heart-beats say!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lost in our love, entranced, enraptured,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We disappear from time and space;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We rest and dream; our souls lie captured<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Within oblivion's sweet embrace.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="OH_LOVE_SO_LONG_AS_LOVE_THOU_CANST" id="OH_LOVE_SO_LONG_AS_LOVE_THOU_CANST"></a>OH, LOVE SO LONG AS LOVE THOU CANST</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, love so long as love thou canst!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, love so long thy soul have need!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hour will come, the hour will come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And let thy heart forever glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And throb with love, and hold love's heat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So long on earth another heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall echo to its yearning beat.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And who to thee his heart shall show,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh raise it up and make it glad!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh make his every moment blithe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And not a moment make him sad!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Guard well thy tongue; a bitter word<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Soon from the mouth of anger leaps.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O God! it was not meant to wound,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But ah! the other goes and weeps.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, love so long as love thou canst!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, love so long thy soul have need!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hour will come, the hour will come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thou kneelest down upon the grave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And sink'st in agony thine eyes,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They never more the dead shall see,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The silent church-yard hears thy sighs.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thou mourn'st:&mdash;"Oh, look upon this heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That here doth weep upon this mound!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgive me if I caused thee pain,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O God, it was not meant to wound!"<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6010" id="Page_6010">[Pg 6010]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But he, he sees and hears thee not;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He comes not, he can never know:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The mouth that kissed thee once says not,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">"Friend, I forgave thee long ago!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He did forgive thee long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though many a hot tear bitter fell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For thee and for thy angry word;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But still he slumbers soft and well!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, love so long as love thou canst!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, love so long thy soul have need!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hour will come, the hour will come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Dr. Edward Breck.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 622px;">
+<a name="PFreytag" id="PFreytag"></a>
+<img src="images/freytag.jpg" width="622" height="1024" alt="FREYTAG" title="FREYTAG" />
+<span class="caption"><big>FREYTAG</big></span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6011" id="Page_6011">[Pg 6011]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="GUSTAV_FREYTAG" id="GUSTAV_FREYTAG"></a>GUSTAV FREYTAG</h2>
+
+<h4>(1816-1895)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capg.png" width="90" height="88" alt="G" title="G" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">ustav Freytag, one of the foremost of German novelists, was
+born July 13th, 1816, in Kreuzburg, Silesia, where his father
+was a physician. He studied alternately at Breslau and Berlin,
+at which latter university he was given the degree of a doctor
+of philosophy in 1838. In 1839 he settled as a <i>privatdocent</i> at the
+University of Breslau, where he lectured on the German language
+and literature until 1844, when he resigned his position to devote
+himself to literature. He removed to Leipzig in 1846, and the following
+year to Dresden, where he married. In 1848 he returned to
+Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt the weekly journal Die Grenzboten,
+which he conducted until 1861, and again from 1869 to 1870.
+In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt in the North German
+Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the Franco-Prussian war,
+he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince, later the German
+Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until after the battle
+of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work was chiefly
+for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen Reich. In
+1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in Wiesbaden,
+except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate Siebleben
+near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.</p>
+
+<p>All of Freytag's earliest work, with the single exception of a volume
+of poems published in 1845 under the title 'In Breslau,' is dramatic.
+His first production was a comedy, 'Die Brautfahrt' (The
+Wedding Journey), published in 1844, which although it was awarded
+a prize offered by the Royal Theatre in Berlin, found but indifferent
+popular favor, as did its successor, the one-act tragedy 'Die Gelehrte'
+(The Scholar). With his next play, 'Die Valentine' (1846),
+Freytag however was signally successful. This was followed the
+year after by 'Graf Waldemar.' He attained his highest dramatic
+success with the comedy 'Die Journalisten' (The Journalists), which
+appeared in 1853, and since its first production in 1854 has maintained
+its place as one of the most popular plays on the German
+stage. But one other play followed, the tragedy 'Die Fabier' (The
+Fabii), which appeared in 1859.</p>
+
+<p>He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his
+most famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6012" id="Page_6012">[Pg 6012]</a></span>
+published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success.
+The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most
+significant, for it marked at the same time an era both in German
+literature and in its author's own career, in that it introduced into
+the one in its most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of
+modern life in Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other,
+the direction which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement
+has a twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels
+Freytag did his most important and lasting work, but that the whole
+of this work was in a manner the development of a similar tendency.
+Although as different as need be in environment, all of his subsequent
+novels embody inherently the characteristics of 'Debit and Credit,'
+for like it, they are all well-defined attempts to depict the typical
+social conditions of the period in which they move, and their characters
+are the carefully considered types of their time. Freytag,
+with a philosophic seriousness of purpose perhaps characteristically
+German, is writing not only novels but the history of civilization, in
+his early work. Later on, the didactic purpose to a certain extent
+overshadows the rest; and although he never loses his power of telling
+a story, it is the history in the end that is paramount.</p>
+
+<p>'Debit and Credit' is a novel of the century, and it takes up the
+great problem of the century, the position of modern industrialism in
+the social life of the day. Its principal centre of action is the business
+house of the wholesale grocer T.O. Schr&ouml;ter, who is an admirable
+embodiment of the careful, industrious, and successful merchant.
+In sharp contradistinction to him is the Baron von Rothsattel, the
+representative of earlier conditions in the organization of the State,
+which made the nobleman pre-eminently a social force. Freytag's
+polemic is not only the dignity of labor under present conditions,
+but the absolute effeteness of the old order of things that despised
+it. The real hero of the story is Anton Wohlfahrt, who begins his
+commercial career as a youth in the house of T.O. Schr&ouml;ter, and
+ends, after some vicissitudes, as a member of the firm. Mercantile
+life has nowhere been better described in its monotony, its interests,
+and its aspirations, as the story is developed; and although at first
+sight no field could be more barren in literary interest, there is in
+reality no lack of incident and action, whose inevitable sequence makes
+the plot. Anton's career in the house of Schr&ouml;ter is interrupted by
+his connection with the Baron von Rothsattel, who has, through his
+want of a business training and his lack of a knowledge of men,
+fallen into the hands of a Jew money-lender; by whom he is persuaded
+to mortgage his land in order to embark in a business undertaking
+which it is presumed will increase his fortune. His mill fails,
+however, and he is involved in difficulties from which he is unable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6013" id="Page_6013">[Pg 6013]</a></span>
+to extricate himself. Anton, the intimate friend of the family, is
+therefore persuaded by the Baroness to undertake the management
+of matters, and after vainly endeavoring to induce his principal to
+interest himself in the affair, sacrifices his position to accompany the
+family to their dilapidated estate in a distant province. The Baron
+will tolerate no interference, however, and Anton finally returns to
+the house of Schr&ouml;ter and is reinstated in the business. Lenore, the
+Baron's daughter, the first cause of Anton's interest, meantime becomes
+engaged to the young nobleman Fink; who has been an associate of
+Anton's in the office of T. O. Schr&ouml;ter, has but recently returned
+from the United States, and who first advances funds for the improvement
+of the estate and ultimately purchases it.</p>
+
+<p>Fink acts his part in the author's philosophy as a contrast to the
+Baron von Rothsattel. Although a nobleman, he has adapted himself
+to the conditions of the century, and is free from any hallucinations
+of his hereditary rank, even while he is perfectly awake to its traditions.
+He has entered upon a commercial career not from choice, but
+from necessity; but he has accepted his fate and has made successful
+use of his opportunities. Anton marries the sister of T. O. Schr&ouml;ter,
+and becomes a partner in the business. Fink is however really the
+one who gains the princess in this modern tale, and is plainly to
+have the more important share as an actual social force in the future.
+The old feudal nobility has played its part on the stage of the world;
+and being so picturesque, and full of romantic opportunity, its loss
+is doubtless to be regretted. The tamer realities of the modern industrial
+state have succeeded it. As Freytag solves the problem in
+'Soll und Haben,' it is the man who works, the man of the industrial
+classes alone, to whom the victory belongs in the modern social
+struggle, be his antecedents bourgeois or aristocratic.</p>
+
+<p>Freytag's second great novel, 'Die Verlorene Handschrift' (The
+Lost Manuscript), which appeared in 1864, concerns itself with another
+phase of the same problem. This time, however, instead of the merchant
+and man of affairs, it is the scholar about whom the action
+centres. Felix Werner, professor of philology, has come upon unmistakable
+traces of the lost books of Tacitus, whose recovery is the
+object of his life. In his search for the manuscript in an old house
+in the country he finds his future wife Ilse, one of the finest types in
+all German literature of the true German woman, both while at home
+a maid in her father's house and subsequently as the professor's wife
+in the university town. Werner, in his scholarly absorption, unwittingly
+neglects his wife, whose beauty has attracted the attention of
+the prince; and there is a series of intrigues which threaten seriously
+to involve the innocent Ilse, until the prince's evil intentions become
+evident even to the unsuspecting Werner. The covers of the lost
+manuscript are actually discovered at last, but the book itself has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6014" id="Page_6014">[Pg 6014]</a></span>
+vanished. In this second novel Freytag displays a most genial
+humor, unsuspected in the author of 'Debit and Credit,' but apparent
+enough in 'The Journalists.' The professorial life is admirably
+drawn with all its lights and shadows; and its motives and ambitions,
+its peculiar struggles and strivings, have never been more
+understandingly treated. The story, however, even more than 'Debit
+and Credit,' displays the author's weaknesses of construction. The
+plot is so confused by digressions that the main thread is sometimes
+lost sight of, and the tendency to philosophical generalization, which
+as a German is to some extent the author's birthright, reaches in
+these pages an appalling exemplification. What had been an extraordinary
+novel pruned of these defects, is still not an ordinary novel
+with them; and as a picture of German university life from the point
+of view of the professor, 'The Lost Manuscript' stands unrivaled in
+literature. Again the thesis in this second novel is the dignity of
+labor, and the nobleman fares no better at the author's hands than
+in the mercantile environment of the first.</p>
+
+<p>These two novels, which outside of Germany are Freytag's best
+claim to attention, were followed by the four volumes of 'Bilder aus
+der Deutschen Vergangenheit' (Pictures from the German Past: 1859-62),
+a series of studies of German life from different epochs of its
+history, intended to illustrate the evolution of modern conditions
+through their successive stages from the remote past. Freytag's early
+work as a university <i>docent</i> had particularly fitted him for this sort of
+writing, and some of his best is contained in these books.</p>
+
+<p>More important still, however, was his next great work, the long
+series of historical novels 'Die Ahnen' (The Ancestors: 1872-80), an
+ambitious plan, born of the stirring events of the Franco-Prussian War
+and the resultant awakening of the new spirit of nationality, to trace
+the development of the German people from the earliest time down to
+the present day. To carry out this purpose he accordingly selects a
+typical German family, which he describes under the characteristic
+conditions of each period, with the most conscientious attention to
+manners and customs and social environment. The same family thus
+appears from generation to generation under the changing conditions of
+the different epochs of German history, and the whole forms together
+the consecutive <i>Culturgeschichte</i> of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>This whole long series of 'The Ancestors' stands as a monument
+of careful research into the most minute factors of German life in
+their time of action. Freytag's antiquarianism is not of the dilettante
+kind that is content to masquerade modern motives in ancient
+garb and setting. He was fully conscious of all the elements of his
+problem, and he sought to reproduce the intellectual point of view
+of his actors, and to account for their motives of action, as well
+as to picture accurately their material environment. It is in his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6015" id="Page_6015">[Pg 6015]</a></span>
+super-conscientiousness in these directions that the inherent weakness
+of the novels of this series lies. They are too palpably reconstructions
+with a purpose. Their didacticism is wrapped around them like a
+garment; and much of the time, that is all that is visible upon the
+surface. As the series advances this fault grows upon them. They
+are in reality of very unequal interest. 'Ingo' and 'Ingraban' are
+the sprightliest in action, and have been as a consequence the
+most widely read of these later works, many of which are, in part at
+least, far too serious of purpose to play their part conspicuously well
+as novels.</p>
+
+<p>The novels of 'The Ancestors' are a culmination of Freytag's
+literary evolution. As a playwright he will no doubt be forgotten except
+for 'The Journalists'; in which he has, however, left an imperishable
+play which German critics have not hesitated to call the best
+comedy of the century. The two novels of modern life from his
+middle period form together his greatest work, although here, and
+particularly in 'The Lost Manuscript,' he has overweighted his material
+with abstract discussion, in which his perspective has sometimes
+all but disappeared. Subsequently, both the 'Bilder' and 'Die
+Ahnen' show his decided predilection for historical studies. The
+struggle in his own case was between the scholar and the man of
+letters, in which the scholar eventually won possession of the field.</p>
+
+<p>Freytag's other work includes&mdash;'Die Technik des Dramas' (The
+Technique of the Drama: 1863), a consideration of the principles of
+dramatic construction; the life of his friend Karl Malthy, 1870; and
+'Der Kronprinz und die Deutsche Kaiserkrone' (The Crown Prince and
+the German Imperial Crown: 1889), written after the death of Frederick
+III., with whom Freytag had had personal relations. To accompany
+the collected edition of his works (1887-88), he wrote a short
+autobiography, 'Erinnerungen aus Meinem Leben' (Recollections from
+My Life).</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_GERMAN_PROFESSOR" id="THE_GERMAN_PROFESSOR"></a>THE GERMAN PROFESSOR</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Lost Manuscript'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Professors' wives also have trouble with their husbands. Sometimes
+when Ilse was seated in company with her intimate friends&mdash;with Madame
+Raschke, Madame Struvelius, or little Madame G&uuml;nther&mdash;at one of those
+confidential coffee parties which they did not altogether despise,
+many things would come to light.</p>
+
+<p>The conversation with these intellectual women was certainly very
+interesting. It is true the talk sometimes passed lightly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6016" id="Page_6016">[Pg 6016]</a></span> over the
+heads of the servants, and sometimes housekeeping troubles ventured
+out of the pond of pleasant talk like croaking frogs. To Ilse's
+surprise, she found that even Flaminia Struvelius could discourse
+seriously about preserving little gherkins, and that she sought
+closely for the marks of youth in a plucked goose. The merry Madame
+G&uuml;nther aroused horror and laughter in more experienced married women,
+when she asserted that she could not endure the crying of little
+children, and that from the very first she would force her child
+(which she had not yet got) to proper silence by chastisement. Thus
+conversation sometimes left greater subjects to stray into this
+domain. And when unimportant subjects were reviewed, it naturally came
+about that the men were honored by a quiet discussion. At such times
+it was evident that although the subject under consideration was men
+in general, each of the wives was thinking of her own husband, and
+that each silently carried about a secret bundle of cares, and
+justified the conclusion of her hearers that that husband too must be
+difficult to manage.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Raschke's troubles could not be concealed; the whole town knew
+them. It was notorious that one market day her husband had gone to the
+university in his dressing-gown&mdash;in a brilliant dressing-gown, blue
+and orange, with a Turkish pattern. His students, who loved him dearly
+and were well aware of his habits, could not succeed in suppressing a
+loud laugh; and Raschke had calmly hung the dressing-gown over his
+pulpit, held his lecture in his shirt-sleeves, and returned home in
+one of the students' overcoats. Since that time Madame Raschke never
+let her husband go out without herself inspecting him. It also
+appeared that all these ten years he had not been able to learn his
+way about the town, and she dared not change her residence, because
+she was quite sure that her professor would never remember it, and
+always return to his old home. Struvelius also occasioned much
+anxiety. Ilse knew about the last and greatest cause; but it also came
+to light that he expected his wife to read Latin proof-sheets, as she
+knew something of that language. Besides, he was quite incapable of
+refusing commissions to amiable wine merchants. At her marriage Madame
+Struvelius had found a whole cellar full of large and small wine
+casks, none of which had been drawn off, while he complained bitterly
+that no wine was ever brought into his cellar. Even little Madame
+G&uuml;nther related that her husband could not give up night work;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6017" id="Page_6017">[Pg 6017]</a></span> and
+that once, when he wandered with a lamp among his books, he came too
+near the curtain, which caught fire. He tore it off, and in so doing
+burnt his hands, and burst into the bedroom with blackened fingers in
+great alarm, and resembling Othello more than a mineralogist....</p>
+
+<p>Raschke was wandering about in the ante-room. Here too was confusion.
+Gabriel had not yet returned from his distant errand; the cook had
+left the remains of the meal standing on a side-table till his return;
+and Raschke had to find his greatcoat by himself. He rummaged among
+the clothes, and seized hold of a coat and a hat. As he was not so
+absent-minded as usual to-day, a glance at the despised supper
+reminded him just in time that he was to eat a fowl; so he seized hold
+of the newspaper which Gabriel had laid ready for his master, hastily
+took one of the chickens out of the dish, wrapped it in the journal,
+and thrust it in his pocket, agreeably surprised at the depth and
+capaciousness it revealed. Then he rushed past the astonished cook,
+and out of the house. When he opened the door of the <i>&eacute;tage</i> he
+stumbled against something that was crouching on the threshold. He
+heard a horrible growling behind him, and stormed down the stairs and
+out of doors.</p>
+
+<p>The words of the friend whom he had left now came into his mind.
+Werner's whole bearing was very characteristic; and there was
+something fine about it. It was strange that in a moment of anger
+Werner's face had acquired a sudden resemblance to a bull-dog's. Here
+the direct chain of the philosopher's contemplations was crossed by
+the remembrance of the conversation on animals' souls.</p>
+
+<p>"It is really a pity that it is still so difficult to determine an
+animal's expression of soul. If we could succeed in that, science
+would gain. For if we could compare in all their minuti&aelig; the
+expression and gestures of human beings and higher animals, we might
+make most interesting deductions from their common peculiarities and
+their particular differences. In this way the natural origin of their
+dramatic movements, and perhaps some new laws, would be discovered."</p>
+
+<p>While the philosopher was pondering thus, he felt a continued pulling
+at his coat-tails. As his wife was in the habit of giving him a gentle
+pull when he was walking next her absorbed in thought and they met
+some acquaintance, he took no further notice of it, but took off his
+hat, and bowing politely towards the railing of the bridge, said
+"Good-evening."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6018" id="Page_6018">[Pg 6018]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"These common and original elements in the mimic expression of human
+beings and higher animals might, if rightly understood, even open out
+new vistas into the great mystery of life." Another pull. Raschke
+mechanically took off his hat. Another pull. "Thank you, dear Aurelia,
+I did bow." As he spoke, the thought crossed his mind that his wife
+would not pull at his coat so low down. It was not she, but his little
+daughter Bertha who was pulling; for she often walked gravely next
+him, and like her mother, pulled at the bell for bows. "That will do,
+my dear," said he, as Bertha continued to snatch and pull at his
+coat-tails. "Come here, you little rogue!" and he absently put his
+hand behind him to seize the little tease. He seized hold of something
+round and shaggy; he felt sharp teeth on his fingers, and turned with
+a start. There he saw in the lamplight a reddish monster with a big
+head, shaggy hair, and a little tassel that fell back into its hind
+legs in lieu of a tail. His wife and daughter were horribly
+transformed; and he gazed in surprise on this indistinct creature
+which seated itself before him, and glared at him in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"A strange adventure!" exclaimed Raschke. "What are you, unknown
+creature? Presumably a dog. Away with you!" The animal retreated a few
+steps. Raschke continued his meditations: "If we trace back the
+expression and gestures of the affections to their original forms in
+this manner, one of the most active laws would certainly prove to be
+the endeavor to attract or repel the extraneous. It would be
+instructive to distinguish, by means of these involuntary movements of
+men and animals, what is essential and what conventional. Away, dog!
+Do me a favor and go home. What does he want with me? Evidently he
+belongs to Werner's domain. The poor creature will assuredly lose
+itself in the town under the dominion of an <i>id&eacute;e fixe</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Meantime Speihahn's attacks were becoming more violent; and now he was
+marching in a quite unnatural and purely conventional manner on his
+hind legs, while his fore paws were leaning against the professor's
+back, and his teeth were actually biting into the coat.</p>
+
+<p>A belated shoemaker's boy stood still and beat his leathern apron. "Is
+not the master ashamed to let his poor apprentice push him along like
+that?" In truth, the dog behind the man looked like a dwarf pushing a
+giant along the ice.</p>
+
+<p>Raschke's interest in the dog's thoughts increased. He stood still
+near a lantern, examined and felt his coat. This coat had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6019" id="Page_6019">[Pg 6019]</a></span> developed a
+velvet collar and very long sleeves, advantages that the philosopher
+had never yet remarked in his greatcoat. Now the matter became clear
+to him: absorbed in thought, he had chosen a wrong coat, and the
+worthy dog insisted on saving his master's garment, and making the
+thief aware that there was something wrong. Raschke was so pleased
+with this sagacity that he turned round, addressed some kind words to
+Speihahn, and made an attempt to stroke his shaggy hair. The dog again
+snapped at his hand. "You are quite right to be angry with me,"
+replied Raschke; "I will prove to you that I acknowledge my fault." He
+took off the coat and hung it over his arm. "Yes, it is much heavier
+than my own." He walked on cheerfully in his thin coat, and observed
+with satisfaction that the dog abandoned the attacks on his back. But
+instead, Speihahn sprang upon his side, and again bit at the coat and
+the hand, and growled unpleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>The professor got angry with the dog, and when he came to a bench on
+the promenade he laid down the coat, intending to face the dog
+seriously and drive him home. In this manner he got rid of the dog,
+but also of the coat. For Speihahn sprang upon the bench with a mighty
+bound, placed himself astride the coat, and met the professor, who
+tried to drive him away, with hideous growling and snarling.</p>
+
+<p>"It is Werner's coat," said the professor, "and it is Werner's dog: it
+would be wrong to beat the poor creature because it is becoming
+violent in its fidelity, and it would be wrong to leave the dog and
+the coat." So he remained standing before the dog and speaking kindly
+to him: but Speihahn no longer took any notice of the professor; he
+turned against the coat itself, which he scratched, rummaged, and bit.
+Raschke saw that the coat could not long endure such rage. "He is
+frantic or mad," said he suspiciously. "I shall have to use force
+against you after all, poor creature;" and he considered whether he
+should also jump upon the seat and push the mad creature by a violent
+kick into the water, or whether it would be better to open the
+inevitable attack from below. He resolved on the latter course, and
+looked round to see whether he could anywhere discover a stone or
+stick to throw at the raging beast. As he looked, he observed the
+trees and the dark sky above him, and the place seemed quite
+unfamiliar. "Has magic been at work here?" he exclaimed, with
+amusement. He turned politely to a solitary wanderer who was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6020" id="Page_6020">[Pg 6020]</a></span>
+passing that way: "Would you kindly tell me in what part of the town we are?
+And could you perhaps lend me your stick for a moment?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed," angrily replied the person addressed, "those are very
+suspicious questions. I want my stick myself at night. Who are you,
+sir?" The stranger approached the professor menacingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I am peaceable," replied Raschke, "and by no means inclined to
+violent attacks. A quarrel has arisen between me and the animal on
+this seat for the possession of a coat, and I should be much obliged
+to you if you would drive the dog away from the coat. But I beg you
+not to hurt the animal any more than is absolutely necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that your coat there?" asked the man.</p>
+
+<p>"Unfortunately I cannot give you an affirmative answer," replied
+Raschke conscientiously.</p>
+
+<p>"There must be something wrong here," exclaimed the stranger, again
+eyeing the professor suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>"There is, indeed," replied Raschke. "The dog is out of his mind; the
+coat is exchanged, and I do not know where we are."</p>
+
+<p>"Close to the valley gate, Professor Raschke," answered the voice of
+Gabriel, who hastily joined the group. "Excuse me, but what brings you
+here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Capital!" exclaimed Raschke joyously. "Pray take charge of this coat
+and this dog."</p>
+
+<p>Gabriel gazed in amazement at Speihahn, who was now lying on the coat
+and bending his head before his friend. Gabriel threw down the dog and
+seized the coat. "Why, that is our greatcoat!" exclaimed he.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Gabriel," said the professor, "that was my mistake, and the dog
+has shown marvelous fidelity to the coat."</p>
+
+<p>"Fidelity!" exclaimed Gabriel indignantly, as he drew a parcel out of
+the coat pocket. "It was greedy selfishness, sir; there must be some
+food in this pocket."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, true," exclaimed Raschke; "it is all the chicken's fault. Give
+me the parcel, Gabriel; I must eat the fowl myself; and we might bid
+each other good-night now with mutual satisfaction, if you would just
+show me my way a little among these trees."</p>
+
+<p>"But you must not go home in the night air without an overcoat,"
+said Gabriel considerately. "We are not far from our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6021" id="Page_6021">[Pg 6021]</a></span> house; the best
+way would really be for you to come back with me, sir."</p>
+
+<p>Raschke considered and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right, Gabriel; my departure was awkward; and to-day an
+animal's soul has restored a man's soul to order."</p>
+
+<p>"If you mean this dog," said Gabriel, "it would be the first time he
+ever did anything good. I see he must have followed you from our door;
+for I put little bones there for him of an evening."</p>
+
+<p>"Just now he seemed not to be quite in his right mind," said the
+professor.</p>
+
+<p>"He is cunning enough when he pleases," continued Gabriel
+mysteriously; "but if I were to speak of my experiences with this
+dog&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do speak, Gabriel," eagerly exclaimed the philosopher. "There is
+nothing so valuable concerning animals as a truthful statement from
+those who have carefully observed them."</p>
+
+<p>"I may say that I have done so," confirmed Gabriel, with satisfaction;
+"and if you want to know exactly what he is, I can assure you that he
+is possessed of the devil, he is a thief, he is embittered, and he
+hates all mankind."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, indeed!" replied the professor, somewhat disconcerted. "I see it
+is much more difficult to look into a dog's heart than into a
+professor's."</p>
+
+<p>Speihahn crept along silent and suppressed, and listened to the
+praises that fell to his lot; while Professor Raschke, conducted by
+Gabriel, returned to the house by the park. Gabriel opened the
+sitting-room door, and announced:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Professor Raschke."</p>
+
+<p>Ilse extended both her hands to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Welcome, welcome, dear Professor Raschke!" and led him to her
+husband's study.</p>
+
+<p>"Here I am again," said Raschke cheerfully, "after wandering as in a
+fairy tale. What has brought me back were two animals, who showed me
+the right way,&mdash;a roast fowl and an embittered dog."</p>
+
+<p>Felix sprang up; the men greeted one another warmly, shaking hands,
+and after all misadventures, spent a happy evening.</p>
+
+<p>When Raschke had gone home late, Gabriel said sadly to his mistress,
+"This was the new coat; the fowl and the dog have put it in a horrible
+plight."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6022" id="Page_6022">[Pg 6022]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FRIEDRICH_FROEBEL" id="FRIEDRICH_FROEBEL"></a>FRIEDRICH FROEBEL</h2>
+
+<h4>(1782-1852)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capi.png" width="90" height="90" alt="I" title="I" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">t was Froebel who said, "The clearer the thread that runs through our
+lives backward to our childhood, the clearer will be our onward glance
+to the goal;" and in the fragment of autobiography he has left us, he
+illustrates forcibly the truth of his own saying. The motherless baby
+who plays alone in the village pastor's quiet house, the dreamy child
+who wanders solitary in the high-walled garden; the thoughtful lad,
+neglected, misunderstood, who forgets the harsh realities of life in
+pondering the mysteries of the flowers, the contradictions of
+existence, and the dogmas of orthodox theology; who decides in early
+boyhood that the pleasures of the senses are without enduring
+influence and therefore on no account to be eagerly pursued;&mdash;these
+presentments of himself, which he summons up for us from the past,
+show the vividness of his early recollections and indicate the course
+which the stream of his life is to run.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus192.jpg" width="270" height="323" alt="Friedrich Froebel" title="Friedrich Froebel" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Friedrich Froebel</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The coldness and injustice of the new mother who assumed control of
+the household when he was four years old, his isolation from other
+children, the merely casual notice he received from the busy father
+absorbed in his parish work, all tended to turn inward the tide of his
+mental and spiritual life. He studied himself, not only because it was
+the bent of his nature, but because he lacked outside objects of
+interest; and to this early habit of introspection we owe many of the
+valuable features of his educational philosophy. Whoever has learned
+thoroughly to understand one child, has conquered a spot of firm
+ground on which to rest while he studies the world of children; and
+because the great teacher realized this truth, because he longed to
+give to others the means of development denied to himself, he turns
+for us the heart-leaves of his boyhood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6023" id="Page_6023">[Pg 6023]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It would appear that Froebel's characteristics were strongly marked
+and unusual from the beginning. Called by every one "a moon-struck
+child" in Oberweissbach, the village of his birth, he was just as
+unanimously considered "an old fool" when, crowned with the experience
+of seventy years, he played with the village children on the green
+hills of Thuringia. The intensity of his inward life, the white heat
+of his convictions, his absolute blindness to any selfish idea or aim,
+his enthusiasm, the exaltation of his spiritual nature, all furnish so
+many cogent reasons why the people of any day or of any community
+should have failed to understand him, and scorned what they could not
+comprehend. It is the old story of the seers and the prophets repeated
+as many times as they appear; for "these colossal souls," as Emerson
+said, "require a long focal distance to be seen."</p>
+
+<p>At ten years old the sensitive boy was fortunately removed from the
+uncongenial atmosphere of the parental household; and in his uncle's
+home he spent five free and happy years, being apprenticed at the end
+of this time to a forester in his native Thuringian woods. Then
+followed a year's course in the University of Jena, and four years
+spent in the study of farming, in clerical work of various kinds, and
+in land-surveying. All these employments, however, Froebel himself
+felt to be merely provisional; for like the hazel wand in the
+diviner's hand, his instinct was blindly seeking through these
+restless years the well-spring of his life.</p>
+
+<p>In Frankfort, where he had gone intending to study architecture,
+Destiny touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and knew her.
+Through a curious combination of circumstances he gained employment in
+Herr Gruner's Model School, and it was found at once that he was what
+the Germans love to call "a teacher by the grace of God." The first
+time he met his class of boys he tells us that he felt inexpressibly
+happy; the hazel wand had found the waters and was fixed at last. From
+this time on, all the events of his life were connected with his
+experience as a teacher. Impelled as soon as he had begun his work by
+a desire for more effective methods, he visited Yverdon, then the
+centre of educational thought, and studied with Pestalozzi. He went
+again in 1808, accompanied by three pupils, and spent two years there,
+alternately studying and teaching.</p>
+
+<p>There was a year of lectures at G&ouml;ttingen after this, and one at the
+University of Berlin, accompanied by unceasing study and research both
+in literary and scientific lines; but in the fateful year 1813 this
+quiet student life was broken in upon, for impelled by strong moral
+conviction, Froebel joined Baron von L&uuml;tzow's famous volunteer corps,
+formed to harass the French by constant skirmishes and to encourage
+the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6024" id="Page_6024">[Pg 6024]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of
+the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing
+arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he
+had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils
+to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and
+unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and
+contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon
+the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became
+master of his fate.</p>
+
+<p>After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in
+the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being
+the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus
+by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so
+perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so
+complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look
+into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly
+the purpose it was intended to work out.</p>
+
+<p>In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of
+his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life
+work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a
+"Universal German Educational Institute." He was without money, of
+course, as he had always been and always would be,&mdash;his hands were
+made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of
+straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward
+things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the
+spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The
+school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later
+established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all
+were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to
+say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.</p>
+
+<p>Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in
+lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction
+with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for
+the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until
+1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a "definite truth." This definite
+truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten;
+and from this time until the end, all other work was laid aside, and
+his entire strength given to the consummate flower of his educational
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>The first kindergarten was opened in 1837 at Blankenburg (where a
+memorial school is now conducted), and in 1850 the institution at
+Marienthal for the training of kindergartners was founded, Froebel
+remaining at its head until his death two years after.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6025" id="Page_6025">[Pg 6025]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With the exception of that remarkable book 'The Education of Man'
+(1826), his most important literary work was done after 1836;
+'Pedagogics of the Kindergarten,' the first great European
+contribution to the subject of child-study, appearing from 1837 to
+1840 in the form of separate essays, and the 'Mutter-und-Kose Lieder'
+(Mother-Play) in 1843. Many of his educational aphorisms and
+occasional speeches were preserved by his great disciple the Baroness
+von Marenholtz-B&uuml;low in her 'Reminiscences of Froebel'; and though two
+most interesting volumes of his correspondence have been published,
+there remain a number of letters, as well as essays and educational
+sketches, not yet rendered into English.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel's literary style is often stiff and involved, its phrases
+somewhat labored, and its substance exceedingly difficult to translate
+with spirit and fidelity; yet after all, his mannerisms are of a kind
+to which one easily becomes accustomed, and the kernel of his thought
+when reached is found well worth the trouble of removing a layer of
+husk. He had always an infinitude of things to say, and they were all
+things of purpose and of meaning; but in writing, as well as in formal
+speaking, the language to clothe the thought came to him slowly and
+with difficulty. Yet it appears that in friendly private intercourse
+he spoke fluently, and one of his students reports that in his classes
+he was often "overpowering and sublime, the stream of his words
+pouring forth like fiery rain."</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that in daily life Froebel was not always an agreeable
+house-mate; for he was a genius, a reformer, and an unworldly
+enthusiast, believing in himself and in his mission with all the ardor
+of a heart centred in one fixed purpose. He was quite intolerant of
+those who doubted or disbelieved in his theories, as well as of those
+who, believing, did not carry their faith into works. The people who
+stood nearest him and devoted themselves to the furthering of his
+ideas slept on no bed of roses, certainly; but although he sometimes
+sacrificed their private interests to his cause, it must not be
+forgotten that he first laid himself and all that he had upon the same
+altar. His nature was one that naturally inspired reverence and
+loyalty, and drew from his associates the most extraordinary devotion
+and self-sacrifice. Then, as now, women were peculiarly attracted by
+his burning enthusiasm, his prophetic utterances, and his lofty views
+of their sex and its mission; and then, as now, the almost fanatical
+zeal of his followers is perhaps to be explained by the fact that he
+gives a new world-view to his students,&mdash;one that produces much the
+same effect upon the character as the spiritual exaltation called
+"experiencing religion."</p>
+
+<p>He was twice married, in each case to a superior woman of great gifts
+of mind and character, and both helpmates joyfully took up a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6026" id="Page_6026">[Pg 6026]</a></span>life of
+privation and care that they might be associated with him and with his
+work. Those memorable words spoken of our Washington,&mdash;"Heaven left
+him childless that a nation might call him father," are even more
+applicable to Froebel, for his wise and tender fatherhood extends to
+all the children of the world. When he passed through the village
+streets of his own country, little ones came running from every
+doorstep; the babies clinging to his knees and the older ones hanging
+about his neck and refusing to leave the dear play-master, as they
+called him. So the kindergartners love to think of him to-day,&mdash;the
+tall spare figure, the long hair, the wise, plain, strong-featured
+face, the shining eyes, and the little ones clustering about him as
+they clustered about another Teacher in Galilee, centuries ago.</p>
+
+<p>Froebel's educational creed cannot here be cited at length, but some
+of its fundamental articles are:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The education of the child should begin with its birth, and should be
+threefold, addressing the mental, spiritual, and physical natures.</p>
+
+<p>It should be continued as it has begun, by appealing to the heart and
+the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.</p>
+
+<p>There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous
+purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten
+to university.</p>
+
+<p>Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a
+free, spontaneous growth,&mdash;a development from within, never a
+prescription from without.</p>
+
+<p>The training of the child should be conducted by means of the
+activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common
+heritage of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life
+thrills through every manifestation of the universe, and that he is a
+part of all that is.</p>
+
+<p>The object of education is the development of the human being in the
+totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a
+child of God.</p>
+
+<p>These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own
+mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has
+but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they
+have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work
+greater magic in the future. The great teacher's place in history may
+be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he
+gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of
+child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful
+one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6027" id="Page_6027">[Pg 6027]</a></span>death-blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens
+in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His
+strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing
+misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne
+to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to
+symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of
+the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of
+mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.</p>
+
+<p>In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens,
+his best memorials, cluster thickly now; and on the face of the cliffs
+that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner mountain may be seen
+in great letters the single word <i>Froebel</i>, hewn deep into the solid
+rock.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/sign197.png" width="500" height="100" alt="Nora Archibald Smith" title="Nora Archibald Smith" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_RIGHT_OF_THE_CHILD" id="THE_RIGHT_OF_THE_CHILD"></a>THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>From 'Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel,' by Baroness B. von
+Marenholtz-B&uuml;low. Copyright 1877, by Mary Mann. Reprinted by
+permission of Lee &amp; Shepard, publishers, Boston.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>All that does not grow out of one's inner being, all that is not one's
+own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken
+that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of
+calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we
+never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to
+overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of
+letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of
+life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear
+the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?...</p>
+
+<p>This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of
+human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the
+child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of
+self-seeking <i>egoism</i> is the most important task of education; for
+selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the
+life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education
+is to teach to love, to break up the egoism<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6028" id="Page_6028">[Pg 6028]</a></span> of the individual, and to
+lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all
+the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the
+highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity....</p>
+
+<p>Women are to recognize that childhood and womanliness (the care of
+childhood and the life of women) are inseparably connected; that they
+form a unit; and that God and nature have placed the protection of the
+human plant in their hands. Hitherto the female sex could take only a
+more or less passive part in human history, because great battles and
+the political organization of nations were not suited to their powers.
+But at the present stage of culture, nothing is more pressingly
+required than the cultivation of every human power for the arts of
+peace and the work of higher civilization. The culture of individuals,
+and therefore of the whole nation, depends in great part upon the
+earliest care of childhood. On that account women, as one half of
+mankind, have to undertake the most important part of the problems of
+the time, problems that men are not able to solve. If but one half of
+the work be accomplished, then our epoch, like all others, will fail
+to reach the appointed goal. As educators of mankind, the women of the
+present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they
+have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings....</p>
+
+<p>But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier
+generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom
+and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time.
+I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may
+grow of itself, out of its own individuality. But where shall I find
+allies and helpers if not in women, who as mothers and teachers may
+put my idea in execution? Only intellectually active women can and
+will do it. But if these are to be loaded with the ballast of dead
+knowledge that can take no root in the unprepared ground, if the
+fountains of their own original life are to be choked up with it, they
+will not follow my direction nor understand the call of the time for
+the new task of their sex, but will seek satisfaction in empty
+superficiality.</p>
+
+<p>To learn to comprehend nature in the child,&mdash;is not that to comprehend
+one's own nature and the nature of mankind? And in this comprehension
+is there not involved a certain degree of comprehension of all things
+else? Women cannot learn and take into themselves anything higher and
+more comprehensive.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6029" id="Page_6029">[Pg 6029]</a></span> It should therefore at least be the beginning,
+and the love of childhood should be awakened in the mind (and in a
+wider sense, this is the love of humanity), so that a new, free
+generation of men can grow up by right care.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="EVOLUTION" id="EVOLUTION"></a>EVOLUTION</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother-Play.' Copyright 1895, by
+D. Appleton &amp; Co.</h4>
+
+
+<p>What shall we learn from our yearning look into the heart of the
+flower and the eye of the child? This truth: Whatever develops, be it
+into flower or tree or man, is from the beginning implicitly that
+which it has the power to become. The possibility of perfect manhood
+is what you read in your child's eye, just as the perfect flower is
+prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A
+presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams,
+stirs in your unconscious infant&mdash;this it is, O mother, which
+transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself
+what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely,
+as <i>your</i> child&mdash;or in other words, as child of man&mdash;he is destined to
+live in the past and future as well as in the present. His earthly
+being implies a past heaven; his birth makes a present heaven; in his
+soul he holds a future heaven. This threefold heaven, which you also
+bear within you, shines out on you through your child's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The beast lives only in the present. Of past and future he knows
+naught. But to man belong not only the present, but also the future
+and the past. His thought pierces the heaven of the future, and hope
+is born. He learns that all human life is one life; that all human
+joys and sorrows are his joys and sorrows, and through participation
+enters the present heaven&mdash;the heaven of love. He turns his mind
+towards the past, and out of retrospection wrests a vigorous faith.
+What soul could fail to conquer an invincible trust in the pure, the
+good, the holy, the ideally human, the truly Divine, if it would look
+with single eye into its own past, into the past of history? Could
+there be a man in whose soul such a contemplation of the past would
+fail to blossom into devout insight, into self-conscious and
+self-comprehending faith? Must not such a retrospect unveil the truth?
+Must not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6030" id="Page_6030">[Pg 6030]</a></span> the beauty of the unveiled truth allure him to Divine doing,
+Divine living? All that is high and holy in human life meets in that
+faith which is born of the unveiling of a heaven that has always been;
+in that hope born of a vision of the heaven that shall be; in that
+love which creates a heaven in the eternal Now. These three heavens
+shine out upon you through your child's eye. The presentiment that he
+carries these three heavens within him transfigures your countenance
+as you gaze upon him. Cherish this premonition, for thereby you will
+help him to make his life a musical chord wherein are blended the
+three notes of faith, hope, and love. These celestial virtues will
+link his life with the Divine life through which all life is one&mdash;with
+the God who is the supernal fountain of life, light, and love....</p>
+
+<p>Higher and more important than the cultivation of man's outer ear, is
+the culture of that inner sense of harmony whereby the soul learns to
+perceive sweet accord in soundless things, and to discern within
+itself harmonies and discords. The importance of wakening the inner
+ear to this music of the soul can scarcely be exaggerated. Learning to
+hear it within, the child will strive to give it outer form and
+expression; and even if in such effort he is only partially
+successful, he will gain thereby the power to appreciate the more
+successful effort of others. Thus enriching his own life by the life
+of others, he solves the problem of development. How else were it
+possible within the quickly fleeting hours of mortal life to develop
+our being in all directions, to fathom its depths, scale its heights,
+measure its boundaries? What we are, what we would be, we must learn
+to recognize in the mirror of all other lives. By the effort of each,
+and the recognition of all, the Divine man is revealed in humanity....</p>
+
+<p>Against the bright light which shines on the smooth white wall is
+thrust a dark object, and straightway appears the form which so
+delights the child. This is the outward fact; what is the truth which
+through this fact is dimly hinted to the prophetic mind? Is it not the
+creative and transforming power of light, that power which brings form
+and color out of chaos, and makes the beauty which gladdens our
+hearts? Is it not more than this,&mdash;a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the
+spiritual fact that our darkest experiences may project themselves in
+forms that will delight and bless, if in our hearts shines the light
+of God? The sternest crags, the most forbidding chasms, are beautiful
+in the mellow sunshine; while the fairest landscape loses all charm,
+and indeed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6031" id="Page_6031">[Pg 6031]</a></span> ceases to be, when the light which created it is
+withdrawn. Is it not thus also with our lives? Yesterday, touched by
+the light of enthusiastic emotion, all our relationships seemed
+beautiful and blessed; to-day, when the glow of enthusiasm has faded,
+they oppress and repulse us. Only the conviction that it is the
+darkness within us which makes the darkness without, can restore the
+lost peace of our souls. Be it therefore, O mother, your sacred duty
+to make your darling early feel the working both of the outer and
+inner light. Let him see in one the symbol of the other, and tracing
+light and color to their source in the sun, may he learn to trace the
+beauty and meaning of his life to their source in God.</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Susan E. Blow.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_LAWS_OF_THE_MIND" id="THE_LAWS_OF_THE_MIND"></a>THE LAWS OF THE MIND</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Letters of Froebel'</h4>
+
+
+<p>I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child-world,
+those which delight us as well as those which grieve us,
+depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the cosmos,
+the planetary system, and the operations of nature; and it is
+therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When
+once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able
+powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies in
+the children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is
+good and virtuous.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FOR_THE_CHILDREN" id="FOR_THE_CHILDREN"></a>FOR THE CHILDREN</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Letters of Froebel'</h4>
+
+
+<p>I wish you could have been here this evening, and seen the many
+beautiful and varied forms and lovely patterns which freely and
+spontaneously developed themselves from some systematic variations of
+a simple ground form, in stick-playing. No one would believe, without
+seeing it, how the child soul, the child life, develops when treated
+as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected
+life of the world, by some skilled kindergarten teacher&mdash;nay, even by
+one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it
+blooms into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6032" id="Page_6032">[Pg 6032]</a></span> delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh,
+if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth
+that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a
+hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what a
+soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what
+dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what
+calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children!</p>
+
+<p>How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be
+so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their
+children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has
+passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for
+educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay,
+and showed how it could be satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped
+lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and
+cry aloud to all men:&mdash;"Set to work at once for your children's sake
+on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose,
+and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A
+Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it
+their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly
+corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say
+I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so
+silly as I,&mdash;amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a
+right to enjoy life,&mdash;I who perpetually call to these parents in tones
+of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children!'" (Kommt,
+laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!)</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="MOTIVES" id="MOTIVES"></a>MOTIVES</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Education of Man.' By permission of Josephine Jarvis,
+the translator, and A. Lovell &amp; Co., publishers</h4>
+
+
+<p>Only in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure,
+spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in
+the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge
+and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do
+we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning
+of our whole being is thereby satisfied,&mdash;at least receives its whole
+meaning, and is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6033" id="Page_6033">[Pg 6033]</a></span> changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an
+immediately rewarded effort....</p>
+
+<p>How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how
+we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an
+inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in
+another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the
+most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the
+inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure
+humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature.</p>
+
+<p>But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in
+boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on
+his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner,
+spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied
+condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this
+observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of
+man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes
+into his life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="APHORISMS" id="APHORISMS"></a>APHORISMS</h3>
+
+
+<p>I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.</p>
+
+<p>The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.</p>
+
+<p>Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.</p>
+
+<p>From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.</p>
+
+<p>Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.</p>
+
+<p>The first groundwork of religious life is love&mdash;love to God and
+man&mdash;in the bosom of the family.</p>
+
+<p>Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man
+and of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.</p>
+
+<p>Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no
+union with God is possible for men.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6034" id="Page_6034">[Pg 6034]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the
+human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not
+therefore humanity born anew in each child?</p>
+
+<p>In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed
+human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like
+one.</p>
+
+<p>In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things
+proceeds from one God.</p>
+
+<p>Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and
+joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.</p>
+
+<p>What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a
+beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and
+lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to
+verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.</p>
+
+<p>This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the
+beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national
+order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must
+first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of
+freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not
+even in that of the nursling.</p>
+
+<p>The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.</p>
+
+<p>A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,&mdash;what is it but a
+true sense of our close filial union with God?</p>
+
+<p>Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he
+must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.</p>
+
+<p>My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their
+innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I
+follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.</p>
+
+<p>A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.</p>
+
+<p>I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in
+God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose
+hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the
+purity and peace of heaven,&mdash;God's earth and God's heaven.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 90%;">
+<a name="PMenagerie" id="PMenagerie"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>THE MENAGERIE.</i></big><br />
+Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland.</span>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by
+a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and
+lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to
+verify the thoughts of their inmost souls."&mdash;<i>Froebel.</i></p></div>
+<img src="images/menagerie.jpg" width="100%" alt="THE MENAGERIE" title="THE MENAGERIE" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6035" id="Page_6035">[Pg 6035]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FROISSART" id="FROISSART"></a>FROISSART</h2>
+
+<h4>(1337-1410?)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY GEORGE M<sup>c</sup>LEAN HARPER</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capf.png" width="90" height="90" alt="F" title="F" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">roissart is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with
+immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings,
+tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French
+knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he
+says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history
+and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and
+noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the
+wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in
+perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage
+them in well-doing."</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus207.jpg" width="270" height="325" alt="Froissart" title="Froissart" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Froissart</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of
+feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was
+artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human
+qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no
+less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of
+fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding
+large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, and
+over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. The works of
+civilized communities&mdash;agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning,
+religion&mdash;were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad
+barbarians.</p>
+
+<p>This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years'
+War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the
+real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing
+efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in
+England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6036" id="Page_6036">[Pg 6036]</a></span>admits,
+and not the knights, who won the battle of Poitiers. Gunpowder and
+cannon, a few years later, doomed the man-at-arms, and the rise of
+strong monarchies crowded out the feudal system. The thunder of
+artillery which echoes faintly in the last pages of Froissart is like
+a parting salvo to all the pageantry the volume holds. From
+cannon-ball and musket-shot the glittering procession has found refuge
+there. Into the safe retreat of these illuminated parchments, all the
+banners and pennons, lances, crests, and tapestries, knights and
+horses under clanking mail, had time&mdash;and but just time&mdash;to withdraw.
+We find them there, fresh as when they hurried in, the colors bright,
+the trumpets blowing.</p>
+
+<p>Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes in Hainault, in 1337, the year
+of his birth almost coinciding with Chaucer's. He tells us in his long
+autobiographical poem, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' that he was fond of
+play when a boy, and delighted in dances, carols, and poems, and had a
+liking for all those who loved dogs and birds. In the school where he
+was sent, he says, there were little girls whom he tried to please by
+giving them rings of glass, and pins, and apples, and pears. It seemed
+to him a most worthy thing to acquire their favor, and he wondered
+when it would be his turn to fall really in love. Much of this poem,
+which narrates tediously the love affair that was not long in coming,
+is probably fictitious; but there is no doubt of the accuracy of his
+description of himself in the opening lines, as fond of pleasure,
+prone to gallantry, and susceptible to all the bright faces of
+romance. From love and arms, he says, we are often told that all joy
+and every honor flow. He informs us elsewhere that he was no sooner
+out of school than he began to write, putting into verse the wars of
+his time.</p>
+
+<p>In 1361 he went to England, where Edward III was reigning with
+Philippa his queen, a daughter of the Count of Hainault. His passport
+to the favor of his great countrywoman was a book, the result of these
+rhymings, covering the period from the battle of Poitiers, 1356, to
+the time of his voyage. This volume is not known to exist, nor any
+copy of it. The Queen made him a clerk of her chamber. He had abundant
+opportunity in England to gratify his curiosity and fill his
+note-book, for the court was full of French noblemen, lately come over
+as hostages for King Jean of France, who was captured at the battle of
+Poitiers.</p>
+
+<p>In 1365 he took letters of recommendation from the Queen to David
+Bruce, King of Scotland, whom he followed for three months in his
+progress through that realm; spending a fortnight at the castle of
+William Douglas and making everywhere diligent inquiry about the
+recent war of 1345. In his delightful little poem 'The Debate between
+the Horse and the Greyhound,' beginning, "Froissart from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6037" id="Page_6037">[Pg 6037]</a></span>Scotland was
+returning," we have a lifelike figure of the inquisitive young
+chronicler, pushing unweariedly from inn to inn on a tired horse and
+leading a footsore dog.</p>
+
+<p>Between his thirtieth and his thirty-fourth year he was sometimes in
+England and sometimes in various parts of the Continent. In August
+1369, while he was abroad, his patroness Queen Philippa died. She had
+encouraged him to continue his researches and writings, and he had
+presented her with a second volume, in prose, which has come down to
+us as a part of the chronicle. He admits that his work was an
+expansion of the chronicle of Jean le Bel, Canon of Saint Lambert at
+Li&egrave;ge, for he says:&mdash;"As all great rivers are made by the gathering
+together of many streams and springs, so the sciences also are
+extracted and compiled by many clerks: what one knows, the other does
+not."</p>
+
+<p>On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country
+of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by
+giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By
+the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a
+living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and
+correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A
+little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his
+chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been
+favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable
+to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his
+writings are all in the French language, which was of course his
+native tongue.</p>
+
+<p>About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at
+Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he
+observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them
+immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were
+however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388,
+hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man
+likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and
+Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book
+of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to
+travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of
+the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various
+towns upon their route had suffered.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they pleased me
+much, and right well did I retain them all; and as soon as I had
+dismounted at the hostelries along the road which we traveled
+together, I wrote them down, at evening as in the morning, to have a
+better record of them in times to come; for there is nothing so
+retentive as writing."</p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6038" id="Page_6038">[Pg 6038]</a></span></p>
+<p>Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months'
+sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many
+towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much
+of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except
+with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which
+enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last
+in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than
+1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.</p>
+
+<p>It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat
+worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest
+of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and
+at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person
+dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the
+castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He
+is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his
+own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not
+regret the time thus spent, nor the money,&mdash;several fortunes, by his
+own count,&mdash;for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is
+always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of
+trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill
+sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from
+province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize
+the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local
+customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two
+French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each
+other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And I tell you for a truth," we read, "that to make these chronicles
+I have gone in my time much through the world, both to fulfill my
+pleasure by seeing the wonders of the earth, and to inquire about the
+arms and adventures that are written in this book."</p></div>
+
+<p>So to horse, good Canon of Chimay! Throw aside books; there is news of
+fighting in the South; after the battle, soldiers will talk. There
+have been deeds of courage and romance. Hasten thither, while the tale
+of them is new!</p>
+
+<p>If he were not so celebrated as a chronicler, Froissart would be known
+as one of the last of the wandering minstrels. He had the roving foot;
+he lived by charming the rich into generosity with his recitals. And
+he wrote much poetry, which is little read, except where it has some
+autobiographical interest. We possess the long poems, 'L'Espinette
+Amoureuse,' 'Le Buisson de Jeunesse,' 'Le Dit du Florin,' and several
+shorter pieces, with fragments of his once famous versified romance
+'M&eacute;liador.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6039" id="Page_6039">[Pg 6039]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His great prose work, while professing to be a history, in distinction
+from the chronicles of previous writers, is however not an orderly
+narration, nor is it a philosophical treatment of political causes and
+effects. It is a collection of pictures and stories, without much
+unity except the constant purpose of exhibiting the prowess of
+knighthood. There is not much indication even of partisanship or
+patriotic feeling. Froissart generally gives due meed of praise to the
+best knight in every bout, the best battalion in every encounter,
+regardless of sides.</p>
+
+<p>The subjects treated are so numerous and disparate that no general
+idea of them can be given. They cover the time from 1326 to 1394, and
+lead us through England, Scotland, Flanders, Hainault, France, Italy,
+Spain, and Northern Africa. Among the most interesting passages are
+the story of King Edward's campaign against the Scots; his march
+through France; the battle of Cr&eacute;cy; the siege of Calais; Wat Tyler's
+Rebellion, which Froissart the well-fed parasite treats with an odd
+and inconsistent mingling of horror and contempt; the Jacquerie, which
+he says was the work of peasant dogs, the scum of the earth; the
+battle of Poitiers, with a fine description of the Black Prince
+waiting at table on poor captured King Jean; and the rise and fall of
+Philip van Artevelde.</p>
+
+<p>Froissart's chronicle used to be regarded as authoritative history.
+But as might have been expected from his mode of inquiry, it is full
+of geographical, chronological, and other errors. Getting his
+information by ear, he wrote proper names phonetically, or turned them
+into something resembling French. Thus Worcester becomes "Vaucestre,"
+Seymour "Simon," Sutherland "Surlant," Walter Tyler "Vautre Tuilier,"
+Edinburgh "Hedaimbourch," Stirling "Eturmelin." The persons from whom
+he got his material were generally partisans either of France or of
+England, and often told him their stories years after the events; so
+that although he tried to be impartial himself, and to offset one
+witness by another, he seldom heard a judicial account of a battle or
+a quarrel. He seems to have consulted few written records, though he
+might easily have seen the State papers of England and Hainault.</p>
+
+<p>It is useless to blame him, however; for the writing of mere history
+was not his purpose. With all his fine devotion to his life work,&mdash;a
+devotion which is the more admirable when we consider his
+pleasure-loving nature,&mdash;with all his attention to fairness, his great
+concern was not so much to instruct as to delight, first himself,
+secondly the great people of his age, and lastly posterity, on whom he
+ever and anon cast a shrewd and longing glance. To please his
+contemporaries, he several times revised his work. Posterity has
+nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which
+is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6040" id="Page_6040">[Pg 6040]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian
+which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great
+authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century.
+Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt
+correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed
+virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely
+professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully
+practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck,
+for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which
+permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on
+prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled
+with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes
+himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by
+his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his
+unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet,
+and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it
+is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and
+squires and men-at-arms about him.</p>
+
+<p>There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to
+remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age.
+It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned
+village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved
+children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and
+agonizing foot-soldiers,&mdash;all these consequences of war he sees and
+occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever
+mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss.
+Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find
+ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune
+by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was
+a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.</p>
+
+<p>Froissart's merit, then, is not that he is a great political
+historian, nor even a great historian of the culture of his time. He
+did not see accurately enough to be the first, nor broadly and deeply
+and independently enough to be the second. But kindly Nature made him
+something else, and enabled him to win that name "which honoreth most
+and most endureth." She gave him the painter's eye, the poet's fancy,
+and it is as the artist of chivalry he lives to-day. His chronicle may
+be often false to historical fact, it may not display a broad and
+sympathetic intelligence or a generous impatience of conventionality,
+but it does please, it does enthrall. It is one of those books without
+moral intent, like the Arabian Nights, which the boys of all ages will
+persist in reading, and which men delight in if they love good
+pictures and good story-telling. No more lasting colors have come down
+to us from Venetian painters than those which rush <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6041" id="Page_6041">[Pg 6041]</a></span>out from the words
+on his pages. His scenes do not take shape in our minds as etchings or
+engravings, but smile themselves into being, like oil-paintings.
+Sunlight, the glint of steel, red and yellow banners waving, white
+horses galloping over the sand, flashing armor, glittering spurs, the
+shining faces of eager men, fill with glory this great pictorial
+wonder-book of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 544px;">
+<img src="images/sign213.png" width="544" height="100" alt="Geo McLean Harper" title="Geo McLean Harper" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_INVASION_OF_FRANCE_BY_KING_EDWARD_III_AND_THE_BATTLE_OF_CRECY" id="THE_INVASION_OF_FRANCE_BY_KING_EDWARD_III_AND_THE_BATTLE_OF_CRECY"></a>THE INVASION OF FRANCE BY KING EDWARD III., AND THE BATTLE OF CR&Eacute;CY</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Chronicles': Translation of John Bourchier, Lord Berners</h4>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">How the King of England Rode Through Normandy</span></h4>
+
+<p>When the King of England arrived in the Hogue Saint-Vaast, the King
+issued out of his ship, and the first foot that he set on the ground
+he fell so rudely that the blood brast out of his nose. The knights
+that were about him took him up and said, "Sir, for God's sake enter
+again into your ship, and come not aland this day, for this is but an
+evil sign for us." Then the King answered quickly and said,
+"Wherefore? This is a good token for me, for the land desireth to have
+me." Of the which answer all his men were right joyful. So that day
+and night the King lodged on the sands, and in the mean time
+discharged the ships of their horses and other baggages; there the
+King made two marshals of his host, the one the Lord Godfrey of
+Harcourt and the other the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Arundel
+constable. And he ordained that the Earl of Huntingdon should keep the
+fleet of ships with a hundred men of arms and four hundred archers;
+and also he ordained three battles, one to go on his right hand,
+closing to the seaside, and the other on his left hand, and the King
+himself in the midst, and every night to lodge all in one field.</p>
+
+<p>Thus they set forth as they were ordained, and they that went by the
+sea took all the ships that they found in their ways; and so long they
+went forth, what by sea and what by land, that they came to a good
+port and to a good town called Barfleur, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6042" id="Page_6042">[Pg 6042]</a></span> which incontinent was
+won, for they within gave up for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that,
+the town was robbed, and much gold and silver there found, and rich
+jewels; there was found so much riches, that the boys and villains of
+the host set nothing by good furred gowns; they made all the men of
+the town to issue out and to go into the ships, because they would not
+suffer them to be behind them for fear of rebelling again. After the
+town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed without brenning, then they
+spread abroad in the country and did what they list, for there was not
+to resist them. At last they came to a great and a rich town called
+Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent part thereof,
+but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong and well
+furnished with men of war.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Of the Great Assembly that the French King Made to Resist
+the King of England</span></h4>
+
+<p>Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled, robbed, wasted, and pilled
+the good plentiful country of Normandy. Then the French King sent for
+the Lord John of Hainault, who came to him with a great number; also
+the King sent for other men of arms, dukes, earls, barons, knights,
+and squires, and assembled together the greatest number of people that
+had been seen in France a hundred year before. He sent for men into so
+far countries, that it was long or they came together, wherefore the
+King of England did what him list in the mean season. The French King
+heard well what he did, and sware and said how they should never
+return again unfought withal, and that such hurts and damages as they
+had done should be dearly revenged; wherefore he had sent letters to
+his friends in the Empire, to such as were farthest off, and also to
+the gentle King of Bohemia and to the Lord Charles his son, who from
+thenceforth was called King of Almaine; he was made King by the aid of
+his father and the French King, and had taken on him the arms of the
+Empire: the French King desired them to come to him with all their
+powers, to the intent to fight with the King of England, who brent and
+wasted his country. These Princes and Lords made them ready with great
+number of men of arms, of Almains, Bohemians, and Luxemburgers, and so
+came to the French King. Also King Philip sent to the Duke of
+Lorraine, who came to serve him with three hundred spears; also there
+came the Earl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6043" id="Page_6043">[Pg 6043]</a></span> [of] Salm in Saumois, the Earl of Sarrebruck, the Earl
+of Flanders, the Earl William of Namur, every man with a fair company.</p>
+
+<p>Ye have heard herebefore of the order of the Englishmen; how they went
+in three battles, the marshals on the right hand and on the left, the
+King and the Prince of Wales his son in the midst. They rode but small
+journeys, and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of
+the clock, and found the country so fruitful that they needed not to
+make no provision for their host, but all only for wine; and yet they
+found reasonably sufficient thereof. It was no marvel, though, they of
+the country were afraid; for before that time they had never seen men
+of war, nor they wist not what war or battle meant. They fled away as
+far as they might hear speaking of the Englishmen, and left their
+houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn; they wist not how to
+save and keep it. The King of England and the Prince had in their
+battle a three thousand men of arms and six thousand archers, and a
+ten thousand men afoot, beside them that rode with the marshals....</p>
+
+<p>Then the King went toward Caen, the which was a greater town and full
+of drapery and other merchandise, and rich burgesses, noble ladies and
+damosels, and fair churches, and specially two great and rich abbeys,
+one of the Trinity, another of Saint Stephen; and on the one side of
+the town one of the fairest castles of all Normandy, and captain
+therein was Robert of Wargny, with three hundred Genoways, and in the
+town was the Earl of Eu and of Guines, Constable of France, and the
+Earl of Tancarville, with a good number of men of war. The King of
+England rode that day in good order and lodged all his battles
+together that night, a two leagues from Caen, in a town with a little
+haven called Austrehem, and thither came also all his navy of ships
+with the Earl of Huntingdon, who was governour of them.</p>
+
+<p>The constable and other lords of France that night watched well the
+town of Caen, and in the morning armed them with all them of the town:
+then the constable ordained that none should issue out, but keep their
+defenses on the walls, gate, bridge, and river; and left the suburbs
+void, because they were not closed; for they thought they should have
+enough to do to defend the town, because it was not closed but with
+the river. They of the town said how they would issue out, for they
+were strong enough to fight with the King of England. When the
+constable saw their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6044" id="Page_6044">[Pg 6044]</a></span> good wills, he said, "In the name of God be it,
+ye shall not fight without me." Then they issued out in good order,
+and made good face to fight and to defend them and to put their lives
+in adventure.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Of the Battle of Caen, and How the Englishmen Took the Town</span></h4>
+
+<p>The same day the Englishmen rose early and appareled them ready to go
+to Caen.<a name="FNanchor_A_42" id="FNanchor_A_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_42" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> The King heard mass before the sun-rising, and then took
+his horse, and the Prince his son, with Sir Godfrey of Harcourt,
+marshal and leader of the host, whose counsel the King much followed.
+Then they drew toward Caen with their battles in good array, and so
+approached the good town of Caen. When they of the town, who were
+ready in the field, saw these three battles coming in good order, with
+their banners and standards waving in the wind, and the archers, the
+which they had not been accustomed to see, they were sore afraid and
+fled away toward the town without any order or good array, for all
+that the constable could do; then the Englishmen pursued them eagerly.
+When the constable and the Earl Tancarville saw that, they took a gate
+at the entry and saved themselves and certain with them, for the
+Englishmen were entered into the town. Some of the knights and squires
+of France, such as knew the way to the castle, went thither, and the
+captain there received them all, for the castle was large. The
+Englishmen in the chase slew many, for they took none to mercy.</p>
+
+<p>Then the constable and the Earl of Tancarville, being in the little
+tower at the bridge foot, looked along the street and saw their men
+slain without mercy; they doubted to fall in their hands. At last they
+saw an English knight with one eye, called Sir Thomas Holland, and a
+five or six other knights with him; they knew them, for they had seen
+them before in Pruce, in Granade, and in other viages. Then they
+called to Sir Thomas and said how they would yield themselves
+prisoners. Then Sir Thomas came thither with his company and mounted
+up into the gate, and there found the said lords with twenty-five
+knights with them, who yielded them to Sir Thomas; and he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6045" id="Page_6045">[Pg 6045]</a></span>took them
+for his prisoners and left company to keep them, and then mounted
+again on his horse and rode into the streets, and saved many lives of
+ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,&mdash;for the soldiers
+were without mercy. It fell so well the same season for the
+Englishmen, that the river, which was able to bear ships, at that time
+was so low that men went in and out beside the bridge. They of the
+town were entered into their houses, and cast down into the street
+stones, timber, and iron, and slew and hurt more than five hundred
+Englishmen; wherewith the King was sore displeased. At night when he
+heard thereof, he commanded that the next day all should be put to the
+sword and the town brent; but then Sir Godfrey of Harcourt
+said:&mdash;"Dear sir, for God's sake assuage somewhat your courage, and
+let it suffice you that ye have done. Ye have yet a great voyage to do
+or ye come before Calais, whither ye purpose to go: and sir, in this
+town there is much people who will defend their houses, and it will
+cost many of your men their lives, or ye have all at your will;
+whereby peradventure ye shall not keep your purpose to Calais, the
+which should redound to your rack. Sir, save your people, for ye shall
+have need of them or this month pass; for I think verily your
+adversary King Philip will meet with you to fight, and ye shall find
+many strait passages and rencounters; wherefore your men, an ye had
+more, shall stand you in good stead: and sir, without any further
+slaying ye shall be lord of this town; men and women will put all that
+they have to your pleasure." Then the King said, "Sir Godfrey, you are
+our marshal; ordain everything as ye will." Then Sir Godfrey with his
+banner rode from street to street, and commanded in the King's name
+none to be so hardy to put fire in any house, to slay any person, nor
+to violate any woman. When they of the town heard that cry, they
+received the Englishmen into their houses and made them good cheer,
+and some opened their coffers and bade them take what them list, so
+they might be assured of their lives; howbeit there were done in the
+town many evil deeds, murders, and robberies. Thus the Englishmen were
+lords of the town three days and won great riches, the which they sent
+by barks and barges to Saint-Saviour by the river of Austrehem, a two
+leagues thence, whereas all their navy lay. Then the King sent the
+Earl of Huntingdon with two hundred men of arms and four hundred
+archers, with his navy and prisoners and riches that they had got,
+back again into England. And the King bought of Sir Thomas Holland
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6046" id="Page_6046">[Pg 6046]</a></span> Constable of France and the Earl of Tancarville, and paid for
+them twenty thousand nobles....</p>
+
+<p>The next day the King departed, brenning and wasting all before him,
+and at night lodged in a good village called Grandvilliers. The next
+day the King passed by Dargies; there was none to defend the castle,
+wherefore it was soon taken and brent. Then they went forth destroying
+the country all about, and so came to the castle of Poix, where there
+was a good town and two castles. There was nobody in them but two fair
+damosels, daughters to the Lord of Poix; they were soon taken, and had
+been violated, an two English knights had not been, Sir John Chandos
+and Sir Basset; they defended them and brought them to the King, who
+for his honor made them good cheer and demanded of them whither they
+would fainest go. They said, "To Corbie," and the King caused them to
+be brought thither without peril. That night the King lodged in the
+town of Poix. They of the town and of the castles spake that night
+with the marshals of the host, to save them and their town from
+brenning, and they to pay a certain sum of florins the next day as
+soon as the host was departed. This was granted them, and in the
+morning the King departed with all his host, except a certain that
+were left there to receive the money that they of the town had
+promised to pay. When they of the town saw the host depart and but a
+few left behind, then they said they would pay never a penny, and so
+ran out and set on the Englishmen, who defended themselves as well as
+they might and sent after the host for succor. When Sir Raynold Cobham
+and Sir Thomas Holland, who had the rule of the rear guard, heard
+thereof, they returned and cried, "Treason, treason!" and so came
+again to Poix-ward and found their companions still fighting with them
+of the town. Then anon they of the town were nigh all slain, and the
+town brent, and the two castles beaten down. Then they returned to the
+King's host, who was as then at Airaines and there lodged, and had
+commanded all manner of men on pain of death to do no hurt to no town
+of Arsyn,<a name="FNanchor_B_43" id="FNanchor_B_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_43" class="fnanchor">[B]</a> for there the King was minded to lie a day or two to take
+advice how he might pass the river of Somme; for it was necessary for
+him to pass the river, as ye shall hear after.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6047" id="Page_6047">[Pg 6047]</a></span></p>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">How the French King Followed the King of England in Beauvoisinois</span></h4>
+
+<p>Now let us speak of King Philip, who was at Saint-Denis and his people
+about him, and daily increased. Then on a day he departed and rode so
+long that he came to Coppegueule, a three leagues from Amiens, and
+there he tarried. The King of England, being at Airaines, wist not
+where for to pass the river of Somme, the which was large and deep,
+and all bridges were broken and the passages well kept. Then at the
+King's commandment his two marshals with a thousand men of arms and
+two thousand archers went along the river to find some passage, and
+passed by Longpr&eacute;, and came to the bridge of Remy, the which was well
+kept with a great number of knights and squires and men of the
+country. The Englishmen alighted afoot and assailed the Frenchmen from
+the morning till it was noon; but the bridge was so well fortified and
+defended that the Englishmen departed without winning of anything.
+Then they went to a great town called Fountains, on the river of
+Somme, the which was clean robbed and brent, for it was not closed.
+Then they went to another town called Long-en-Ponthieu; they could not
+win the bridge, it was so well kept and defended. Then they departed
+and went to Picquigny, and found the town, the bridge, and the castle
+so well fortified that it was not likely to pass there; the French
+King had so well defended the passages, to the intent that the King of
+England should not pass the river of Somme, to fight with him at his
+advantage or else to famish him there.</p>
+
+<p>When these two marshals had assayed in all places to find passage and
+could find none, they returned again to the King, and shewed how they
+could find no passage in no place. The same night the French King came
+to Amiens with more than a hundred thousand men. The King of England
+was right pensive, and the next morning heard mass before the
+sun-rising and then dislodged; and every man followed the marshals'
+banners, and so rode in the country of Vimeu approaching to the good
+town of Abbeville, and found a town thereby, whereunto was come much
+people of the country in trust of a little defense that was there; but
+the Englishmen anon won it, and all they that were within slain, and
+many taken of the town and of the country. The King took his lodging
+in a great hospital<a name="FNanchor_C_44" id="FNanchor_C_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_44" class="fnanchor">[C]</a> that was there. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6048" id="Page_6048">[Pg 6048]</a></span>same day the French King
+departed from Amiens and came to Airaines about noon; and the
+Englishmen were departed thence in the morning. The Frenchmen found
+there great provision that the Englishmen had left behind them,
+because they departed in haste. There they found flesh ready on the
+broaches, bread and pasties in the ovens, wine in tuns and barrels,
+and the tables ready laid. There the French King lodged and tarried
+for his lords.</p>
+
+<p>That night the King of England was lodged at Oisemont. At night when
+the two marshals were returned, who had that day overrun the country
+to the gates of Abbeville and to Saint-Valery and made a great
+skirmish there, then the King assembled together his council and made
+to be brought before him certain prisoners of the country of Ponthieu
+and of Vimeu. The King right courteously demanded of them if there
+were any among them that knew any passage beneath Abbeville, that he
+and his host might pass over the river of Somme: if he would shew him
+thereof, he should be quit of his ransom, and twenty of his company
+for his love. There was a varlet called Gobin Agace, who stepped forth
+and said to the King:&mdash;"Sir, I promise you on the jeopardy of my head
+I shall bring you to such a place, whereas ye and all your host shall
+pass the river of Somme without peril. There be certain places in the
+passage that ye shall pass twelve men afront two times between day and
+night; ye shall not go in the water to the knees. But when the flood
+cometh, the river then waxeth so great that no man can pass; but when
+the flood is gone, the which is two times between day and night, then
+the river is so low that it may be passed without danger both
+a-horseback and afoot. The passage is hard in the bottom, with white
+stones, so that all your carriage may go surely; therefore the passage
+is called Blanche-Taque. An ye make ready to depart betimes, ye may be
+there by the sun-rising." The King said, "If this be true that ye
+say, I quit thee thy ransom and all thy company, and moreover shall
+give thee a hundred nobles." Then the King commanded every man to be
+ready at the sound of the trumpet to depart.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6049" id="Page_6049">[Pg 6049]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Of the Battle of Blanche-Taque</span></h4>
+
+<p>The King of England slept not much that night, for at midnight he
+arose and sowned his trumpet; then incontinent they made ready
+carriages and all things, and at the breaking of the day they departed
+from the town of Oisemont and rode after the guiding of Gobin Agace,
+so that they came by the sun-rising to Blanche-Taque: but as then the
+flood was up, so that they might not pass, so the King tarried there
+till it was prime; then the ebb came.</p>
+
+<p>The French King had his currours in the country, who brought him word
+of the demeanor of the Englishmen. Then he thought to close the King
+of England between Abbeville and the river of Somme, and so to fight
+with him at his pleasure. And when he was at Amiens he had ordained a
+great baron of Normandy, called Sir Godemar du Fay, to go and keep the
+passage of Blanche-Taque, where the Englishmen must pass or else in
+none other place. He had with him a thousand men of arms and six
+thousand afoot, with the Genoways; so they went by Saint-Riquier in
+Ponthieu and from thence to Crotoy, whereas the passage lay: and also
+he had with him a great number of men of the country, and also a great
+number of them of Montreuil, so that they were a twelve thousand men
+one and other.</p>
+
+<p>When the English host was come thither, Sir Godemar du Fay arranged
+all his company to defend the passage. The King of England let not for
+all that; but when the flood was gone, he commanded his marshals to
+enter into the water in the name of God and St. George. Then they that
+were hardy and courageous entered on both parties, and many a man
+reversed. There were some of the Frenchmen of Artois and Picardy that
+were as glad to joust in the water as on the dry land.</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchmen defended so well the passage at the issuing out of the
+water, that they had much to do. The Genoways did them great trouble
+with their cross-bows; on the other side the archers of England shot
+so wholly together, that the Frenchmen were fain to give place to the
+Englishmen. There was a sore battle, and many a noble feat of arms
+done on both sides. Finally the Englishmen passed over and assembled
+together in the field. The King and the Prince passed, and all the
+lords; then the Frenchmen kept none array, but departed, he that
+might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6050" id="Page_6050">[Pg 6050]</a></span> best. When Sir Godemar saw that discomfiture, he fled and saved
+himself; some fled to Abbeville and some to Saint-Riquiers. They that
+were there afoot could not flee, so that there were slain a great
+number of them of Abbeville, Montreuil, Rue, and of Saint-Riquiers;
+the chase endured more than a great league. And as yet all the
+Englishmen were not passed the river, and certain currours of the King
+of Bohemia and of Sir John of Hainault came on them that were behind,
+and took certain horses and carriages and slew divers, or they could
+take the passage.</p>
+
+<p>The French King the same morning was departed from Airaines, trusting
+to have found the Englishmen between him and the river of Somme; but
+when he heard how that Sir Godemar du Fay and his company were
+discomfited, he tarried in the field and demanded of his marshals what
+was best to do. They said, "Sir, ye cannot pass the river but at the
+bridge of Abbeville, for the flood is come in at Blanche-Taque;" then
+he returned and lodged at Abbeville.</p>
+
+<p>The King of England, when he was past the river, he thanked God, and
+so rode forth in like manner as he did before. Then he called Gobin
+Agace and did quit him his ransom and all his company, and gave him a
+hundred nobles and a good horse. And so the King rode forth fair and
+easily, and thought to have lodged in a great town called Noyelles;
+but when he knew that the town pertained to the Countess d'Aumale,
+sister to the Lord Robert of Artois,<a name="FNanchor_D_45" id="FNanchor_D_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_45" class="fnanchor">[D]</a> the King assured the town and
+country as much as pertained to her, and so went forth: and his
+marshals rode to Crotoy on the seaside and brent the town, and found
+in the haven many ships and barks charged with wines of Poitou,
+pertaining to the merchants of Saintonge and of Rochelle; they brought
+the best thereof to the King's host. Then one of the marshals rode to
+the gates of Abbeville and from thence to Saint-Riquiers, and after to
+the town of Rue-Saint-Esprit. This was on a Friday, and both battles
+of the marshals returned to the King's host about noon and so lodged
+all together near to Cressy in Ponthieu.</p>
+
+<p>The King of England was well informed how the French King followed
+after him to fight. Then he said to his company, "Let us take here
+some plot of ground, for we will go no farther till we have seen our
+enemies. I have good cause here to abide <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6051" id="Page_6051">[Pg 6051]</a></span>them, for I am on the right
+heritage of the Queen my mother, the which land was given at her
+marriage: I will challenge it of mine adversary Philip of Valois." And
+because that he had not the eighth part in number of men as the French
+King had, therefore he commanded his marshals to chose a plot of
+ground somewhat for his advantage; and so they did, and thither the
+King and his host went. Then he sent his currours to Abbeville, to see
+if the French King drew that day into the field or not. They went
+forth and returned again, and said how they could see none appearance
+of his coming; then every man took their lodging for that day, and to
+be ready in the morning at the sound of the trumpet in the same place.
+This Friday the French King tarried still in Abbeville abiding for his
+company, and sent his two marshals to ride out to see the dealing of
+the Englishmen; and at night they returned, and said how the
+Englishmen were lodged in the fields. That night the French King made
+a supper to all the chief lords that were there with him, and after
+supper the King desired them to be friends each to other. The King
+looked for the Earl of Savoy, who should come to him with a thousand
+spears, for he had received wages for a three months of them at Troyes
+in Champagne.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Of the Order of the Englishmen at Cressy</span></h4>
+
+<p>On the Friday, as I said before, the King of England lay in the
+fields, for the country was plentiful of wines and other victual, and
+if need had been, they had provision following in carts and other
+carriages. That night the King made a supper to all his chief lords of
+his host and made them good cheer; and when they were all departed to
+take their rest, then the King entered into his oratory and kneeled
+down before the altar, praying God devoutly that if he fought the next
+day, that he might achieve the journey to His honor; then about
+midnight he laid him down to rest, and in the morning he rose betimes
+and heard mass, and the Prince his son with him, and the most part of
+his company, were confessed and houseled; and after the mass said, he
+commanded every man to be armed and to draw to the field to the same
+place before appointed. Then the King caused a park to be made by the
+wood-side behind his host, and there was set all carts and carriages,
+and within the park were all their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6052" id="Page_6052">[Pg 6052]</a></span> horses, for every man was afoot;
+and into this park there was but one entry. Then he ordained three
+battles: In the first was the young Prince of Wales, with him the Earl
+of Warwick and Oxford, the Lord Godfrey of Harcourt, Sir Raynold
+Cobham, Sir Thomas Holland, the Lord Stafford, the Lord of Mohun, the
+Lord Delaware, Sir John Chandos, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, Sir
+Robert Nevill, the Lord Thomas Clifford, the Lord Bourchier, the Lord
+de Latimer, and divers other knights and squires that I cannot name;
+they were an eight hundred men of arms and two thousand archers, and a
+thousand of other with the Welshmen; every lord drew to the field
+appointed under his own banner and pennon. In the second battle was
+the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Ros, the Lord
+Lucy, the Lord Willoughby, the Lord Basset, the Lord of Saint-Aubin,
+Sir Louis Tufton, the Lord of Multon, the Lord Lascelles and divers
+other, about an eight hundred men of arms and twelve hundred archers.
+The third battle had the King; he had seven hundred men of arms and
+two thousand archers. Then the King leapt on a hobby, with a white rod
+in his hand, one of his marshals on the one hand and the other on the
+other hand: he rode from rank to rank desiring every man to take heed
+that day to his right and honor. He spake it so sweetly and with so
+good countenance and merry cheer, that all such as were discomfited
+took courage in the seeing and hearing of him. And when he had thus
+visited all his battles, it was then nine of the day; then he caused
+every man to eat and drink a little, and so they did at their leisure.
+And afterward they ordered again their battles; then every man lay
+down on the earth and by him his salet and bow, to be the more fresher
+when their enemies should come.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Order of the Frenchmen at Cressy, and How they Beheld the Demeanor
+of the Englishmen</span></h4>
+
+<p>This Saturday the French King rose betimes and heard mass in Abbeville
+in his lodging in the abbey of St. Peter, and he departed after the
+sun-rising. When he was out of the town two leagues, approaching
+towards his enemies, some of his lords said to him, "Sir, it were good
+that ye ordered your battles, and let all your footmen pass somewhat
+on before, that they be not troubled with the horsemen." Then the King
+sent four<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6053" id="Page_6053">[Pg 6053]</a></span> knights, the Moine [of] Bazeilles, the Lord of Noyers, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord d'Aubigny, to ride to aview the English
+host; and so they rode so near that they might well see part of their
+dealing. The Englishmen saw them well and knew well how they were come
+thither to aview them; they let them alone and made no countenance
+toward them, and let them return as they came. And when the French
+King saw these four knights return again, he tarried till they came to
+him and said, "Sirs, what tidings?" These four knights each of them
+looked on other, for there was none would speak before his companion;
+finally the King said to [the] Moine, who pertained to the King of
+Bohemia and had done in his days so much that he was reputed for one
+of the valiantest knights of the world, "Sir, speak you." Then he
+said:&mdash;"Sir, I shall speak, sith it pleaseth you, under the correction
+of my fellows. Sir, we have ridden and seen the behaving of your
+enemies: know ye for truth they are rested in three battles abiding
+for you. Sir, I will counsel you as for my part, saving your
+displeasure, that you and all your company rest here and lodge for
+this night; for or they that be behind of your company be come hither,
+and or your battles be set in good order, it will be very late, and
+your people be weary and out of array, and ye shall find your enemies
+fresh and ready to receive you. Early in the morning ye may order your
+battles at more leisure and advise your enemies at more deliberation,
+and to regard well what way ye will assail them; for, sir, surely they
+will abide you."</p>
+
+<p>Then the King commanded that it should be so done. Then his two
+marshals one rode before, another behind, saying to every banner,
+"Tarry and abide here in the name of God and St. Denis." They that
+were foremost tarried, but they that were behind would not tarry, but
+rode forth, and said how they would in no wise abide till they were as
+far forward as the foremost; and when they before saw them come on
+behind, then they rode forward again, so that the King nor his
+marshals could not rule them. So they rode without order or good
+array, till they came in sight of their enemies; and as soon as the
+foremost saw them they reculed then aback without good array, whereof
+they behind had marvel and were abashed, and thought that the foremost
+company had been fighting. Then they might have had leisure and room
+to have gone forward, if they had list; some went forth, and some
+abode still. The commons, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6054" id="Page_6054">[Pg 6054]</a></span> whom all the ways between Abbeville and
+Cressy were full, when they saw that they were near to their enemies,
+they took their swords and cried, "Down with them! let us slay them
+all." There is no man, though he were present at the journey, that
+could imagine or shew the truth of the evil order that was among the
+French party, and yet they were a marvelous great number. That I write
+in this book I learned it specially of the Englishmen, who well beheld
+their dealing; and also certain knights of Sir John of Hainault's, who
+was always about King Philip, shewed me as they knew.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Of the Battle of Cressy, August 26th, 1346</span></h4>
+
+<p>The Englishmen, who were in three battles lying on the ground to rest
+them, as soon as they saw the Frenchmen approach, they rose upon their
+feet fair and easily without any haste, and arranged their battles.
+The first, which was the Prince's battle, the archers there stood in
+manner of a herse and the men of arms in the bottom of the battle. The
+Earl of Northampton and the Earl of Arundel with the second battle
+were on a wing in good order, ready to comfort the Prince's battle, if
+need were.</p>
+
+<p>The lords and knights of France came not to the assembly together in
+good order, for some came before and some came after, in such haste
+and evil order that one of them did trouble another. When the French
+King saw the Englishmen his blood changed, and said to his marshals,
+"Make the Genoways go on before, and begin the battle, in the name of
+God and St. Denis." There were of the Genoways' cross-bows about a
+fifteen thousand, but they were so weary of going afoot that day a six
+leagues armed with their cross-bows, that they said to their
+constables, "We be not well ordered to fight this day, for we be not
+in the case to do any great deed of arms: we have more need of rest."
+These words came to the Earl of Alen&ccedil;on, who said, "A man is well at
+ease to be charged with such a sort of rascals, to be faint and fail
+now at most need." Also the same season there fell a great rain and a
+clipse with a terrible thunder, and before the rain there came flying
+over both battles a great number of crows for fear of the tempest
+coming. Then anon the air began to wax clear, and the sun to shine
+fair and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6055" id="Page_6055">[Pg 6055]</a></span> bright, the which was right in the Frenchmen's eyen and on
+the Englishmen's backs. When the Genoways were assembled together and
+began to approach, they made a great leap and cry to abash the
+Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that; then
+the Genoways again the second time made another leap and a fell cry,
+and stept forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot;
+thirdly, again they leapt and cried, and went forth till they came
+within shot; then they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the
+English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so
+wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow. When the Genoways
+felt the arrows piercing through heads, arms, and breasts, many of
+them cast down their cross-bows, and did cut their strings and
+returned discomfited. When the French King saw them fly away, he said,
+"Slay these rascals, for they shall let and trouble us without
+reason." Then ye should have seen the men of arms dash in among them
+and killed a great number of them; and ever still the Englishmen shot
+whereas they saw thickest press: the sharp arrows ran into the men of
+arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men, among the
+Genoways, and when they were down, they could not relieve again; the
+press was so thick that one overthrew another. And also among the
+Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great
+knives, and they went in among the men of arms and slew and murdered
+many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights, and
+squires; whereof the King of England was after displeased, for he had
+rather they had been taken prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The valiant King of Bohemia called Charles of Luxembourg, son to the
+noble Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, for all that he was nigh blind,
+when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him,
+"Where is the Lord Charles my son?" His men said, "Sir, we cannot
+tell; we think he be fighting." Then he said, "Sirs, ye are my men, my
+companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far
+forward that I may strike one stroke with my sword." They said they
+would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose
+him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to
+other and set the King before to accomplish his desire, and so they
+went on their enemies. The Lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote
+himself King of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to
+the battle; but when he saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6056" id="Page_6056">[Pg 6056]</a></span> that the matter went awry on their party,
+he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The King his father was so
+far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea, and more than
+four, and fought valiantly, and so did his company; and they
+adventured themselves so forward that they were there all slain, and
+the next day they were found in the place about the King, and all
+their horses tied each to other.</p>
+
+<p>The Earl of Alen&ccedil;on came to the battle right ordinately and fought
+with the Englishmen, and the Earl of Flanders also on his part. These
+two lords with their companies coasted the English archers and came to
+the Prince's battle, and there fought valiantly long. The French King
+would fain have come thither, when he saw their banners, but there was
+a great hedge of archers before him. The same day the French King had
+given a great black courser to Sir John of Hainault, and he made the
+Lord Thierry of Senzeille to ride on him and to bear his banner. The
+same horse took the bridle in the teeth and brought him through all
+the currours of the Englishmen, and as he would have returned again,
+he fell in a great dike and was sore hurt, and had been there dead, an
+his page had not been, who followed him through all the battles and
+saw where his master lay in the dike, and had none other let but for
+his horse; for the Englishmen would not issue out of their battle for
+taking of any prisoner. Then the page alighted and relieved his
+master: then he went not back again the same way that they came; there
+was too many in his way.</p>
+
+<p>This battle between Broye and Cressy this Saturday was right cruel and
+fell, and many a feat of arms done that came not to my knowledge. In
+the night divers knights and squires lost their masters, and sometime
+came on the Englishmen, who received them in such wise that they were
+ever nigh slain; for there was none taken to mercy nor to ransom, for
+so the Englishmen were determined.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning the day of the battle certain Frenchmen and Almains
+perforce opened the archers of the Prince's battle, and came and
+fought with the men of arms hand to hand. Then the second battle of
+the Englishmen came to succor the Prince's battle, the which was time,
+for they had as then much ado; and they with the Prince sent a
+messenger to the King, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the
+knight said to the King, "Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of
+Oxford, Sir Raynold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6057" id="Page_6057">[Pg 6057]</a></span> Cobham and other, such as be about the Prince
+your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore
+they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them; for
+if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they
+shall have much ado." Then the King said, "Is my son dead, or hurt, or
+on the earth felled?" "No, sir," quoth the knight, "but he is hardly
+matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid." "Well," said the King,
+"return to him and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that
+they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my
+son is alive: and also say to them that they suffer him this day to
+win his spurs; for if God be pleased, I will this journey be his and
+the honor thereof, and to them that be about him." Then the knight
+returned again to them and shewed the King's words, the which greatly
+encouraged them, and repoined in that they had sent to the King as
+they did.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Godfrey of Harcourt would gladly that the Earl of Harcourt, his
+brother, might have been saved; for he heard say by them that saw his
+banner how that he was there in the field on the French party: but Sir
+Godfrey could not come to him betimes, for he was slain or he could
+come at him, and so was also the Earl of Aumale his nephew. In another
+place the Earl of Alen&ccedil;on and the Earl of Flanders fought valiantly,
+every lord under his own banner; but finally they could not resist
+against the puissance of the Englishmen, and so there they were also
+slain, and divers other knights and squires. Also the Earl Louis of
+Blois, nephew to the French King, and the Duke of Lorraine, fought
+under their banners; but at last they were closed in among a company
+of Englishmen and Welshmen, and there were slain for all their
+prowess. Also there was slain the Earl of Auxerre, the Earl of
+Saint-Pol, and many other.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening the French King, who had left about him no more than a
+threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was
+one, who had remounted once the King, for his horse was slain with an
+arrow, then he said to the King, "Sir, depart hence, for it is time;
+lose not yourself willfully: if ye have loss at this time, ye shall
+recover it again another season." And so he took the King's horse by
+the bridle and led him away in a manner perforce. Then the King rode
+till he came to the castle of Broye. The gate was closed, because it
+was by that time dark: then the King called the captain, who came to
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6058" id="Page_6058">[Pg 6058]</a></span> walls and said, "Who is that calleth there this time of night?"
+Then the King said, "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune
+of France." The captain knew then it was the King, and opened the gate
+and let down the bridge. Then the King entered, and he had with him
+but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, the Lord d'Aubigny, and the Lord of Montsault. The
+King would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about
+midnight, and so rode by such guides as knew the country till he came
+in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested.</p>
+
+<p>This Saturday the Englishmen never departed from their battles for
+chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended
+themselves against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended
+about evensong time.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_42" id="Footnote_A_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_42"><span class="label">[A]</span></a>
+This was 26th July, 1346. Edward arrived at Poissy on
+12th August; Philip of Valois left Paris on the 14th; the English
+crossed the Seine at Poissy on the 16th, and the Somme at
+Blanche-taque on the 24th.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_43" id="Footnote_B_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_43"><span class="label">[B]</span></a>
+Probably a misunderstanding by Froissart of the English
+word "arson": the king's command being not to burn the towns on the
+Somme, as he wanted them for shelter.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_44" id="Footnote_C_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_44"><span class="label">[C]</span></a>
+That is, a house of the Knights of St. John.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_45" id="Footnote_D_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_45"><span class="label">[D]</span></a>
+She was in fact his daughter.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6059" id="Page_6059">[Pg 6059]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JAMES_ANTHONY_FROUDE" id="JAMES_ANTHONY_FROUDE"></a>JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE</h2>
+
+<h4>(1818-1894)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capj.png" width="90" height="90" alt="J" title="J" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">ames Anthony Froude, English historian and essayist, was born April
+23d, 1818, and died October 20th, 1894. His father was a clergyman,
+and the son was sent to Westminster School and to Oriel College,
+Oxford. In 1842 he became a fellow of Exeter, and two years later he
+was ordained a deacon; an office which he did not formally lay down
+until many years later, although his earliest publications, 'Shadows
+of the Clouds' and 'Nemesis of Faith,' showed that he had come to
+hold&mdash;and what perhaps is more to the point, dared to express,&mdash;views
+hardly compatible with the character of a docile and unreasoning
+neophyte.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus231.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="J. A. Froude" title="J. A. Froude" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">J. A. Froude</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>These books were severely censured by the authorities, and cost
+him&mdash;to the great benefit of the world&mdash;an appointment he had received
+of teacher in Tasmania. He resigned his fellowship and took up the
+profession of letters, writing much for Fraser and the Westminster,
+and becoming for a short period the editor of the former. His <i>magnum
+opus</i> is his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat
+of the Spanish Armada,' in twelve volumes, from 1856 to 1870. His
+other principal publications are&mdash;'The English in Ireland in the
+Eighteenth Century' (1874); 'C&aelig;sar' (1879); 'Bunyan' (1880); 'Thomas
+Carlyle (first forty years of his life)' (1882); 'Life in London'
+(1884); 'Short Studies on Great Subjects' (1882, four series); 'The
+Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889); 'The English in the West Indies' (1889);
+'The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon' (1892); 'The Life and Letters of
+Erasmus' (1892); 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century' (1892); and
+'The Council of Trent.' 'Shadows of the Clouds,' 'The Nemesis of
+Faith,' and 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' are in the form of fiction; and
+though they&mdash;especially the last&mdash;contain some charming descriptive
+passages, and evince some of Froude's power of character sketching,
+they serve on the whole to prove that he was not a novelist. The
+fortunes of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6060" id="Page_6060">[Pg 6060]</a></span>group of people are of less absorbing interest to him
+than questions of social and racial ethics. There is nothing more
+annoying than to have an essayist stand behind a story-teller and
+interrupt him from time to time with acute philosophical comments on
+ultimate causes. The characters of Morty and Sylvester Sullivan are
+admirably contrasted Celtic types, but both they and the English
+Colonel Goring are a trifle stagy and stiff in their joints. The
+murders of the two chiefs, Morty Sullivan and Colonel Goring, are
+dramatically told; but Froude's deficient sense of humor, at least of
+that quality of humor which gives a subtle sense of congruity, results
+in an attempt to combine the elements of the tale and the didactic
+society in impossible proportions. He is an essayist and historian,
+not a novel-writer.</p>
+
+<p>Froude stands before the English-reading public prominent in three
+characteristics: First, as a technical prose artist, in which regard
+he is entitled to be classed with Ruskin, Newman, and Pater; less
+enthusiastic and elaborately ornamental than the first, less musically
+and delicately fallacious than the second, and less self-conscious and
+phrase-caressing than the third, but carrying a solider burden of
+thought than all three. Second, as a historian of the modern school,
+which aims by reading the original records to produce an independent
+view of historical periods. Third, as the most clear-sighted and
+broad-minded of those whose position near the centre of the Oxford
+movement and intimacy with the principal actors gave them an insight
+into its inner nature.</p>
+
+<p>There can be but one opinion of Froude as a master of English. In some
+of his early work there are traces of the manner of Macaulay in the
+succession of short assertive sentences, most of which an ordinary
+writer would group as limiting clauses about the main assertion. This
+method gives a false appearance of vigor and definiteness; it makes
+easy reading by relieving the mind from the necessity of weighing the
+modifying propositions: but it is entirely unadapted to nice
+modulations of thought. Froude very soon avoided the vices of
+Macaulayism, and attained a narrative style which must be regarded as
+the best in an age which has paid more attention than any other to the
+art of telling a story. In descriptive historical narrative he is
+unrivaled, because he is profoundly impressed not only with the
+dramatic qualities but with the real significance of a scene; unlike
+Macaulay, to whom the superficial theatrical elements appeal. A
+reading of Macaulay's description of the trial of Warren Hastings, and
+Froude's narrative of the killing of Thomas Becket or of the execution
+of Mary Queen of Scots, will bring out at once Froude's radical
+superiority in both conception and execution.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the place to debate the question of Froude's historical
+accuracy, further than to remark that he was an industrious reader <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6061" id="Page_6061">[Pg 6061]</a></span>of
+historical documents, and by nature a seeker after the truth. If a
+profound conviction of the harmfulness of ecclesiasticism colored the
+light with which he illuminated the records of the past, we must
+remember that history is at best largely the impressions of
+historians; and that if it be true that Froude does present one side,
+it is the side on which the warnings to posterity are most distinctly
+inscribed. A reading of the controversy between Froude and Freeman in
+the calmer light of the present leads to the conclusion that the
+<i>suppressio veri</i> with which Froude was charged is not a <i>suggestio
+falsi</i>, but an artistic selection of the characteristic. He felt a
+certain contempt for the minute and meaningless fidelity to the
+record, which is not writing history but editing documents. He
+possessed, too, among his other literary powers, the rare one of being
+able to individualize the man whose life he studies and of presenting
+the character so as to be consistent and human. This power fills his
+history and sketch with rare personalities. Thomas Becket, Henry III.,
+Henry VIII., Queen Catharine, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, are
+more than historical portraits in the ordinary sense: they are
+conceptions of individuals, vivified by the artistic sense. Whether or
+not they are true to the originals as reflected in the contemporary
+documents, they are at least human possibilities, and therefore truer
+than the distorted automata that lie in state on the pages of some
+historians. A human character is so exceedingly complex and so
+delicately balanced with contradictory elements, that it is probable
+that no two persons ever estimate it exactly alike. Besides, prominent
+historical personages become in the popular imagination invested with
+exaggerated attributes, and it is not likely that men will ever agree
+even as to which of them was the hero and which the villain of the
+drama. It was to be expected that Froude should be violently assailed
+by those who accepted a traditional view of Henry VIII. and of Mary.
+It was inevitable that he should differ from them, because he had more
+than a view: he had a conception. His historical personages are
+certainly possibilities, because they are human, and the traditional
+figures are either monsters or saints; and humanity&mdash;at least Teutonic
+humanity&mdash;does not produce unadulterated saints nor unrelieved
+monsters.</p>
+
+<p>While Froude's historical work has been criticized for lack of minute
+accuracy in details, his books on Carlyle have been criticized for the
+opposite fault of quoting too fully and literally; from letters and
+journals, matter never intended for the public, and of a nature not
+only to wound living persons but to create an erroneous impression of
+the writer. The habit of expressing himself in pithy and pungent
+personalities seems to have been with Carlyle a sort of intellectual
+exercise, and should not necessarily be taken as an index of morose
+ill-temper. A very delicate literary tact was necessary to his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6062" id="Page_6062">[Pg 6062]</a></span>literary executor, in selecting from the matter put in his hands that
+which would combine to make a true picture of a crude and powerful
+genius without making him appear to the ordinary reader a selfish,
+willful man. Froude's idea of the duty of an editor of contemporary
+biography seems to have been that it was limited to careful
+publication of all the available material as <i>m&eacute;moires pour servir</i>.
+Such miscellaneous printing may in the end serve truth, but at the
+time it arouses resentment. It resulted, however, in the production of
+a book far preferable to the non-committal, evasive, destructively
+laudatory biography of a public man, of which every year brings a new
+specimen. It is at least honest, if not tactful.</p>
+
+<p>Froude's early connection with the Oxford movement and his work on the
+Lives of the Saints first called his attention to the study of
+historical documents, and to the large amount of fiction with which
+truth is diluted in them. His further researches among the authorities
+recently made accessible, for the history of the destruction of the
+monasteries, impressed on him the fact that an assumption of spiritual
+authority is as dangerous to those who assume it as to those over whom
+it is assumed, exactly as physical slavery is in the end as harmful to
+the masters as it is to the slaves. He saw that ecclesiasticism had
+been profoundly hostile to morals, and he judged the present by the
+past till he really believed that the precious fruits of the
+Reformation would be lost if the ritualists obtained control of the
+Church. He persuaded himself that under such influence&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Civilization would ebb, the great moral lights be extinguished,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the world would creep an unintelligent darkness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under which men would be portioned anew 'twixt the priest and the soldier."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is perhaps too much to expect of a man of the imaginative
+temperament of Froude, to whom the abominations of the Church from the
+twelfth to the sixteenth century were as real as if he had witnessed
+them, to retain judicial calmness under the vituperation with which he
+was assailed; but his profound distrust of the medi&aelig;val Church
+certainly does give an air of partisanship to his strictures on its
+modern ineffectual revival. He forgot that great principles of justice
+and toleration are now so embodied in law and fixed in the hearts of
+the English-speaking people that society is protected, and the evils
+of spiritual tyranny are restricted to the few who are willing to
+abase their intellects to it; that the corroding evil of conventual
+life is minimized by healthy outside influences; and that the most
+advanced modern ritualist would prove too good a Christian to light an
+<i>auto da f&eacute;</i>. It was but natural that he should forget this, for he
+was a strong man in the centre of the conflict, and independence was
+the core of his being.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6063" id="Page_6063">[Pg 6063]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This strength of independence is shown by the fact that though young,
+and profoundly sensitive to the attraction of a character like
+Newman's, he was from the first able to resist the fascination which
+that remarkable man exerted over all with whom he came in contact. The
+pure spiritual nature possesses a mysterious power over young men, so
+great that they often yield to its counterfeit. Newman was the true
+priest, and Froude recognized his genius and that his soul was "an
+adumbration of the Divine." But he felt instinctively the radical
+unsoundness of Newman's thought, and "would not follow, though an
+angel led." Others fell off for prudential reasons; but Froude was
+indifferent to these, and obedient to a conviction the strength of
+which must be estimated by the depth of his feeling for character.</p>
+
+<p>Froude was sometimes criticized for writing history under the
+influence of personal feeling. It is difficult to see how a readable
+history can be written except by one who at least takes an interest in
+the story; but whether capacity for feeling makes a man a less
+trustworthy historian, depends upon how far this emotional
+susceptibility is controlled by intellectual insight and just views of
+the laws under which society develops. That Froude was an absolutely
+perfect historian, no one would claim: he was too intensely human to
+be perfect. It is safe to say that the perfect historian will not
+exist until Shakespeare and Bacon reappear combined in one man. For
+the great historian must be both scholar and artist. As scholar he
+must possess, too, both the acquisitive and the organizing intellect.
+He must both gather facts and interpret them. He must have the
+artistic sense which selects from the vast mass of fact that which is
+significant. This power of artistic selection is of course influenced
+by his unconscious ideals, by his conception of the relative
+importance of the forces which move mankind, and of the ultimate goal
+of progress. His philosophy directs his art, and his art interprets in
+the light of his philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>It may be admitted that Froude possesses a larger share of the
+artistic than of the philosophic qualities necessary to the great
+historian. At times his hatred of ecclesiasticism becomes almost a
+prejudice. In his writings on Irish and colonial questions he evinces
+the Englishman's love of the right, but sometimes, unfortunately, the
+Englishman's inability to do justice to other races in points which
+distinguish them from his own. In some expressions he seems to
+distrust democracy in much the same unreasoning way in which Mr.
+Ruskin distrusts machinery. He had imbibed something of Mr. Carlyle's
+belief in the "strong man"; though he, no more than Carlyle, can show
+how the strong, just ruler can be produced or selected. But a more
+serious deficiency in Froude's philosophy arises from his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6064" id="Page_6064">[Pg 6064]</a></span>imperfect
+conception of the method of evolution which governs all organizations,
+civil and religious, so that they continually throw off short-lived
+varieties and history becomes a continual giving way of the old order
+to the new. To fear, as Froude seems to, lest a survival may become a
+governing type, is as unreasonable as to fear that old men will live
+forever. Certainly he would have taken a juster, saner view of the
+English Reformation, had he been convinced that all the collisions
+between the moral laws and the rebellious wills of men, which are the
+burden of the years, are in the end obliterated in the slow onward
+movement of the race; but then perhaps his history would have lost in
+interest what it might have gained in philosophic breadth and balance.
+For it cannot be denied that feeling has given his narrative that most
+valuable quality&mdash;life.</p>
+
+<p>The general recognition of Froude's power, and the growing conviction
+that he was far nearer right than the theological school he so
+cordially detested, was vindicated by his appointment as Professor of
+History at Oxford to succeed Freeman, one of the severest critics of
+his historical fairness. He lived to deliver but three courses of
+lectures, one of which has been published in that delightful volume
+'The Life and Letters of Erasmus.' The others, 'English Seamen of the
+XVIth Century,' 'Lectures on the Council of Trent,' and the very able
+paper on Job in 'Short Studies on Great Subjects,' even if taken by
+themselves, would cause us to form a high opinion of the scope and
+range of Froude's powers. Those to whom brilliancy is synonymous with
+unsoundness may perhaps continue to call him merely a "brilliant
+writer"; but the general verdict will be that his brilliancy is the
+structural adornment of a well-fitted framework of thought.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/sign236.png" width="307" height="100" alt="Charles F. Johnson" title="Charles F. Johnson" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_GROWTH_OF_ENGLANDS_NAVY" id="THE_GROWTH_OF_ENGLANDS_NAVY"></a>THE GROWTH OF ENGLAND'S NAVY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Jean Paul the German poet said that God had given to France the empire
+of the land, to England the empire of the sea, and to his own country
+the empire of the air. The world has changed since Jean Paul's days.
+The wings of France have been clipped: the German Empire has become a
+solid thing: but England still holds her watery dominion; Britannia
+does still rule the waves, and in this proud position she has spread
+the English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6065" id="Page_6065">[Pg 6065]</a></span>race over the globe; she is peopling new Englands at the
+Antipodes; she has made her Queen Empress of India; and is in fact the
+very considerable phenomenon in the social and political world which
+all acknowledge her to be. And all this she has achieved in the course
+of three centuries, entirely in consequence of her predominance as an
+ocean power. Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that
+guards them,&mdash;her empire will come to an end, her colonies will fall
+off like leaves from a withered tree, and Britain will become once
+more an insignificant island in the North Sea, for the future students
+in Australian and New Zealand universities to discuss the fate of in
+their debating societies.</p>
+
+<p>How the English navy came to hold so extraordinary a position is worth
+reflecting on. Much has been written on it, but little, as it seems to
+me, which touches the heart of the matter. We are shown the power of
+our country growing and expanding. But how it grew; why, after a sleep
+of so many hundred years, the genius of our Scandinavian forefathers
+suddenly sprang again into life,&mdash;of this we are left without
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning was undoubtedly the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
+1588. Down to that time the sea sovereignty belonged to the Spaniards,
+and had been fairly won by them. The conquest of Granada had
+stimulated and elevated the Spanish character. The subjects of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and Philip II., were
+extraordinary men and accomplished extraordinary things. They
+stretched the limits of the known world; they conquered Mexico and
+Peru; they planted their colonies over the South-American continent;
+they took possession of the great West-Indian islands, and with so
+firm a grasp that Cuba at least will never lose the mark of the hand
+which seized it. They built their cities as if for eternity. They
+spread to the Indian Ocean, and gave their monarch's name to the
+Philippines. All this they accomplished in half a century, and as it
+were, they did it with a single hand; with the other they were
+fighting Moors and Turks, and protecting the coasts of the
+Mediterranean from the corsairs of Tunis and Constantinople.</p>
+
+<p>They had risen on the crest of the wave, and with their proud <i>Non
+Sufficit Orbis</i> were looking for new worlds to conquer, at a time when
+the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond
+their own fishing grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing
+from the port of London was scarce bigger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6066" id="Page_6066">[Pg 6066]</a></span> than a modern coasting
+collier. And yet within the space of a single ordinary life these
+insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards'
+grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign.
+How did it come about? What Cadmus had sown dragons' teeth in the
+furrows of the sea, for the race to spring from who manned the ships
+of Queen Elizabeth, who carried the flag of their own country round
+the globe, and challenged and fought the Spaniards on their own coasts
+and in their own harbors?</p>
+
+<p>The English sea power was the legitimate child of the Reformation. It
+grew, as I shall show you, directly out of the new despised
+Protestantism. Matthew Parker and Bishop Jewell, the judicious Hooker
+himself, excellent men as they were, would have written and preached
+to small purpose without Sir Francis Drake's cannon to play an
+accompaniment to their teaching. And again, Drake's cannon would not
+have roared so loudly and so widely, without seamen already trained in
+heart and hand to work his ships and level his artillery. It was to
+the superior seamanship, the superior quality of English ships and
+crews, that the Spaniards attributed their defeat. Where did these
+ships come from? Where and how did these mariners learn their trade?
+Historians talk enthusiastically of the national spirit of a people
+rising with a united heart to repel the invader, and so on. But
+national spirit could not extemporize a fleet, or produce trained
+officers and sailors to match the conquerors of Lepanto. One slight
+observation I must make here at starting, and certainly with no
+invidious purpose. It has been said confidently,&mdash;it has been
+repeated, I believe, by all modern writers,&mdash;that the Spanish invasion
+suspended in England the quarrels of creed, and united Protestants and
+Roman Catholics in defense of their Queen and country. They remind us
+especially that Lord Howard of Effingham, who was Elizabeth's admiral,
+was himself a Roman Catholic. But was it so? The Earl of Arundel, the
+head of the House of Howard, was a Roman Catholic, and he was in the
+Tower praying for the success of Medina Sidonia. Lord Howard of
+Effingham was no more a Roman Catholic than&mdash;I hope I am not taking
+away their character&mdash;than the present Archbishop of Canterbury or the
+Bishop of London. He was a Catholic, but an English Catholic, as those
+reverend prelates are. Roman Catholic he could not possibly have been,
+nor any one who on that great occasion was found on the side of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6067" id="Page_6067">[Pg 6067]</a></span>
+Elizabeth. A Roman Catholic is one who acknowledges the Roman Bishop's
+authority. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, had pronounced her
+deposed, had absolved her subjects from their allegiance and forbidden
+them to fight for her. No Englishman who fought on that great occasion
+for English liberty was, or could have been, in communion with Rome.
+Loose statements of this kind, lightly made, fall in with the modern
+humor. They are caught up, applauded, repeated, and pass unquestioned
+into history. It is time to correct them a little.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_DEATH_OF_COLONEL_GORING" id="THE_DEATH_OF_COLONEL_GORING"></a>THE DEATH OF COLONEL GORING</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Two Chiefs of Dunboy'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Fatally mistaking what was intended for a friendly warning, the
+colonel conceived that there was some one in the forge whom the smith
+wanted to conceal.</p>
+
+<p>"I may return or not," he said; "but I must first have a word with
+these strangers of yours. We can meet as friends for once, with
+nothing to dispute over."</p>
+
+<p>Minahan made no further attempt to prevent him from going in. If
+gentlemen chose to have their quarrels, he muttered between his teeth,
+it was no business of his.</p>
+
+<p>Goring pushed open the door and entered. By the dim light&mdash;for the
+shutter that had been thrown back had been closed again, and the only
+light came from a window in the roof&mdash;he made out three figures
+standing together at the further end of the forge, in one of whom,
+though he tried to conceal himself, he instantly recognized his
+visitor of the previous evening.</p>
+
+<p>"You here, my man?" he said. "You left my house two hours ago. Why are
+you not on your way home?"</p>
+
+<p>Sylvester, seeing he was discovered, turned his face full round, and
+in a voice quietly insolent, replied, "I fell in with some friends of
+mine on the road. We had a little business together, and it is good
+luck that has brought your honor to us while we are talking, for the
+jintlemen here have a word or two they would like to be saying to ye,
+colonel, before ye leave them."</p>
+
+<p>"To me!" said Goring, turning from Sylvester to the two figures, whose
+faces were still covered by their cloaks. "If these gentlemen are what
+I suppose them to be, I am glad to meet them, and will hear willingly
+what they may have to say."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6068" id="Page_6068">[Pg 6068]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps less willingly than you think, Colonel Goring," said the
+taller of the two, who rose and stepped behind him to the door, which
+he closed and barred. Goring, looking at him with some surprise, saw
+that he was the person whom he had met on the mountains, and had
+afterwards seen at the funeral at Derreen. The third man rose from a
+bench on which he had been leaning, lifted his cap, and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There is an old proverb, sir, that short accounts make long friends.
+There can be no friendship between you and me, but the account between
+us is of very old standing. I have returned to Ireland, only for a
+short stay; I am about to leave it, never to come back. A gentleman
+and a soldier, like yourself, cannot wish that I should go while that
+account is still unsettled. Our fortunate meeting here this morning
+provides us with an opportunity."</p>
+
+<p>It was Morty's voice that he heard, and Morty's face that he saw as he
+became accustomed to the gloom. He looked again at the pretended
+messenger from the carded curate, and he then remembered the old
+Sylvester who had brought the note from Lord Fitzmaurice to the agent
+from Kenmare. In an instant the meaning of the whole situation flashed
+across him. It was no casual re-encounter. He had been enticed into
+the place where he found himself, with some sinister and perhaps
+deadly purpose. A strange fatality had forced him again and again into
+collision with the man of whose ancestral lands he had come into
+possession. Once more, by a deliberate and treacherous contrivance, he
+and the chief of the O'Sullivans had been brought face to face
+together, and he was alone, without a friend within call of him;
+unless his tenant, who as he could now see had intended to give him
+warning, would interfere further in his defense. And of this he knew
+Ireland well enough to be aware that there was little hope.</p>
+
+<p>He supposed that they intended to murder him. The door, at which he
+involuntarily glanced, was fastened by this time with iron bolts. He
+was a man of great personal strength and activity, but in such a
+situation neither would be likely to avail him. Long inured to danger,
+and ready at all moments to meet whatever peril might threaten him, he
+calmly faced his adversary and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This meeting is not accidental, as you would have me believe. You
+have contrived it. Explain yourself further."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6069" id="Page_6069">[Pg 6069]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Colonel Goring," said Morty Sullivan, "you will recall the
+circumstances under which we last parted. Enemy as you are and always
+have been to me and mine, I will do you the justice to say that on
+that occasion you behaved like a gentleman and a man of courage. But
+our quarrel was not fought out. Persons present interfered between us.
+We are now alone, and can complete what was then left unfinished."</p>
+
+<p>"Whether I did well or ill, sir," the colonel answered, "in giving you
+the satisfaction which you demanded of me at the time you speak of, I
+will not now say. But I tell you that the only relations which can
+exist between us at present are those between a magistrate and a
+criminal who has forfeited his life. If you mean to murder me, you can
+do it; you have me at advantage. You can thus add one more to the list
+of villainies with which you have stained an honorable name. If you
+mean that I owe you a reparation for personal injuries, such as the
+customs of Ireland allow one gentleman to require from another, this,
+as you well know, is not the way to ask for it. But I acknowledge no
+such right. When I last encountered you I but partly knew you. I now
+know you altogether. You have been a pirate on the high seas. Your
+letters of marque do not cover you, for you are a subject of the King,
+and have broken your allegiance. Such as you are, you stand outside
+the pale of honorable men, and I should degrade the uniform I wear if
+I were to stoop to measure arms with you."</p>
+
+<p>The sallow olive of Morty's cheek turned livid. He clutched the bench
+before him, till the muscles of his hands stood out like knots of
+rope.</p>
+
+<p>"You are in my power, colonel," he said: "do not tempt me too far. If
+my sins have been many, my wrongs are more. It must be this or worse.
+One word from me, and you are a dead man."</p>
+
+<p>He laid four pistols on the smith's tool-chest. "Take a pair of them,"
+he said. "They are loaded alike. Take which you please. Let us stand
+on the opposite sides of this hovel, and so make an end. If I fall, I
+swear on my soul you shall have no hurt from any of my people. My
+friend Connell is an officer of mine, but he holds a commission
+besides in the Irish Brigade. There is no better-born gentleman in
+Kerry. His presence here is your sufficient security. You shall return
+to Dunboy as safe from harm as if you had the Viceroy's body-guard
+about you, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6070" id="Page_6070">[Pg 6070]</a></span> your own boat's crew that shot down my poor fellows at
+Glengariff. To this I pledge you my honor."</p>
+
+<p>"Your honor!" said Goring; "your honor! And you tempted me here by a
+lying tale, sent by the lips of yonder skulking rascal. That alone,
+sir, were there nothing else, would have sufficed to show what you
+are."</p>
+
+<p>A significant click caught the ear of both the speakers. Looking
+round, they saw Sylvester had cocked a pistol.</p>
+
+<p>"Drop that," said Morty, "or by God! kinsman of mine though you be, I
+will drive a bullet through the brain of you. Enough of this, sir," he
+said, turning to Goring. "Time passes, and this scene must end. I
+would have arranged it otherwise, but you yourself know that by this
+way alone I could have brought you to the meeting. Take the pistols, I
+say, or by the bones of my ancestors that lie buried under Dunboy
+Castle yonder, I will call in my men from outside, and they shall
+strip you bare, and score such marks on you as the quartermaster
+leaves on the slaves that you hire to fight your battles. Prince
+Charles will laugh when I tell him in Paris how I served one at least
+of the hounds that chased him at Culloden."</p>
+
+<p>The forge in which this scene was going on was perfectly familiar to
+Goring, for he had himself designed it and built it. There was the
+ordinary broad open front to the road, constructed of timber, which
+was completely shut. The rest of the building was of stone, and in the
+wall at the back there was a small door leading into a field, and
+thence into the country. Could this door be opened, there was a
+chance, though but a faint one, of escape. A bar lay across, but of no
+great thickness. The staple into which it ran was slight. A vigorous
+blow might shatter both.</p>
+
+<p>Sylvester caught the direction of Goring's eye, caught its meaning,
+and threw himself in the way. The colonel snatched a heavy hammer
+which stood against the wall. With the suddenness of an electric flash
+he struck Sylvester on the shoulder, broke his collar-bone, and hurled
+him back senseless, doubled over the anvil. A second stroke, catching
+the bar in the middle, shattered it in two, and the door hung upon the
+latch. Morty and Connell, neither of whom had intended foul play,
+hesitated, and in another moment Goring would have been free and away.
+Connell, recovering himself, sprang forward and closed with him. The
+colonel, who had been the most accomplished wrestler of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6071" id="Page_6071">[Pg 6071]</a></span> his regiment,
+whirled him round, flung him with a heavy fall on the floor, and had
+his hand on the latch when, half stunned as he was, Connell recovered
+his feet, drew a skene, and rushed at Colonel Goring again. So sudden
+it all was, so swift the struggle, and so dim the light, that from the
+other end it was hard to see what was happening. Wrenching the skene
+out of Connell's hands, and with the hot spirit of battle in him,
+Colonel Goring was on the point of driving it into his assailant's
+side.</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot, Morty! shoot, or I am a dead man!" Connell cried.</p>
+
+<p>Morty, startled and uncertain what to do, had mechanically snatched up
+a pistol when Sylvester was struck down. He raised his hand at
+Connell's cry. It shook from excitement, and locked together as the
+two figures were, he was as likely to hit friend as foe. Again Connell
+called, and Morty fired and missed; and the mark of the bullet is
+still shown in the wall of the smithy as a sacred reminiscence of a
+fight for Irish liberty. The second shot went true to its mark.
+Connell had been beaten down, though unwounded, and Goring's tall form
+stood out above him in clear view. This time Morty's hand did not fail
+him. A shiver passed through Goring's limbs. His arms dropped. He
+staggered back against the door, and the door yielded, and he fell
+upon the ground outside. But it was not to rise and fly. The ball had
+struck him clean above the ear, and buried itself in the brain. He was
+dead.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SCIENTIFIC_METHOD_APPLIED_TO_HISTORY" id="SCIENTIFIC_METHOD_APPLIED_TO_HISTORY"></a>SCIENTIFIC METHOD APPLIED TO HISTORY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Historical facts can only be verified by the skeptical and the
+inquiring, and skepticism and inquiry nip like a black frost the eager
+credulity in which legendary biographies took their rise. You can
+watch such stories as they grew in the congenial soil of belief. The
+great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted
+Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true,
+genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for
+themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their
+fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural
+powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them
+personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and
+portents<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6072" id="Page_6072">[Pg 6072]</a></span> vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St.
+Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He
+told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel
+to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor
+becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the
+county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely
+the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was
+feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us
+that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his
+message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august
+visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are
+imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid
+enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus
+and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and
+we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St.
+Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he
+comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope
+Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a
+wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen
+him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty
+times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate
+towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of
+them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick
+which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least
+as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very
+little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith
+and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of
+probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a
+story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of
+carelessness, credulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which
+we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that
+evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or
+superstition. To the medi&aelig;val writer, the more stupendous the miracle
+the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he
+could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but
+inherent fitness.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the
+first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the
+next or heroic we have accounts of real<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6073" id="Page_6073">[Pg 6073]</a></span> persons, but handed down to
+us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight
+was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old
+times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the
+figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as
+apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in
+stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental
+condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real
+life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring
+imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with
+certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain,
+prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation;
+they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or
+transferred from owner to owner,&mdash;manipulated to suit or decorate a
+preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry,
+where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles,
+and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no
+less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship,
+though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they
+resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one
+another.</p>
+
+<p>At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper.
+The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape
+out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is
+a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological
+string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is
+not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he
+means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that
+ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what part
+of the world we please,&mdash;take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in
+Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,&mdash;he is but a step in advance
+of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never
+bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never
+speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He
+takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his
+hand,&mdash;the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He
+transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more
+picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down,
+though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic.
+Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6074" id="Page_6074">[Pg 6074]</a></span> Curtius jumping into the gulf;
+our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of
+the spider,&mdash;stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity
+with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish
+village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the
+sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however
+charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated
+into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth
+of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into
+the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of
+historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy,
+Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own
+departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet
+entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as
+our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest.
+The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,&mdash;a people so
+pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character
+indelibly into the constitution of Europe,&mdash;these Romans, at the very
+time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed
+themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by
+a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the
+entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is
+likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things
+which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato
+tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face
+without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the
+world betray sometimes analogous misgivings.</p>
+
+<p>In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably
+harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first
+great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers.
+Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time,
+he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis
+and Plat&aelig;a. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time
+thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was
+not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager,
+cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were
+qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most
+delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot;
+and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6075" id="Page_6075">[Pg 6075]</a></span>
+was like Shakespeare's,&mdash;a calm, intelligent insight into human
+things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or
+other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he
+saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world;
+and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard
+and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather
+believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be
+critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what
+he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his
+judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain
+evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same
+space so much important truth,&mdash;truth which survives the sharpest test
+that modern discoveries can apply to it.</p>
+
+<p>The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best
+of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the
+same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what
+philosophers call subjectivity,&mdash;the projection into the narrative of
+the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories.
+Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the
+representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps
+consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a
+statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate
+supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account
+of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome.
+The boldest fabricator would not venture to introduce an entire and
+complete invention. This was not the case with the older authors.
+Thucydides tells us frankly that the speeches which he interweaves
+with his narrative were his own composition. They were intended as
+dramatic representations of the opinions of the factions and parties
+with which Greece was divided, and they were assigned to this person
+or to that, as he supposed them to be internally suitable. Herodotus
+had set Thucydides the example, and it was universally followed. No
+speech given by any old historian can be accepted as literally true
+unless there is a specific intimation to that effect. Deception was
+neither practiced nor pretended. It was a convenient method of
+exhibiting characters and situations, and it was therefore adopted
+without hesitation or reserve.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6076" id="Page_6076">[Pg 6076]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_DEATH_OF_THOMAS_BECKET" id="THE_DEATH_OF_THOMAS_BECKET"></a>THE DEATH OF THOMAS BECKET</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'</h4>
+
+
+<p>The knights were introduced. They advanced. The archbishop neither
+spoke nor looked at them, but continued talking to a monk who was next
+him. He himself was sitting on a bed. The rest of the party present
+were on the floor. The knights seated themselves in the same manner,
+and for a few moments there was silence. Then Becket's black, restless
+eye glanced from one to the other. He slightly noticed Tracy; and
+Fitzurse said a few unrecorded sentences to him, which ended with "God
+help you!" To Becket's friends the words sounded like insolence. They
+may have meant no more than pity for the deliberate fool who was
+forcing destruction upon himself.</p>
+
+<p>Becket's face flushed. Fitzurse went on, "We bring you the commands of
+the King beyond the sea; will you hear us in public or in private?"
+Becket said he cared not. "In private, then," said Fitzurse. The monks
+thought afterwards that Fitzurse had meant to kill the archbishop
+where he sat. If the knights had entered the palace, thronged as it
+was with men, with any such intention, they would scarcely have left
+their swords behind them. The room was cleared, and a short
+altercation followed, of which nothing is known save that it ended
+speedily in high words on both sides. Becket called in his clergy
+again, his lay servants being excluded, and bade Fitzurse go on. "Be
+it so," Sir Reginald said. "Listen, then, to what the King says. When
+the peace was made, he put aside all his complaints against you. He
+allowed you to return, as you desired, free to your see. You have now
+added contempt to your other offenses. You have broken the treaty. You
+have allowed your pride to tempt you to defy your lord and master to
+your own sorrow. You have censured the bishops by whose administration
+the Prince was crowned. You have pronounced an anathema against the
+King's ministers, by whose advice he is guided in the management of
+the empire. You have made it plain that if you could you would take
+the Prince's crown from him. Your plots and contrivances to attain
+your ends are notorious to all men. Say, then, will you attend us to
+the King's presence, and there answer for yourself? For this we are
+sent."</p>
+
+<p>The archbishop declared that he had never wished any hurt to the
+Prince. The King had no occasion to be displeased if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6077" id="Page_6077">[Pg 6077]</a></span> crowds came
+about him in the towns and cities, after having been so long deprived
+of his presence. If he had done any wrong he would make satisfaction,
+but he protested against being suspected of intentions which had never
+entered his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Fitzurse did not enter into an altercation with him, but
+continued:&mdash;"The King commands further that you and your clerks repair
+without delay to the young King's presence, and swear allegiance, and
+promise to amend your faults."</p>
+
+<p>The archbishop's temper was fast rising. "I will do whatever may be
+reasonable," he said, "but I tell you plainly, the King shall have no
+oaths from me, nor from any one of my clergy. There has been too much
+perjury already. I have absolved many, with God's help, who had
+perjured themselves. I will absolve the rest when he permits."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand you to say that you will not obey," said Fitzurse, and
+went on in the same tone:&mdash;"The King commands you to absolve the
+bishops whom you have excommunicated without his permission" (<i>absque
+licenti&acirc; su&acirc;</i>).</p>
+
+<p>"The Pope sentenced the bishops," the archbishop said. "If you are not
+pleased, you must go to him. The affair is none of mine."</p>
+
+<p>Fitzurse said it had been done at his instigation, which he did not
+deny; but he proceeded to reassert that the King had given his
+permission. He had complained at the time of the peace of the injury
+which he had suffered in the coronation, and the King had told him
+that he might obtain from the Pope any satisfaction for which he liked
+to ask.</p>
+
+<p>If this was all the consent which the King had given, the pretense of
+his authority was inexcusable. Fitzurse could scarce hear the
+archbishop out with patience. "Ay, ay!" said he; "will you make the
+King out to be a traitor, then? The King gave you leave to
+excommunicate the bishops when they were acting by his own order! It
+is more than we can bear to listen to such monstrous accusations."</p>
+
+<p>John of Salisbury tried to check the archbishop's imprudent tongue,
+and whispered to him to speak to the knights in private; but when the
+passion was on him, no mule was more ungovernable than Becket. Drawing
+to a conclusion, Fitzurse said to him:&mdash;"Since you refuse to do any
+one of those things which the King requires of you, his final commands
+are that you and your clergy shall forthwith depart out of this realm
+and out of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6078" id="Page_6078">[Pg 6078]</a></span> his dominions, never more to return. You have broken the
+peace, and the King cannot trust you again."</p>
+
+<p>Becket answered wildly that he would not go&mdash;never again would he
+leave England. Nothing but death should now part him from his church.
+Stung by the reproach of ill-faith, he poured out the catalogue of his
+own injuries. He had been promised restoration, and instead of
+restoration he had been robbed and insulted. Ranulf de Broc had laid
+an embargo on his wine. Robert de Broc had cut off his mule's tail;
+and now the knights had come to menace him.</p>
+
+<p>De Morville said that if he had suffered any wrong he had only to
+appeal to the Council, and justice would be done.</p>
+
+<p>Becket did not wish for the Council's justice. "I have complained
+enough," he said; "so many wrongs are daily heaped upon me that I
+could not find messengers to carry the tale of them. I am refused
+access to the court. Neither one king nor the other will do me right.
+I will endure it no more. I will use my own powers as archbishop, and
+no child of man shall prevent me."</p>
+
+<p>"You will lay the realm under interdict, then, and excommunicate the
+whole of us?" said Fitzurse.</p>
+
+<p>"So God help me," said one of the others, "he shall not do that. He
+has excommunicated over-many already. We have borne too long with
+him."</p>
+
+<p>The knights sprang to their feet, twisting their gloves and swinging
+their arms. The archbishop rose. In the general noise words could no
+longer be accurately heard. At length the knights moved to leave the
+room, and addressing the archbishop's attendants, said, "In the King's
+name we command you to see that this man does not escape."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I shall fly, then?" cried the archbishop. "Neither for
+the King nor for any living man will I fly. You cannot be more ready
+to kill me than I am to die.... Here you will find me," he shouted,
+following them to the door as they went out, and calling after them.
+Some of his friends thought that he had asked De Morville to come back
+and speak quietly with him, but it was not so. He returned to his
+seat, still excited and complaining.</p>
+
+<p>"My lord," said John of Salisbury to him, "it is strange that you will
+never be advised. What occasion was there for you to go after these
+men and exasperate them with your bitter speeches?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6079" id="Page_6079">[Pg 6079]</a></span> You would have
+done better, surely, by being quiet and giving them a milder answer.
+They mean no good, and you only commit yourself."</p>
+
+<p>The archbishop sighed, and said, "I have done with advice. I know what
+I have before me."</p>
+
+<p>It was four o'clock when the knights entered. It was now nearly five;
+and unless there were lights the room must have been almost dark.
+Beyond the archbishop's chamber was an ante-room, beyond the ante-room
+the hall. The knights, passing through the hall into the quadrangle,
+and thence to the lodge, called their men to arms. The great gate was
+closed. A mounted guard was stationed outside, with orders to allow no
+one to go out or in. The knights threw off their cloaks and buckled on
+their swords. This was the work of a few minutes. From the cathedral
+tower the vesper bell was beginning to sound. The archbishop had
+seated himself to recover from the agitation of the preceding scene,
+when a breathless monk rushed in to say that the knights were arming.
+"Who cares? Let them arm," was all that the archbishop said. His
+clergy was less indifferent. If the archbishop was ready for death,
+they were not. The door from the hall into the court was closed and
+barred, and a short respite was thus secured. The intention of the
+knights, it may be presumed, was to seize the archbishop and carry him
+off to Saltwood or to De Morville's castle at Knaresborough, or
+perhaps to Normandy. Coming back to execute their purpose, they found
+themselves stopped by the hall door. To burst it open would require
+time; the ante-room between the hall and the archbishop's apartments
+opened by an oriel window and an outside stair into a garden. Robert
+de Broc, who knew the house well, led the way to it in the dark. The
+steps were broken, but a ladder was standing against the window, by
+which the knights mounted, and the crash of the falling casement told
+the fluttered group about the archbishop that their enemies were upon
+them. There was still a moment. The party who entered by the window,
+instead of turning into the archbishop's room, first went into the
+hall to open the door and admit their comrades. From the archbishop's
+room a second passage, little used, opened into the northwest corner
+of the cloister, and from the cloister there was a way into the north
+transept of the cathedral. The cry was "To the church! To the church!"
+There at least there would be immediate safety.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6080" id="Page_6080">[Pg 6080]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The archbishop had told the knights that they would find him where
+they left him. He did not choose to show fear; or he was afraid, as
+some thought, of losing his martyrdom. He would not move. The bell had
+ceased. They reminded him that vespers had begun, and that he ought to
+be in the cathedral. Half yielding, half resisting, his friends swept
+him down the passage into the cloister. His cross had been forgotten
+in the haste. He refused to stir till it was fetched and carried
+before him as usual. Then only, himself incapable of fear, and
+rebuking the terror of the rest, he advanced deliberately to the door
+into the south transept. His train was scattered behind him, all along
+the cloister from the passage leading out of the palace. As he entered
+the church, cries were heard, from which it became plain that the
+knights had broken into the archbishop's room, had found the passage,
+and were following him. Almost immediately Fitzurse, Tracy, De
+Morville, and Le Breton were discerned in the dim light, coming
+through the cloister in their armor, with drawn swords, and axes in
+their left hands. A company of men-at-arms was behind them. In front
+they were driving before them a frightened flock of monks.</p>
+
+<p>From the middle of the transept in which the archbishop was standing,
+a single pillar rose into the roof. On the eastern side of it opened a
+chapel of St. Benedict, in which were the tombs of several of the old
+primates. On the west, running of course parallel to the nave, was a
+Lady chapel. Behind the pillar, steps led up into the choir, where
+voices were already singing vespers. A faint light may have been
+reflected into the transept from the choir tapers, and candles may
+perhaps have been burning before the altars in the two chapels; of
+light from without through the windows at that hour there could have
+been none. Seeing the knights coming on, the clergy who had entered
+with the archbishop closed the door and barred it. "What do you fear?"
+he cried in a clear, loud voice. "Out of the way, you coward! the
+Church of God must not be made a fortress." He stepped back and
+reopened the door with his own hands, to let in the trembling wretches
+who had been shut out among the wolves. They rushed past him, and
+scattered in the hiding-places of the vast sanctuary, in the crypt, in
+the galleries, or behind the tombs. All, or almost all, even of his
+closest friends,&mdash;William of Canterbury, Benedict, John of Salisbury
+himself,&mdash;forsook him to shift for themselves, admitting frankly that
+they were unworthy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6081" id="Page_6081">[Pg 6081]</a></span> of martyrdom. The archbishop was left alone with
+his chaplain Fitzstephen, Robert of Merton his old master, and Edward
+Grim, the stranger from Cambridge,&mdash;or perhaps with Grim only, who
+says that he was the only one who stayed, and was the only one
+certainly who showed any sign of courage. A cry had been raised in the
+choir that armed men were breaking into the cathedral. The vespers
+ceased; the few monks assembled left their seats and rushed to the
+edge of the transept, looking wildly into the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The archbishop was on the fourth step beyond the central pillar
+ascending into the choir, when the knights came in. The outline of his
+figure may have been just visible to them, if light fell upon it from
+candles in the Lady chapel. Fitzurse passed to the right of the
+pillar, De Morville, Tracy, and Le Breton to the left. Robert de Broc,
+and Hugh Mauclerc, another apostate priest, remained at the door by
+which they entered. A voice cried, "Where is the traitor? Where is
+Thomas Becket?" There was silence; such a name could not be
+acknowledged. "Where is the archbishop?" Fitzurse shouted. "I am
+here," the archbishop replied, descending the steps, and meeting the
+knights full in the face. "What do you want with me? I am not afraid
+of your swords. I will not do what is unjust." The knights closed
+round him. "Absolve the persons whom you have excommunicated," they
+said, "and take off the suspensions." "They have made no
+satisfaction," he answered; "I will not." "Then you shall die as you
+have deserved," they said.</p>
+
+<p>They had not meant to kill him&mdash;certainly not at that time and in that
+place. One of them touched him on the shoulder with the flat of his
+sword, and hissed in his ears, "Fly, or you are a dead man." There was
+still time; with a few steps he would have been lost in the gloom of
+the cathedral, and could have concealed him in any one of a hundred
+hiding-places. But he was careless of life, and he felt that his time
+was come. "I am ready to die," he said. "May the Church through my
+blood obtain peace and liberty! I charge you in the name of God that
+you hurt no one here but me."</p>
+
+<p>The people from the town were now pouring into the cathedral; De
+Morville was keeping them back with difficulty at the head of the
+steps from the choir, and there was danger of a rescue. Fitzurse
+seized him, meaning to drag him off as a prisoner. He had been calm so
+far; his pride rose at the indignity of an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6082" id="Page_6082">[Pg 6082]</a></span> arrest. "Touch me not,
+thou abominable wretch!" he said, wrenching his cloak out of
+Fitzurse's grasp. "Off, thou pander, thou!" Le Breton and Fitzurse
+grasped him again, and tried to force him upon Tracy's back. He
+grappled with Tracy and flung him to the ground, and then stood with
+his back against the pillar, Edward Grim supporting him. Fitzurse,
+stung by the foul epithet which Becket had thrown at him, swept his
+sword over him and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the
+pavement, struck direct at his head. Grim raised his arm and caught
+the blow. The arm fell broken, and the one friend found faithful sank
+back disabled against the wall. The sword with its remaining force
+wounded the archbishop above the forehead, and the blood trickled down
+his face. Standing firmly, with his hands clasped, he bent his neck
+for the death-stroke, saying in a low voice, "I am prepared to die for
+Christ and for his Church." These were his last words. Tracy again
+struck him. He fell forward upon his knees and hands. In that position
+Le Breton dealt him a blow which severed the scalp from the head and
+broke the sword against the stone, saying, "Take that for my Lord
+William." De Broc or Mauclerc&mdash;the needless ferocity was attributed to
+both of them&mdash;strode forward from the cloister door, set his foot on
+the neck of the dead lion, and spread the brains upon the pavement
+with his sword's point. "We may go," he said; "the traitor is dead,
+and will trouble us no more."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the murder of Becket, the echoes of which are still heard
+across seven centuries of time, and which, be the final judgment upon
+it what it may, has its place among the most enduring incidents of
+English history. Was Becket a martyr, or was he justly executed as a
+traitor to his sovereign? Even in that supreme moment of terror and
+wonder, opinions were divided among his own monks. That very night
+Grim heard one of them say, "He is no martyr, he is justly served."
+Another said&mdash;scarcely feeling, perhaps, the meaning of the
+words,&mdash;"He wished to be king and more than king. Let him be king, let
+him be king." Whether the cause for which he died was to prevail, or
+whether the sacrifice had been in vain, hung on the answer which would
+be given to this momentous question. In a few days or weeks an answer
+came in a form to which in that age no rejoinder was possible; and the
+only uncertainty which remained at Canterbury was whether it was
+lawful to use the ordinary prayers for the repose of the dead man's
+soul, or whether, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6083" id="Page_6083">[Pg 6083]</a></span>in consequence of the astounding miracles which
+were instantly worked by his remains, the Pope's judgment ought not to
+be anticipated, and the archbishop ought not to be at once adored as a
+saint in heaven.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHARACTER_OF_HENRY_VIII" id="CHARACTER_OF_HENRY_VIII"></a>CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII.</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'History of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which
+both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was
+assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records,
+I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither
+any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found
+that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other
+fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to
+deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy,
+statesmen whose beneficent legislature survives among the most valued
+of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the
+English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable
+atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the
+Roman Senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.</p>
+
+<p>Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the
+narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of
+unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the
+conditions, internal and external, under which his task was allotted
+to him, he, like every other man, ought to be judged. He was
+inconsistent: he can bear the reproach of it. He ended by accepting
+and approving what he had commenced with persecuting; yet it was with
+the honest inconsistency which distinguishes the conduct of most men
+of practical ability in times of change, and even by virtue of which
+they obtain their success. If at the commencement of the movement he
+had regarded the eucharist as a "remembrance," he must either have
+concealed his convictions or he would have forfeited his throne; if he
+had been a stationary bigot, the Reformation might have waited for a
+century, and would have been conquered only by an internecine war.</p>
+
+<p>But as the nation moved the King moved, leading it, but not outrunning
+it; checking those who went too fast, dragging<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6084" id="Page_6084">[Pg 6084]</a></span> forward those who
+lagged behind. The conservatives, all that was sound and good among
+them, trusted him because he so long continued to share their
+conservatism; when he threw it aside he was not reproached with breach
+of confidence, because his own advance had accompanied theirs.</p>
+
+<p>Protestants have exclaimed against the Six Articles Bill; Romanists
+against the Act of Supremacy. Philosophers complain that the
+prejudices of the people were needlessly violated, that opinions
+should have been allowed to be free, and the reform of religion have
+been left to be accomplished by reason. Yet, however cruel was the Six
+Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were
+unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden
+miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his
+eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably,
+had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles
+of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was
+itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared
+Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of
+enforcing it by violence. His personal exertions were ever to mitigate
+the action of the law, while its letter was sustained; and England at
+its worst was a harbor of refuge to the Protestants, compared to the
+Netherlands, to France, to Spain, or even to Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>That the Romanists should have regarded him as a tyrant is natural;
+and were it true that English subjects owed fealty to the Pope, their
+feeling was just. But however desirable it may be to leave religious
+opinion unfettered, it is certain that if England was legitimately
+free, she could tolerate no difference of opinion on a question of
+allegiance, so long as Europe was conspiring to bring her back into
+slavery. So long as the English Romanists refused to admit without
+mental reservation that, if foreign enemies invaded this country in
+the Pope's name, their place must be at the side of their own
+sovereign, "religion" might palliate the moral guilt of their treason,
+but it could not exempt them from its punishment.</p>
+
+<p>But these matters have been discussed in the details of this history,
+where alone they can be understood.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond and besides the Reformation, the constitution of these islands
+now rests in large measure on foundations laid in this reign. Henry
+brought Ireland within the reach of English civilization. He absorbed
+Wales and the Palatinates into the general English system. He it was
+who raised the House of Commons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6085" id="Page_6085">[Pg 6085]</a></span> from the narrow duty of voting
+supplies, and of passing without discussion the measures of the Privy
+Council, and converted them into the first power in the State under
+the Crown. When he ascended the throne, so little did the Commons care
+for their privileges that their attendance at the sessions of
+Parliament was enforced by a law. They woke into life in 1529, and
+they became the right hand of the King to subdue the resistance of the
+House of Lords, and to force upon them a course of legislation which
+from their hearts they detested. Other kings in times of difficulty
+summoned their "great councils," composed of peers, or prelates, or
+municipal officials, or any persons whom they pleased to nominate.
+Henry VIII. broke through the ancient practice, and ever threw himself
+on the representatives of the people. By the Reformation and by the
+power which he forced upon them, he had so interwoven the House of
+Commons with the highest business of the State that the peers
+thenceforward sunk to be their shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Something, too, ought to be said of his individual exertions in the
+details of State administration. In his earlier life, though active
+and assiduous, he found leisure for elegant accomplishments, for
+splendid amusements, for relaxations careless, extravagant, sometimes
+questionable. As his life drew onwards, his lighter tastes
+disappeared, and the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into
+the business of the commonwealth. Those who have examined the printed
+State papers may form some impression of his industry from the
+documents which are his own composition, and the letters which he
+wrote and received: but only persons who have seen the original
+manuscripts, who have observed the traces of his pen in side-notes and
+corrections, and the handwritings of his secretaries in diplomatic
+commissions, in drafts of Acts of Parliament, in expositions and
+formularies, in articles of faith, in proclamations, in the countless
+multitude of documents of all sorts, secular or ecclesiastical, which
+contain the real history of this extraordinary reign,&mdash;only they can
+realize the extent of labor to which he sacrificed himself, and which
+brought his life to a premature close. His personal faults were great,
+and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper
+blemishes would be but as scars upon the features of a sovereign who
+in trying times sustained nobly the honor of the English name, and
+carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its
+history.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6086" id="Page_6086">[Pg 6086]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="ON_A_SIDING_AT_A_RAILWAY_STATION" id="ON_A_SIDING_AT_A_RAILWAY_STATION"></a>ON A SIDING AT A RAILWAY STATION</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Some years ago I was traveling by railway, no matter whence or
+whither. I was in a second-class carriage. We had been long on the
+road, and had still some distance before us, when one evening our
+journey was brought unexpectedly to an end by the train running into a
+siding. The guards opened the doors, we were told that we could
+proceed no further, and were required to alight. The passengers were
+numerous, and of all ranks and sorts. There were third class, second,
+first, with saloon carriages for several great persons of high
+distinction. We had ministers of State, judges on circuit, directors,
+leading men of business, idle young men of family who were out amusing
+themselves, an archbishop, several ladies, and a duke and duchess with
+their suite. These favored travelers had Pullman cars to themselves,
+and occupied as much room as was allotted to scores of plebeians. I
+had amused myself for several days in observing the luxurious
+appurtenances by which they were protected against discomfort,&mdash;the
+piles of cushions and cloaks, the baskets of dainties, the novels and
+magazines to pass away the time, and the profound attention which they
+met with from the conductors and station-masters on the line. The rest
+of us were a miscellaneous crowd,&mdash;commercial people, lawyers,
+artists, men of letters, tourists moving about for pleasure or because
+they had nothing to do; and in third-class carriages, artisans and
+laborers in search of work, women looking for husbands or for service,
+or beggars flying from starvation in one part of the world to find it
+follow them like their shadows, let them go where they pleased. All
+these were huddled together, feeding hardly on such poor provisions as
+they carried with them or could pick up at the stopping-places. No
+more consideration was shown them than if they had been so many
+cattle. But they were merry enough: songs and sounds of laughter came
+from their windows, and notwithstanding all their conveniences, the
+languid-looking fine people in the large compartments seemed to me to
+get through their journey with less enjoyment after all than their
+poor fellow travelers. These last appeared to be of tougher texture,
+to care less for being jolted and shaken, to be better humored and
+kinder to one another. They had found life go hard with them wherever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6087" id="Page_6087">[Pg 6087]</a></span>
+they had been, and not being accustomed to have everything which they
+wished for, they were less selfish and more considerate.</p>
+
+<p>The intimation that our journey was for the present at an end came on
+most of us as an unpleasant surprise. The grandees got out in a high
+state of indignation. They called for their servants, but their
+servants did not hear them, or laughed and passed on. The conductors
+had forgotten to be obsequious. All classes on the platform were
+suddenly on a level. A beggar woman hustled the duchess, as she was
+standing astonished because her maid had left her to carry her own
+bag. The patricians were pushed about among the crowd with no more
+concern than if they had been common mortals. They demanded loudly to
+see the station-master. The minister complained angrily of the delay;
+an important negotiation would be imperiled by his detention, and he
+threatened the company with the displeasure of his department. A
+consequential youth who had just heard of the death of his elder
+brother was flying home to take his inheritance. A great lady had
+secured, as she had hoped, a brilliant match for her daughter; her
+work over, she had been at the baths to recover from the dissipation
+of the season; difficulty had arisen unlooked for, and unless she was
+at hand to remove it the worst consequences might be feared. A banker
+declared that the credit of a leading commercial house might fail,
+unless he could be at home on the day fixed for his return; he alone
+could save it. A solicitor had the evidence in his portmanteau which
+would determine the succession to the lands and title of an ancient
+family. An elderly gentleman was in despair about his young wife, whom
+he had left at home; he had made a will by which she was to lose his
+fortune if she married again after his death, but the will was lying
+in his desk unsigned. The archbishop was on his way to a synod, where
+the great question was to be discussed whether gas might be used at
+the altar instead of candles. The altar candles were blessed before
+they were used, and the doubt was whether gas could be blessed. The
+right reverend prelate conceived that if the gas tubes were made in
+the shape of candles the difficulty could be got over, but he feared
+that without his moderating influence the majority might come to a
+rash decision.</p>
+
+<p>All these persons were clamoring over their various anxieties with the
+most na&iuml;ve frankness, the truth coming freely out,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6088" id="Page_6088">[Pg 6088]</a></span> whatever it might
+be. One distinguished-looking lady in deep mourning, with a sad,
+gentle face, alone was resigned and hopeful. It seemed that her
+husband had been stopped not long before at the same station. She
+thought it possible that she might meet him again.</p>
+
+<p>The station-master listened to the complaints with composed
+indifference. He told the loudest that they need not alarm themselves.
+The State would survive the absence of the minister. The minister, in
+fact, was not thinking of the State at all, but of the party triumph
+which he expected; and the peerage which was to be his reward, the
+station-master said, would now be of no use to him. The youth had a
+second brother who would succeed instead of him, and the tenants would
+not be inconvenienced by the change. The fine lady's daughter would
+marry to her own liking instead of her mother's, and would be all the
+happier for it. The commercial house was already insolvent, and the
+longer it lasted the more innocent people would be ruined by it. The
+boy whom the lawyer intended to make into a rich baronet was now
+working industriously at school, and would grow up a useful man. If a
+great estate fell in to him he would be idle and dissolute. The old
+man might congratulate himself that he had escaped so soon from the
+scrape into which he had fallen. His wife would marry an adventurer,
+and would suffer worse from inheriting his fortune. The archbishop was
+commended for his anxiety. His solution of the candle problem was no
+doubt an excellent one; but his clergy were now provided with a
+harmless subject to quarrel over, and if it was adopted they might
+fall out over something else which might be seriously mischievous.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean, then, that you are not going to send us forward at all?"
+the minister inquired sternly.</p>
+
+<p>"You will see," the station-master answered with a curious short
+laugh. I observed that he looked more gently at the lady in mourning.
+She had said nothing, but he knew what was in her mind, and though he
+held out no hope in words that her wish would be gratified, he smiled
+sadly, and the irony passed out of his face.</p>
+
+<p>The crowd meanwhile were standing about the platform, whistling tunes
+or amusing themselves, not ill-naturedly at the distress of their
+grand companions. Something considerable was happening. But they had
+so long experienced the ups and downs of things that they were
+prepared for what fortune might send.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6089" id="Page_6089">[Pg 6089]</a></span> They had not expected to find a
+Paradise where they were going, and one place might be as good as
+another. They had nothing belonging to them except the clothes they
+stood in and their bits of skill in their different trades. Wherever
+men were, there would be need of cobblers, and tailors, and smiths,
+and carpenters. If not, they might fall on their feet somehow, if
+there was work to be done of any sort.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a bell rang, a door was flung open, and we were ordered into
+a waiting-room, where we were told that our luggage was to be
+examined. It was a large, barely furnished apartment, like the <i>salle
+d'attente</i> at the Northern Railway Station at Paris. A rail ran
+across, behind which we were all penned; opposite to us was the usual
+long table, on which were piled boxes, bags, and portmanteaus, and
+behind them stood a row of officials, in a plain uniform with gold
+bands round their caps, and the dry peremptory manner which passengers
+accustomed to deference so particularly dislike. At their backs was a
+screen extending across the room, reaching half-way to the ceiling; in
+the rear of it there was apparently an office.</p>
+
+<p>We each looked to see that our particular belongings were safe, but we
+were surprised to find that we could recognize none of them. Packages
+there were in plenty, alleged to be the property of the passengers who
+had come in by the train. They were arranged in the three
+classes,&mdash;first, second, and third,&mdash;but the proportions were
+inverted: most of it was labeled as the luggage of the travelers in
+fustian, who had brought nothing with them but what they carried in
+their hands; a moderate heap stood where the second-class luggage
+should have been, and some of superior quality; but none of us could
+make out the shapes of our own trunks. As to the grand ladies and
+gentlemen, the innumerable articles which I had seen put as theirs
+into the van were nowhere to be found. A few shawls and cloaks lay
+upon the planks, and that was all. There was a loud outcry; but the
+officials were accustomed to it, and took no notice. The
+station-master, who was still in charge of us, said briefly that the
+saloon luggage would be sent forward in the next train. The late
+owners would have no more use for it, and it would be delivered to
+their friends.</p>
+
+<p>The late owners! Were we no longer actual owners, then? My individual
+loss was not great, and besides, it might be made up to me; for I saw
+my name on a strange box on the table,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6090" id="Page_6090">[Pg 6090]</a></span> and being of curious
+disposition, the singularity of the adventure made it interesting to
+me. The consternation of the rest was indescribable. The minister
+supposed that he had fallen among communists, who disbelieved in
+property, and was beginning a speech on the elementary conditions of
+society; when silence was called, and the third-class passengers were
+ordered to advance, that their boxes might be opened. Each man had his
+own carefully docketed. The lids flew off, and within, instead of
+clothes, and shoes, and dressing apparatus, and money, and jewels, and
+such-like, were simply samples of the work which he had done in his
+life. There was an account-book also, in which were entered the number
+of days which he had worked, the number and size of the fields, etc.,
+which he had drained and inclosed and plowed, the crops which he had
+reaped, the walls which he had built, the metal which he had dug out
+and smelted and fashioned into articles of use to mankind, the leather
+which he had tanned, the clothes which he had woven,&mdash;all entered with
+punctual exactness; and on the opposite page, the wages which he had
+received, and the share which had been allotted to him of the good
+things which he had helped to create.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his work, so specifically called, there were his actions,&mdash;his
+affection for his parents or his wife and children, his self-denials,
+his charities, his purity, his truth, his honesty; or it might be ugly
+catalogues of sins and oaths and drunkenness and brutality. But
+inquiry into action was reserved for a second investigation before a
+higher commissioner. The first examination was confined to the literal
+work done by each man for the general good,&mdash;how much he had
+contributed, and how much society had done for him in return; and no
+one, it seemed, could be allowed to go any further without a
+certificate of having passed this test satisfactorily. With the
+workmen, the balance in most instances was found enormously in their
+favor. The state of the case was so clear that the scrutiny was
+rapidly got over, and they and their luggage were passed in to the
+higher court. A few were found whose boxes were empty, who had done
+nothing useful all their lives, and had subsisted by begging and
+stealing. These were ordered to stand aside till the rest of us had
+been disposed of.</p>
+
+<p>The saloon passengers were taken next. Most of them, who had nothing
+at all to show, were called up together and were asked what they had
+to say for themselves. A well-dressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6091" id="Page_6091">[Pg 6091]</a></span> gentleman, who spoke for the
+rest, said that the whole investigation was a mystery to him. He and
+his friends had been born to good fortunes, and had found themselves,
+on entering upon life, amply provided for. They had never been told
+that work was required of them, either work with their hands or work
+with their heads,&mdash;in fact, work of any kind. It was right of course
+for the poor to work, because they could not honestly live otherwise.
+For themselves, they had spent their time in amusements, generally
+innocent. They had paid for everything which they had consumed. They
+had stolen nothing, taken nothing from any man by violence or fraud.
+They had kept the Commandments, all ten of them, from the time when
+they were old enough to understand them. The speaker, at least,
+declared that he had no breach of any Commandment on his own
+conscience, and he believed that he might say as much of his
+companions. They were superior people, who had been always looked up
+to and well spoken of; and to call upon them to show what they had
+done was against reason and equity.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen," said the chief official, "we have heard this many times;
+yet as often as it is repeated we feel fresh astonishment. You have
+been in a world where work is the condition of life. Not a meal can be
+had by any man that some one has not worked to produce. Those who work
+deserve to eat; those who do not work deserve to starve. There are but
+three ways of living: by working, by stealing, or by begging. Those
+who have not lived by the first have lived by one of the other two.
+And no matter how superior you think yourselves, you will not pass
+here till you have something of your own to produce. You have had your
+wages beforehand&mdash;ample wages, as you acknowledge yourselves. What
+have you to show?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wages!" the speaker said: "we are not hired servants; we received no
+wages. What we spent was our own. All the orders we received were that
+we were not to do wrong. We have done no wrong. I appeal to the higher
+court."</p>
+
+<p>But the appeal could not be received. To all who presented themselves
+with empty boxes, no matter who they were, or how excellent their
+characters appeared to one another, there was the irrevocable
+answer&mdash;"No admittance, till you come better furnished." All who were
+in this condition, the duke and duchess among them, were ordered to
+stand aside with the thieves. The duchess declared that she had given
+the finest parties in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6092" id="Page_6092">[Pg 6092]</a></span> season, and as it was universally agreed
+that they had been the most tedious, and that no one had found any
+pleasure there, a momentary doubt rose whether they might not have
+answered some useful purpose in disgusting people with such modes of
+entertainment; but no evidence of this was forthcoming: the world had
+attended them because the world had nothing else to do, and she and
+her guests had been alike unprofitable. Thus the large majority of the
+saloon passengers was disposed of. The minister, the archbishop, the
+lawyer, the banker, and others who although they had no material work
+credited to them had yet been active and laborious in their different
+callings, were passed to the superior judges.</p>
+
+<p>Our turn came next,&mdash;ours of the second class,&mdash;and a motley gathering
+we were. Busy we must all have been, from the multitude of articles
+which we found assigned to us: manufacturers with their wares,
+solicitors with their law-suits, doctors and clergymen with the bodies
+and souls which they had saved or lost, authors with their books,
+painters and sculptors with their pictures and statues. But the hard
+test was applied to all that we had produced,&mdash;the wages which we had
+received on one side, and the value of our exertions to mankind on the
+other,&mdash;and imposing as our performances looked when laid out to be
+examined, we had been paid, most of us, out of all proportion to what
+we were found to have deserved. I was reminded of a large compartment
+in the Paris Exhibition, where an active gentleman, wishing to show
+the state of English literature, had collected copies of every book,
+review, pamphlet, or newspaper which had been published in a single
+year. The bulk was overwhelming, but the figures were only decimal
+points, and the worth of the whole was a fraction above zero. A few of
+us were turned back summarily among the thieves and the fine gentlemen
+and ladies: speculators who had done nothing but handle money which
+had clung to their fingers in passing through them, divines who had
+preached a morality which they did not practice, and fluent orators
+who had made speeches which they knew to be nonsense; philosophers who
+had spun out of moonshine systems of the universe, distinguished
+pleaders who had defeated justice while they established points of
+law, writers of books upon subjects of which they knew enough to
+mislead their readers, purveyors of luxuries which had added nothing
+to human health or strength, physicians and apothecaries who had
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6093" id="Page_6093">[Pg 6093]</a></span>
+pretended to knowledge which they knew that they did not
+possess,&mdash;these all, as the contents of their boxes bore witness
+against them, were thrust back into the rejected herd.</p>
+
+<p>There were some whose account stood better, as having at least
+produced something of real merit, but they were cast on the point of
+wages: modest excellence had come badly off; the plausible and
+unscrupulous had thriven and grown rich. It was tragical, and
+evidently a surprise to most of us, to see how mendacious we had been:
+how we had sanded our sugar, watered our milk, scamped our
+carpentering and mason's work, literally and metaphorically; how in
+all things we had been thinking less of producing good work than of
+the profit which we could make out of it; how we had sold ourselves to
+tell lies and act them, because the public found lies pleasant and
+truth expensive and troublesome. Some of us were manifest rogues, who
+had bought cheap and sold dear, had used false measures and weights,
+had made cotton pass for wool, and hemp for silk, and tin for silver.
+The American peddler happened to be in the party, who had put a rind
+upon a grindstone and had sold it as a cheese. These were promptly
+sifted out and placed with their fellows; only persons whose services
+were on the whole greater than the pay which they had received were
+allowed their certificates. When my own box was opened, I perceived
+that though the wages had been small, the work done seemed smaller
+still; and I was surprised to find myself among those who had passed.</p>
+
+<p>The whistle of a train was heard at this moment, coming in upon the
+main line. It was to go in half an hour, and those who had been turned
+back were told that they were to proceed by it to the place where they
+had been originally going. They looked infinitely relieved at the
+news; but before they started, a few questions had to be put to them,
+and a few alterations made which were to affect their future. They
+were asked to explain how they had come to be such worthless
+creatures. They gave many answers, which came mainly to the same
+thing. Circumstances had been against them. It was all owing to
+circumstances. They had been badly brought up. They had been placed in
+situations where it had been impossible for them to do better. The
+rich people repeated that they had never been informed that any work
+was expected of them. Their wants had all been provided for, and it
+was unfair to expect that they should have exerted themselves of their
+own accord when they had no motive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6094" id="Page_6094">[Pg 6094]</a></span> for working. If they had only been
+born poor, all would have gone well with them. The cheating tradesman
+declared that the first duty of a shopkeeper, according to all
+received principles, was to make money and better his condition. It
+was the buyer's business to see to the quality of the articles which
+he purchased; the shopkeeper was entitled to sell his wares at the
+highest price which he could get for them. So, at least, it was
+believed and taught by the recognized authorities on the subject. The
+orators, preachers, newspaper writers, novel-writers, etc., etc., of
+whom there were a great many, appealed to the crowds who came to
+listen to them, or bought and read their productions. <i>Tout le monde</i>,
+it was said, was wiser than the wisest single sage. They had given the
+world what the world wished for and approved; they had worked at
+supplying it with all their might, and it was extremely hard to blame
+them for guiding themselves by the world's judgment. The thieves and
+vagabonds argued that they had been brought into existence without
+their consent being asked: they had not wished for it; although they
+had not been without their pleasures, they regarded existence on the
+whole as a nuisance which they would gladly have been spared. Being
+alive, however, they had to keep alive; and for all that they could
+see, they had as full a right to the good things which the world
+contained as anybody else, provided they could get them. They were
+called thieves. Law and language were made by the property-owners, who
+were their natural enemies. If society had given them the means of
+living honestly they would have found it easy to be honest. Society
+had done nothing for them&mdash;why should they do anything for society?</p>
+
+<p>So, in their various ways, those who had been "plucked" defended
+themselves. They were all delighted to hear that they were to have
+another chance; and I was amused to observe that though some of them
+had pretended that they had not wished to be born, and had rather not
+have been born, not one of them protested against being sent back. All
+they asked was that they should be put in a new position, and that the
+adverse influences should be taken off. I expected that among these
+adverse influences they would have mentioned the faults of their
+own dispositions. My own opinion had been that half the misdoings
+of men came from congenital defects of character which they had
+brought with them into the world, and that constitutional courage,
+right-mindedness, and practical ability were as much gifts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6095" id="Page_6095">[Pg 6095]</a></span> of nature
+or circumstance as the accidents of fortune. A change in this respect
+was of more consequence than in any other. But with themselves they
+were all apparently satisfied, and they required only an improvement
+in their surroundings. The alterations were rapidly made. The duchess
+was sent to begin her life again in a laborer's cottage. She was to
+attend the village school and rise thence into a housemaid. The fine
+gentleman was made a plowboy. The authors and preachers were to become
+mechanics, and bound apprentices to carpenters and blacksmiths. A
+philosopher who, having had a good fortune and unbroken health, had
+insisted that the world was as good as it could be made, was to be
+born blind and paralytic, and to find his way through life under the
+new conditions. The thieves and cheats, who pretended that their
+misdemeanors were due to poverty, were to find themselves, when they
+arrived in the world again, in palaces surrounded with luxury. The cup
+of Lethe was sent round. The past became a blank. They were hurried
+into the train; the engine screamed and flew away with them.</p>
+
+<p>"They will be all here again in a few years," the station-master said,
+"and it will be the same story over again. I have had these very
+people in my hands a dozen times. They have been tried in all
+positions, and there is still nothing to show, and nothing but
+complaints of circumstances. For my part, I would put them out
+altogether." "How long is it to last?" I asked. "Well," he said, "it
+does not depend on me. No one passes here who cannot prove that he has
+lived to some purpose. Some of the worst I have known made at last
+into pigs and geese, to be fatted up and eaten, and made of use that
+way. Others have become asses, condemned to carry burdens, to be
+beaten with sticks, and to breed asses like themselves for a hundred
+generations. All animated creatures tend to take the shape at last
+which suits their character."</p>
+
+<p>The train was scarcely out of sight when again the bell rang. The
+scene changed as at a theatre. The screen was rolled back, and we who
+were left found ourselves in the presence of four grave-looking
+persons, like the board of examiners whom we remembered at college. We
+were called up one by one. The work which had passed the first ordeal
+was again looked into, and the quality of it compared with the talent
+or faculty of the producer, to see how far he had done his
+best,&mdash;whether anywhere he had done worse than he might have done and knew
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6096" id="Page_6096">[Pg 6096]</a></span>
+how to have done; while besides, in a separate collection, were
+the vices, the sins, the selfishnesses and ill-humors, with&mdash;in the
+other scale&mdash;the acts of personal duty, of love and kindness and
+charity, which had increased the happiness or lightened the sorrows of
+those connected with him. These last, I observed, had generally been
+forgotten by the owner, who saw them appear with surprise, and even
+repudiated them with protest. In the work, of course, both material
+and moral, there was every gradation both of kind and merit. But while
+nothing was absolutely worthless, everything, even the highest
+achievements of the greatest artist or the greatest saint, fell short
+of absolute perfection. Each of us saw our own performances, from our
+first ignorant beginnings to what we regarded as our greatest triumph;
+and it was easy to trace how much of our faults were due to natural
+deficiencies and the necessary failures of inexperience, and how much
+to self-will or vanity or idleness. Some taint of mean motives,
+too,&mdash;some desire of reward, desire of praise or honor or wealth, some
+foolish self-satisfaction, when satisfaction ought not to have been
+felt,&mdash;was to be seen infecting everything, even the very best which
+was presented for scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>So plain was this that one of us, an earnest, impressive-looking
+person, whose own work bore inspection better than that of most of us,
+exclaimed passionately that so far as he was concerned the examiners
+might spare their labor. From his earliest years he had known what he
+ought to do, and in no instance had he ever completely done it. He had
+struggled; he had conquered his grosser faults: but the farther he had
+gone, and the better he had been able to do, his knowledge had still
+grown faster than his power of acting upon it; and every additional
+day that he had lived, his shortcomings had become more miserably
+plain to him. Even if he could have reached perfection at last, he
+could not undo the past, and the faults of his youth would bear
+witness against him and call for his condemnation. Therefore, he said,
+he abhorred himself. He had no merit which could entitle him to look
+for favor. He had labored on to the end, but he had labored with a
+full knowledge that the best which he could offer would be unworthy of
+acceptance. He had been told, and he believed, that a high Spirit not
+subject to infirmity had done his work for him, and done it perfectly,
+and that if he abandoned all claim on his own account, he might be accepted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6097" id="Page_6097">[Pg 6097]</a></span>
+for the sake of what another had done. This, he trusted, was
+true, and it was his sole dependence. In the so-called good actions
+with which he seemed to be credited, there was nothing that was really
+good; there was not one which was altogether what it ought to have
+been.</p>
+
+<p>He was evidently sincere, and what he said was undoubtedly true&mdash;true
+of him and true of every one. Even in the vehemence of his
+self-abandonment a trace lingered of the taint which he was
+confessing, for he was a polemical divine; he had spent his life and
+gained a reputation in maintaining this particular doctrine. He
+believed it, but he had not forgotten that he had been himself its
+champion.</p>
+
+<p>The examiner looked kindly at him, but answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We do not expect impossibilities; and we do not blame you when you
+have not accomplished what is beyond your strength. Only those who are
+themselves perfect can do anything perfectly. Human beings are born
+ignorant and helpless. They bring into the world with them a
+disposition to seek what is pleasant to themselves, and what is
+pleasant is not always right. They learn to live as they learn
+everything else. At first they cannot do rightly at all. They improve
+under teaching and practice. The best only arrive at excellence. We do
+not find fault with the painter on account of his first bad copies, if
+they were as good as could be looked for at his age. Every craftsman
+acquires his art by degrees. He begins badly; he cannot help it; and
+it is the same with life. You learn to walk by falling down. You learn
+to live by going wrong and experiencing the consequences of it. We do
+not record against a man 'the sins of his youth' if he has been
+honestly trying to improve himself. We do not require the same
+self-control in a child as in a man. We do not require the same
+attainments from all. Some are well taught, some are ill taught, some
+are not taught at all. Some have naturally good dispositions, some
+have naturally bad dispositions. Not one has had power 'to fulfill the
+law,' as you call it, completely. Therefore it is no crime in him if
+he fails. We reckon as faults those only which arise from idleness,
+willfulness, selfishness, and deliberate preference of evil to good.
+Each is judged according to what he has received."</p>
+
+<p>I was amused to observe how pleased the archbishop looked while the
+examiner was speaking. He had himself been engaged in controversy with
+this gentleman on the share of "good works"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6098" id="Page_6098">[Pg 6098]</a></span> in justifying a man; and
+if the examiner had not taken his side in the discussion, he had at
+least demolished his adversary. The archbishop had been the more
+disinterested in the line which he had taken, as his own "works,"
+though in several large folios, weighed extremely little; and indeed,
+had it not been for passages in his early life,&mdash;he had starved
+himself at college that he might not be a burden upon his widowed
+mother,&mdash;I do not know but that he might have been sent back into the
+world to serve as a parish clerk.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, there were questions which I was longing to ask, and I was
+trying to collect my courage to speak. I wanted chiefly to know what
+the examiner meant by "natural disposition." Was it that a man might
+be born with a natural capacity for becoming a saint, as another man
+with a capacity to become a great artist or musician, and that each of
+us could only grow to the limits of his natural powers? And again,
+were idleness, willfulness, selfishness, etc., etc., natural
+dispositions? for in that case&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But at the moment the bell rang again, and my own name was called.
+There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity
+of the person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said
+or done, was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need
+for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably
+impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, the few good
+actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In
+the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and
+other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was
+poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely
+every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition
+grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it.
+Alas! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as
+if no compositor had ever labored in setting type for it. Pale and
+illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly
+prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at
+long intervals. They were those on which I had labored least, and had
+almost forgotten; or those, as I observed in one or two instances,
+which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly
+journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge, of
+willfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be
+true, was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness;
+sins of infirmity,&mdash;culpable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6099" id="Page_6099">[Pg 6099]</a></span> indeed, but not culpable in the last
+degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual
+sentiments&mdash;these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my
+heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I
+should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was
+reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was
+flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance
+would be in my favor: so many years of labor&mdash;such and such cheques
+received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I
+was in good hope that I might scrape through.</p>
+
+<p>The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been
+listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when
+suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there
+appeared an interminable vista of creatures&mdash;creatures of all kinds
+from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They
+were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in
+part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood
+in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,&mdash;oxen and calves, sheep
+and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants,
+grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds
+which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them
+had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and
+river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling
+and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the
+oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally
+to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These
+had been my wages. At this enormous cost had my existence been
+maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were
+sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to
+produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has
+to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in
+air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the
+pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We
+were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the
+person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value
+in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were
+sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so
+pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the
+judgment, though we shall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6100" id="Page_6100">[Pg 6100]</a></span> withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves
+we say freely that we have long watched him,&mdash;him and his
+fellows,&mdash;and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the
+human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most
+destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous
+beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied,
+he kills us for his mere amusement."</p>
+
+<p>The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the
+fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and
+self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on
+the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of
+condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became
+indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound
+of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the
+railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take
+our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus
+for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were
+waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and
+duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously
+bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right
+honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with
+which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop
+before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a
+very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me."
+The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the
+honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have
+dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this
+world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of
+imagination."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6101" id="Page_6101">[Pg 6101]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HENRY_B_FULLER" id="HENRY_B_FULLER"></a>HENRY B. FULLER</h2>
+
+<h4>(1859-)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capn.png" width="90" height="93" alt="N" title="N" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">ew England blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago
+even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of
+prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret
+Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind
+of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking
+for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the
+Great West.</p>
+
+<p>Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited
+place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for
+predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a
+musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he
+was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged
+at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted
+little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor
+Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This
+fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the
+book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and
+widely read. 'The Chatelaine of La Trinit&eacute;,' his next venture,
+appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year.
+Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain
+remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in
+common with this workaday world.</p>
+
+<p>To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book&mdash;published as a
+serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and
+called 'The Cliff-Dwellers'&mdash;pictured Chicago in its most sordid and
+utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole
+community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence,
+the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the
+book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain whether
+to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his
+mercilessness.</p>
+
+<p>In 1895 appeared 'With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago
+social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still
+delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more
+sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is
+carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6102" id="Page_6102">[Pg 6102]</a></span>theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an
+old-fashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience
+to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process
+is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic
+lightness of touch. 'With the Procession' is such a story as might
+happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis
+are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's
+Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking
+himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of
+the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his
+readers that they too shall fall to thinking.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="AT_THE_HEAD_OF_THE_MARCH" id="AT_THE_HEAD_OF_THE_MARCH"></a>AT THE HEAD OF THE MARCH</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'With the Procession.' Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and
+reprinted by permission of Harper &amp; Brothers, publishers, New York</h4>
+
+
+<p>"Well, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest
+of the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous
+pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a
+sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter
+of a vast and variegated fa&ccedil;ade; and higher still, the morning sun
+shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering
+chimneys.</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the
+wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the
+inner ones.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
+searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo
+in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
+splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in
+for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most
+fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the
+beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
+further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"</p>
+
+<p>The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates&mdash;" she began.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened half-way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his
+chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6103" id="Page_6103">[Pg 6103]</a></span> shows in so many of
+those conscientious portraits of the olden time.</p>
+
+<p>"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself.</p>
+
+<p>She dropped her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that
+the man wore knee-breeches and black-silk stockings.</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
+I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
+never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in <i>this</i>
+town!"</p>
+
+<p>She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
+began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.</p>
+
+<p>The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as
+it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
+master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but
+there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all.
+Some of these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought
+polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in
+appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy;
+few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at
+the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
+eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will: she
+acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him
+into the concession that she herself was nothing less.</p>
+
+<p>The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
+discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that
+he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
+permitted to pass the gate.</p>
+
+<p>She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
+partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of
+forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted
+upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow
+door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with
+the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led
+with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
+speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6104" id="Page_6104">[Pg 6104]</a></span> of all this
+luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
+eight hundred feet from the Monument!"</p>
+
+<p>Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
+she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected
+in an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity
+of the grand stairway finally filled&mdash;filled more completely, more
+amply, than she could have imagined possible through the passage of
+one person merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow
+and somewhat ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning-gown
+with a broad plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous
+material in the sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and
+her voluminous gray hair was tossed and fretted about the temples
+after the fashion of a marquise of the old r&eacute;gime. Jane set her jaw
+and clamped her knotty fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care if she <i>is</i> so rich," she muttered, "and so famous, and
+so fashionable, and so terribly handsome; she can't bear <i>me</i> down."</p>
+
+<p>The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
+carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps
+was silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide
+and roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she
+was to deal: with one of the big, the broad, the great, the
+triumphant; with one of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian
+keenness and sagacity, an American ambition and determination; with
+one who baffles circumstance and almost masters fate&mdash;with one of the
+conquerors, in short.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
+"but all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
+door before&mdash;yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
+Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
+She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on
+Jane with an expression of rather cold questioning.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
+advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing
+there....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6105" id="Page_6105">[Pg 6105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My father," Jane began again, in the same tone, "is David Marshall.
+He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have lived here a
+great many years. It seems to me that there ought to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I <i>do</i> know David
+Marshall&mdash;yes," she said; "or did&mdash;a good many years ago." She looked
+up into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her
+glance was curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are
+David Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst
+of spunk. "Really&mdash;David Marshall's daughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to
+be placated yet.</p>
+
+<p>"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so
+in the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else
+you could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is
+he, anyway? I haven't seen him&mdash;to really speak to him&mdash;for fifteen
+years. It may be even more."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
+its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be
+inviting Jane to advance without let or hindrance.</p>
+
+<p>But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
+laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants
+to; she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
+citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
+memory. The portcullis was dropped, and the late enemy was invited to
+advance as a friend.</p>
+
+<p>Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
+gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
+within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and
+looked into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that
+temper once myself," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The sluice gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams
+of tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their
+course.</p>
+
+<p>"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place?
+Oh, this terrible town! You can't keep your old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6106" id="Page_6106">[Pg 6106]</a></span> friends; you can
+hardly know your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it
+is the same as if it were a hundred."</p>
+
+<p>Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
+herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
+permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place.
+And in the same old way," she added&mdash;in the spirit of concession.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him&mdash;like your
+father?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of
+the family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And
+another drop fell.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't slander yourself." She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
+seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't
+meaning to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also
+shrugged her shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and
+patted.</p>
+
+<p>"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially.
+She motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the
+roomier sofa. "Or no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day;
+it's so hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should.
+Come, it ought to be warmer in the music-room."</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
+have a spare hour on my hands this morning&mdash;the first in a month. My
+music teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You
+shall have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your
+plans; I dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane
+Marshall."</p>
+
+<p>"Her music teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor
+so far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from
+searching out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of
+fifty-five want to be taking music lessons for?"</p>
+
+<p>The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
+hard-woods; its paneled walls and ceilings rang with a magnificent
+sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like
+marquetry of the floor.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6107" id="Page_6107">[Pg 6107]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
+luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by
+special order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall
+music-stand in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound
+scores of all the German classics and the usual operas of the French
+and Italian schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing
+there seemed to have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it
+grand!" sighed Jane. She already felt herself succumbing beneath these
+accumulated splendors.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano stool, with her back
+to the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I
+have sat down here for a month."</p>
+
+<p>"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this
+I should play in it every day."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
+practicing in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
+you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
+thing?"&mdash;thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover
+of the keyboard.</p>
+
+<p>"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
+don't believe she can play a single note."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on.
+"I had the greatest set-back of my life. I asked to join the Amateur
+Musical Club. They wouldn't let me in."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote
+me a note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it
+meant. I see now well enough that my fingers <i>were</i> rather stiffer
+than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering
+Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and
+Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under.
+I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practiced scales
+an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was crazy. I
+tackled Grieg and Lassen and Chopin,&mdash;yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm
+going to play for that committee next month. Let me see if they'll
+dare to vote me out again!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>that's</i> it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous of
+meting out exact and even-handed justice. She found it impossible to
+withhold respect from so much grit and determination.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6108" id="Page_6108">[Pg 6108]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
+young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
+sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
+evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
+'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.</p>
+
+<p>"Your father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she
+went on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father
+was one of my old beaux&mdash;at least, I always counted him with the rest.
+I was a gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I
+could; so I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your
+father was one of the quiet ones."</p>
+
+<p>"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
+shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.</p>
+
+<p>"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a
+word. My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'&mdash;a new
+thing here; I was the first one in town to have it. There were
+thirteen pages, and there was always a rush to see who should turn
+them. Your father didn't often enter the rush, but I really liked his
+way of turning the best of any. He never turned too soon or too late;
+he never bothered me by shifting his feet every second or two, nor by
+talking to me at the hard places. In fact, he was the only one who
+could do it right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa&mdash;all over."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently
+she shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that
+this place is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."</p>
+
+<p>In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
+yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
+latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre
+and solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the
+walls, around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases,
+constructed with the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's
+art. In the centre of the room a wide and substantial table was set
+with all the paraphernalia of correspondence, and the leathery abysses
+of three or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6109" id="Page_6109">[Pg 6109]</a></span> four vast easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish
+self-abandonment.</p>
+
+<p>"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows
+of formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after
+that poor sole book-case of theirs at home&mdash;a huge black-walnut thing
+like a wardrobe, and with a couple of drawers at the bottom,
+receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes.
+"How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole
+being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and
+Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets', and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in genially;
+"and enough Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica to reach around the corner and
+back again. Sets&mdash;sets&mdash;sets."</p>
+
+<p>"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all
+abashed by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and
+write papers at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
+towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But
+really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it
+was put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the
+keys are to get at them with. <i>I</i> can't do anything with them; why,
+some of them weigh five or six pounds!"</p>
+
+<p>Jane shriveled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
+had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
+interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her
+head to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the
+cord; doing nobody any good&mdash;their owners least of all." She resolved
+to admire openly nothing more whatever.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane
+towards another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with
+a resumption of her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of
+books&mdash;especially poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I
+was likely to be alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe
+I could give you even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the
+Romans. Yes; and almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."</p>
+
+<p>Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman; and here
+apparently was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6110" id="Page_6110">[Pg 6110]</a></span> me," she
+inquired, with something approaching sternness, "that my father&mdash;<i>my
+father</i>&mdash;was ever fond of poetry and&mdash;and music, and&mdash;and all that
+sort of thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young
+man, with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above
+the average. And that Shakespeare of his&mdash;I recall it perfectly. It
+was a chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed
+stamp, and print a great deal too fine for <i>my</i> eyes. He always had to
+do the reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane
+closely. "Perhaps you have never done your father justice."</p>
+
+<p>Jane felt herself driven to defense&mdash;even to apology. "The fact is,"
+she said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about
+the only one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess <i>I</i>
+don't know him any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no
+right to defend her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates slowly. She crossed over to the
+radiator and began working at the valve. "I <i>told</i> Granger I knew he'd
+be sorry if he didn't put in furnace flues too. I really can't ask you
+to take your things off down here; let's go up-stairs&mdash;that's the only
+warm place I can think of."</p>
+
+<p>She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the
+rooms before you go up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage
+no ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as
+she felt good manners would allow.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
+she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
+the&mdash;well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
+decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"</p>
+
+<p>Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering
+apartment; it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of
+the eighteenth century&mdash;an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking.
+Grilles, panels, mirror frames, all glimmered in green and gold, and a
+row of lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty
+ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
+general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of
+guide-post, had rather baffled her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6111" id="Page_6111">[Pg 6111]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Hem!" she observed critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
+splendor of the place; "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period;
+done, too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a
+real <i>jardin d'hiver</i>, in fact. Very handsome indeed."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
+response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
+periods in architecture and decoration."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself&mdash;and to three or four
+others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
+still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music lessons. It <i>is</i> a
+little singular, I admit&mdash;my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
+pupil. You know, of course, that I <i>was</i> a school-teacher? Yes, I had
+a little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
+basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a
+little bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know
+those old-fashioned frame cottages&mdash;one of them. In the early days pa
+was a carpenter&mdash;a boss carpenter, to do him full justice; the town
+was growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
+beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted,
+and wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own
+hats till long after I was married."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
+tapestried <i>causeuse</i>. The light from the lofty windows shattered on
+the prisms of her glittering chandeliers, and diffused itself over the
+paneled Loves and Graces around her.</p>
+
+<p>"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out
+and do something for myself&mdash;I've always tried to hold up my own end.
+My little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback&mdash;another
+school next door, full of great rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
+and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
+stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught
+book-keeping. Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I
+used to lie awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival
+institution. Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or
+three children who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to
+work on single entry. I don't know whether they learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6112" id="Page_6112">[Pg 6112]</a></span> anything, but
+<i>I</i> did&mdash;enough to keep Granger's books for the first year after we
+started out."</p>
+
+<p>Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
+confidences as these.</p>
+
+<p>"We were married at the most fashionable church in town&mdash;right there
+in Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like
+it, in her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves,
+but we had some awfully stylish neighbors&mdash;all those Terrace Row
+people, just around the corner. 'We'll get there too, sometime,' I
+said to Granger. 'This is going to be a big town, and we have a good
+show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars
+going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the
+front steps and ring the bell <i>like</i> somebody.' So, as I say, we were
+married at the best church in town; we thought it safe enough to
+discount the future."</p>
+
+<p>"Good for you," said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick
+of these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
+Granger:&mdash;'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
+those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out
+some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and&mdash;'
+The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this
+room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people.
+You ought to have been here at the <i>bal poudr&eacute;</i> I gave last
+season&mdash;lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on
+their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this."
+Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor.
+"The next thing will be something else."</p>
+
+<p>Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
+"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
+distinguished guests."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it
+isn't Moorish; it's Baroque&mdash;and a very good example."</p>
+
+<p>The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
+each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
+half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
+fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment,
+broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
+Baroque all over."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6113" id="Page_6113">[Pg 6113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read
+about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last
+Fortnightly?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
+awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind
+that day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something&mdash;or
+so we thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear&mdash;well, it just made
+me blue. You didn't notice it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to
+it; it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then&mdash;you
+think them corrupt and degraded?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
+forms are interesting from a historical and sociological point of
+view. And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter."
+Jane slid over these big words with a practiced ease.</p>
+
+<p>"They impressed my notables, any way," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
+entertained a good deal during the Fair&mdash;it was expected, of course,
+from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
+without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince&mdash;a
+Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
+blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
+English too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
+summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea
+that he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the
+English, isn't it? How can people who are so clever and capable in
+practical things ever be such insolent tom-fools in social things?
+Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture gallery for a
+minute.</p>
+
+<p>"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
+she stood beside Jane in the centre of the room under the coldly
+diffused glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt
+and De Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon
+as I began to hear about the Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw
+there was. Well, I set to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I
+<i>want</i> to learn. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6114" id="Page_6114">[Pg 6114]</a></span> want to move; I want to keep right up with the
+times and the people. I got books and photographs, and I went to all
+the galleries. I read the artists' biographies and took in all the
+loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too. Some of these things are going
+to the Art Institute next week&mdash;that Daubigny, for one. It's little,
+but it's good: there couldn't be anything more like him, could there?</p>
+
+<p>"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
+Corot&mdash;at least we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
+commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
+minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
+ahead; for after all, people of our position would naturally be
+expected to have a Corot. I don't care to tell you what he paid for
+it."...</p>
+
+<p>"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
+towards the opposite wall. "Carolus Duran; fifty thousand francs; and
+he wouldn't let me pick out my own costume either....</p>
+
+<p>"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too
+dazed to speak or even to smile.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates hastened forward light-footedly. "Conservatory&mdash;<i>that's</i>
+Moorish," she indicated casually; "nothing in it but orchids and
+things. Come along." Jane followed&mdash;dumbly, humbly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase
+of Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern
+depended above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over
+the balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted
+window on the landing-stage.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" she said, "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
+impassioned splendor, her jeweled fingers shut tightly, and her fists
+thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
+"<i>We</i> did it, we two&mdash;just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands
+and hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight&mdash;a fair
+field and no favor&mdash;and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay
+there too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you
+can. I <i>do</i> head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't
+foot it with the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have
+me. But they'll never get me&mdash;never! There's ten more good years in me
+yet; and if we were to slip to the bottom to-morrow we should work
+back to the top again before we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6115" id="Page_6115">[Pg 6115]</a></span> finish. When I led the grand march at
+the Charity Ball I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a
+vainglorious show. Well, who would look better in such a role than I,
+or who has earned a better right to play it? There, child! ain't that
+success? ain't that glory? ain't that poetry?&mdash;h'm," she broke off
+suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't by to hear that! He's always taking
+up his poor mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded, do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Humble-minded? one of my boys humble-minded? No indeed; he's
+grammatical, that's all: he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several
+halls and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and
+spacious room done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier
+wires mingled with pipes, and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a
+massive brass bedstead full-panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases,
+and the mirror of the dressing-case reflected a formal row of
+silver-backed brushes and combs.</p>
+
+<p>"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," stammered Jane, "it's all very fine, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I know what they say about it&mdash;I've heard them a dozen
+times: 'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like.
+<i>I</i> shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"</p>
+
+<p>"About," said Jane.</p>
+
+<p>"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "<b>I</b> <i>don't</i> sleep here. I'd as soon
+think of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to <i>sleep</i> in;
+it's for the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there
+now."</p>
+
+<p>Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
+it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her
+mussy little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman,"
+she murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano;
+she doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any
+sleep out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the
+next stage of her adventure.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side door....
+"This is my office." She traversed the "office," passed into a room
+beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6116" id="Page_6116">[Pg 6116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
+great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!&mdash;she
+understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what
+footing she had been placed.</p>
+
+<p>She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was
+filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old
+mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to
+correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid
+was lined with faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was
+an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare
+as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose
+plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with
+narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose
+top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung
+a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and
+loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed, and motioned Jane to a
+small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at
+your service."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
+was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a
+charity. You'd better; this is the last room&mdash;there's nothing beyond."
+Her eyes were twinkling, but immensely kind.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt too
+that not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber.
+"How good you are to me!"</p>
+
+<p>Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
+small plan. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
+Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of club-room in
+some convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and
+others employed in business. There was to be a room where they could
+get lunch, or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor
+where they could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or
+music; it was the expectation to have a piano and a few books and
+magazines.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6117" id="Page_6117">[Pg 6117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down
+on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
+mother," concluded Jane.</p>
+
+<p>"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
+Peters&mdash;but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
+hair-brush."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?"
+she asked, "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
+see&mdash;two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords,
+but simple catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
+anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use
+a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."...</p>
+
+<p>She dropped her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever have a private secretary?"</p>
+
+<p>"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."</p>
+
+<p>"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever
+change&mdash;no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters
+and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards.
+Tutors are bad enough&mdash;but thank goodness, my boys are past that age.
+And men-servants are bad enough&mdash;every time I want to stir in my own
+house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my
+train; however, people in our position&mdash;well, Granger insists, you
+know."...</p>
+
+<p>"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?"
+She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row
+of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft.</p>
+
+<p>"Asters?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're
+chrysanthemums&mdash;you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're
+the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and
+American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass?
+How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of
+gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the
+steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what
+I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up
+strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford
+it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and
+bachelor's-buttons out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6118" id="Page_6118">[Pg 6118]</a></span> there in the back yard, and the girls can run
+their clothes-lines somewhere else."</p>
+
+<p>"It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in
+the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind&mdash;one of those little
+yellow brier roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just&mdash;'yaller.' And
+it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
+child"&mdash;wistfully&mdash;"if I could only smell it now!"</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.</p>
+
+<p>"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket
+and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of
+yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all
+I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the
+wall-paper."</p>
+
+<p>"The wall-paper?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
+when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
+match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second street. Then I went
+down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West
+Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of
+the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville,
+and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what&mdash;finally?"</p>
+
+<p>"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
+chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
+than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
+cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too
+quaintly ugly for anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can
+be! I only wish mine was like it."</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6119" id="Page_6119">[Pg 6119]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SARAH_MARGARET_FULLER" id="SARAH_MARGARET_FULLER"></a>SARAH MARGARET FULLER</h2>
+
+<h4>(MARCHIONESS OSSOLI)</h4>
+
+<h4>(1810-1850)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capm.png" width="90" height="90" alt="M" title="M" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">argaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art,
+and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote
+Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should
+always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under
+the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so
+live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not
+regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her....
+It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right
+to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any
+other." In the coolest way she said to her friends:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus291.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="Margaret Fuller" title="Margaret Fuller" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Margaret Fuller</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the more I
+feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a
+queen....In near eight years' experience I have learned as much as
+others would in eighty, from my great talent at explanation.... But in
+truth I have not much to say; for since I have had leisure to look at
+myself, I find that so far from being an original genius, I have not
+yet learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have done in
+life has been to form my character to a certain consistency, cultivate
+my tastes, and learn to tell the truth with a little better grace than
+I did at first. When I look at my papers I feel as if I had never had
+a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis
+only when on talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
+know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact and
+brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.
+They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our
+knowledge; and while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and
+fly, and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the
+weak points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
+when we come to write, and without suggestion from another mind, to
+declare the positive amount of thought that is in us.... Then
+gentlemen are surprised that I write <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6120" id="Page_6120">[Pg 6120]</a></span>no better, because I talk so
+well. I have served a long apprenticeship to the one, none to the
+other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I talk;
+for then I feel inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow
+within me, I am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my
+thought into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
+seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to
+write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force to be either a
+genius or a character. One should be either private or public. I love
+best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly bounded
+to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I
+should stifle."</p></div>
+
+<p>All these na&iuml;ve confessions were made, it must be remembered,
+either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
+fear of misinterpretation.</p>
+
+<p>This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport,
+Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
+Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
+lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
+never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
+which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as
+possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical sketch. "Thus I had
+tasks given me, as many and as various as the hours would allow, and
+on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of
+reciting to him in the evening after he returned from his office. As
+he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very
+late, and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and
+his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the
+recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to bed several
+hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence
+was a premature development of the brain that made me a 'youthful
+prodigy' by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions,
+nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the
+harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth,
+while later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous
+affections of all kinds.... I was taught Latin and English grammar at
+the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which,
+for some years, I read it daily.... Of the Greek language I knew only
+enough to feel that the sounds told the same story as the mythology;
+that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern
+composure.... With these books I passed my days. The great amount of
+study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and reading became a
+habit and a passion. The force of feeling which under other
+circumstances might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the
+thoughts of others."</p></div>
+
+<p>By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
+herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
+Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6121" id="Page_6121">[Pg 6121]</a></span>
+great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
+1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first half-hour of
+Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a
+face and a frame that would indicate fullness and tenacity of life.
+She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with
+strong, fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
+dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her appearance
+had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness,&mdash;a trick of
+incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,&mdash;the nasal tone of her
+voice,&mdash;all repelled; and I said to myself, 'We shall never get far.'
+It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on
+most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends,
+to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with
+her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an
+overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly
+the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire,
+in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
+many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."</p></div>
+
+<p>In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston,
+continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
+but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
+on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
+women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
+reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
+this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
+a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she
+published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
+and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fr&auml;ulein G&uuml;nerode and Bettine
+von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
+England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
+and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling
+of the spirit in each soul,&mdash;an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
+pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
+the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
+to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
+Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
+two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
+of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment
+which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
+found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
+classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder,
+nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
+'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
+being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6122" id="Page_6122">[Pg 6122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844)led Horace Greeley to
+offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Tribune.
+It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
+interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment
+authoritative. The best of her contributions to that journal were
+published, with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under
+the title of 'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).</p>
+
+<p>In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed and
+written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps, the
+most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy in
+1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republican
+ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her
+husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while he
+was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their baby
+in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the siege
+of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hospital of the
+Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when Lowell was
+satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,'" says Mr. Higginson, "she
+was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century
+before." Her Southern nature and her longing for action and love had
+found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and son from
+Leghorn for America. But the vessel was wrecked off Fire Island within
+a day's sail of home and friends, and, save the body of her child and
+a trunk of water-soaked papers, the sea swallowed up all remnants of
+the happiness of her later life.</p>
+
+<p>The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of letters
+about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to have
+possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
+intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
+so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
+self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
+as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in
+which she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
+egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life and
+movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and husband,
+and their child. And then she died.</p>
+
+<p>The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has found
+expression in three notable biographies: 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
+Ossoli,' by her brother; 'Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson ('American Men of Letters Series'); and 'Margaret Fuller
+(Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe ('Eminent Women Series').</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6123" id="Page_6123">[Pg 6123]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="GEORGE_SAND" id="GEORGE_SAND"></a>GEORGE SAND</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">To Elizabeth Hoar</span></h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Memoirs': Paris, &mdash;&mdash;, 1847</h4>
+
+
+<p>You wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris, "Madame
+Sand." I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I
+had supposed it might be exaggerated....</p>
+
+<p>It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters,
+and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant
+whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by
+the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only
+lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my
+natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who
+am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my
+thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.</p>
+
+<p>The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a
+peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her goddaughter, whom
+she had brought from her province. She announced me as "Madame
+Sal&egrave;re," and returned into the ante-room to tell me, "Madame says she
+does not know you." I began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the
+crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if
+she has received a letter from me." As I spoke Madame Sand opened the
+door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall
+forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her
+figure; she is large but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of
+dark-violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful
+hair dressed with the greatest taste; her whole appearance and
+attitude, in its simple and ladylike dignity, presented an almost
+ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her
+face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper
+part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and
+masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but
+not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the
+whole head Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on
+one side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what fixed
+my attention was the expression of <i>goodness</i>, nobleness, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6124" id="Page_6124">[Pg 6124]</a></span> power
+that pervaded the whole,&mdash;the truly human heart and nature that shone
+in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est vous," and held out her
+hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment;
+then I said, "Il me fait de bien de vous voir," and I am sure I said
+it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman,
+so large and so developed in character, and everything that <i>is</i> good
+in it so <i>really</i> good. I loved, shall always love her.</p>
+
+<p>She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez &eacute;crit une lettre
+charmante." This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went
+on as if we had always known one another.... Her way of talking is
+just like her writing,&mdash;lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep
+feeling, and the same happiness in striking the nail on the head every
+now and then with a blow.... I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich,
+so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very
+much; I never liked a woman better.... For the rest, she holds her
+place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems
+full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but
+she has also enjoyed and done much.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="AMERICANS_ABROAD_IN_EUROPE" id="AMERICANS_ABROAD_IN_EUROPE"></a>AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'At Home and Abroad'</h4>
+
+
+<p>The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more
+American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although
+we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe
+as to literature and the arts is still that of a colony, and one feels
+the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to
+the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote
+allusions and derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the
+stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing
+up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
+dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through
+the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant <i>valets
+de place</i>, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country,
+and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no
+more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,&mdash;lifts some mists
+from his horizon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6125" id="Page_6125">[Pg 6125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are three species: First, the servile American,&mdash;a being utterly
+shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money
+and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable
+clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and
+furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among
+those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance
+at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,&mdash;a class
+which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive
+classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric
+feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However,
+though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and
+cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our
+country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws
+develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and
+proud of&mdash;he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history
+of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it
+requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.
+With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he
+seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his
+grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came,
+and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old
+things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they
+are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
+ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,&mdash;and no wonder, profoundly
+ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends
+which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are
+represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed,
+such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the
+Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite
+sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the
+rules of connoisseurs,&mdash;not feeling that to see such objects mental
+vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed
+at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This
+is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
+enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a meaning;
+add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of
+might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy
+of the class first specified.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6126" id="Page_6126">[Pg 6126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking
+special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of
+these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to
+speak.</p>
+
+<p>This is that of the thinking American,&mdash;a man who, recognizing the
+immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil,
+yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to
+gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new
+climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom
+and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from
+noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And
+that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in
+that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.</p>
+
+<p>The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and
+little,&mdash;such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some
+brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of men beneath the
+feet of a few, and these too often the least worthy; such a small drop
+of honey to each cup of gall, and in many cases so mingled that it is
+never one moment in life purely tasted; above all, so little achieved
+for humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening
+to blot out the traces of each triumph,&mdash;that no wonder if the
+strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many
+indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes.
+Yes! those men <i>are</i> worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
+faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
+agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul
+worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next
+sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous
+love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened
+the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some
+such there are; and feeling that, with all the excuses for failure,
+still only the sight of those who triumph gives a meaning to life or
+makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6127" id="Page_6127">[Pg 6127]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="A_CHARACTER_SKETCH_OF_CARLYLE" id="A_CHARACTER_SKETCH_OF_CARLYLE"></a>A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Letter to R. W. Emerson</span></h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Memoirs': Paris, &mdash;&mdash;, 1846</h4>
+
+
+<p>I enjoyed the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much in my
+element in European society. It does not indeed come up to my ideal,
+but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me
+in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not
+like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water....</p>
+
+<p>Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the
+Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and appointed an evening
+to be passed at their house. That first time I was delighted with him.
+He was in a very sweet humor,&mdash;full of wit and pathos, without being
+overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow
+of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal
+being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I
+wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full
+sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad.
+He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my
+position, so that I did not get tired. That evening he talked of the
+present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of
+the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely
+stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you
+he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a
+story of some poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday
+lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits
+reading the 'Essays' and looking upon the sea....</p>
+
+<p>The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which was a witty,
+French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author of a 'History of
+Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe, a task for which he
+must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him.
+But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt
+Carlyle a little,&mdash;of which one was glad, for that night he was in his
+acrid mood; and though much more brilliant than on the former evening,
+grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he
+said....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6128" id="Page_6128">[Pg 6128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings,
+his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced
+with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the
+usual misfortune of such marked men,&mdash;happily not one invariable or
+inevitable,&mdash;that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and
+show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and
+instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience
+of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all
+opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in
+their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical
+superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a
+torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow
+freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly
+resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed
+to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows
+not how to stop in the chase.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there
+is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old
+Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse
+that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than
+talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
+with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
+some singular epithet which serves as a <i>refrain</i> when his song is
+full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the
+stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the
+higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject
+is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to
+laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the
+spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact,
+if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to
+others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of
+pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view,
+and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak
+more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to
+blame and praise him,&mdash;the Siegfried of England, great and powerful,
+if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than
+legislate for good.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6129" id="Page_6129">[Pg 6129]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THOMAS_FULLER" id="THOMAS_FULLER"></a>THOMAS FULLER</h2>
+
+<h4>(1608-1661)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller seems
+blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet and happy
+spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of Shakespeare and his
+brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine. In Fuller the
+world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes urbanity, the
+mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well satisfied with the
+kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity and the eternal
+problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of England clergyman,
+was no less a cavalier at heart than the most jaunty follower of King
+Charles. He had not the intensity of nature which characterizes the
+theologian by the grace of God. His 'Holy and Profane State,' his
+'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,'
+evidence a comfortable and reasonable reliance on the Unseen; but they
+will not be read for their spiritual insight so much as for their
+well-seasoned and delightful English. That quaint and fragrant style
+of his lends charm even to those passages in which his thought is
+commonplace.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus301.jpg" width="270" height="325" alt="Thomas Fuller" title="Thomas Fuller" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Thomas Fuller</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that posterity
+recognizes a man of marked intellectual power. His scholarship is
+exhibited in such a work as the 'Church History of Britain'; his
+peculiar faculty for happy description in the 'Worthies of England.'
+Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of his
+own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island; his
+love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same year
+as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyman of the same name as his own,
+he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men and things.
+His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.</p>
+
+<p>His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded him
+opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of his
+day, and especially with its "gentry." By birth, education, and
+inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
+the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death he
+has devoted the last volume of his great work, the 'History of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6130" id="Page_6130">[Pg 6130]</a></span> the
+Church of Britain.' Under the Protectorate, the genial priest and man
+of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like many others in
+Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puritan authorities,
+but was permitted to preach again in London by the grace of Cromwell.
+He was subsequently appointed chaplain to Charles II., but did not
+live long after the Restoration, dying of a fever in 1661.</p>
+
+<p>An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
+written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was not
+inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back always to
+the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact which
+gives their permanent value to the 'History of the Church of Britain'
+and to the 'History of the Holy War.' These works bear witness to wide
+and patient research, to a thorough sifting of material. The
+antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its scholarly
+dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the 'Worthies
+of England.' Fuller's other writings may be of more intrinsic value,
+but it is through the 'Worthies' that he is remembered and loved. The
+book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an ancient flower garden,
+where blooms of every sort grow in lavish tangle. He considers the
+counties of England, one by one, telling of their physical
+characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of the princely
+children born in them, of the other "Worthies"&mdash;scholars, soldiers,
+and saints&mdash;who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller gathered his
+material for this variegated record from every quarter of his beloved
+little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he had many
+opportunities of visiting places and studying their people. As an
+incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ramblings of the
+old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering in their talk
+some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit of folk-lore.
+He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely families as
+familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk. Sometimes an
+exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as in this, of
+the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I.:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>She was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her infancy,
+when not fully four years old. Being minded by those about her to call
+upon God even when the pangs of death were upon her, "I am not able,"
+saith she, "to say my long prayer" (meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I
+will say my short one, 'Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the
+sleep of death.'" This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.</p></div>
+
+<p>Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be numbered
+among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the world of
+letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of their
+readers.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6131" id="Page_6131">[Pg 6131]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_KINGS_CHILDREN" id="THE_KINGS_CHILDREN"></a>THE KING'S CHILDREN</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Worthies of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Katherine, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen Mary, was
+born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being at St. James), and
+survived not above half an hour after her baptizing; so that it is
+charity to mention her, whose memory is likely to be lost, so short
+her continuance in this life,&mdash;the rather because her name is not
+entered, as it ought, into the register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields;
+as indeed none of the King's children, save Prince Charles, though
+they were born in that parish. And hereupon a story depends.</p>
+
+<p>I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of kings born
+at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were ever faithfully
+paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record the names of such
+children in the register of St. Martin's. But the money being
+embezzled (we know by some, God knows by whom), no memorial is entered
+of them. Sad that bounty should betray any to baseness, and that which
+was intended to make them the more solemnly remembered should occasion
+that they should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the
+children of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children
+are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to them;"
+for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the cause that we have
+been so often at a loss about the nativities and other properties of
+those of royal extraction.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_LEARNED_LADY" id="A_LEARNED_LADY"></a>A LEARNED LADY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Worthies of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Margaret More.&mdash;Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among men and
+learned statesmen. The reason is because of her unfeigned affection to
+her father, from whom she would not willingly be parted (and from me
+shall not be), either living or dead.</p>
+
+<p>She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's house therein,
+and attained to that skill in all learning and languages that she
+became the miracle of her age. Foreigners<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6132" id="Page_6132">[Pg 6132]</a></span> took such notice thereof
+that Erasmus hath dedicated some epistles unto her. No woman that
+could speak so well did speak so little; whose secrecy was such, that
+her father intrusted her with his most important affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a depraved place
+in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written "Nisi vos sinceritas"
+she amended it "Nervos sinceritas." Yea, she translated Eusebius out
+of Greek; but it was never printed, because J. Christopherson had done
+it so exactly before.</p>
+
+<p>She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire, one of a
+bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's head was set
+up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would be cast into the
+Thames to make room for divers others (then suffering for denying the
+King's supremacy), she bought the head and kept it for a relic (which
+some called affection, others religion, others superstition in her),
+for which she was questioned before the Council, and for some short
+time imprisoned until she had buried it; and how long she herself
+survived afterwards is to me unknown.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="HENRY_DE_ESSEX_STANDARD-BEARER_TO_HENRY_II" id="HENRY_DE_ESSEX_STANDARD-BEARER_TO_HENRY_II"></a>HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Worthies of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>It happened in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle
+fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and Welsh,
+wherein this Henry de Essex, <i>animum et signum simul
+abjecit</i>,&mdash;betwixt traitor and coward,&mdash;cast away both his courage and
+banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that
+had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny, the doing of so foul
+a fact, until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a
+knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon
+his large inheritance was confiscated to the King, and he himself,
+partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl,
+under which, between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder
+of his life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6133" id="Page_6133">[Pg 6133]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_GOOD_SCHOOLMASTER" id="THE_GOOD_SCHOOLMASTER"></a>THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Holy and Profane State'</h4>
+
+
+<p>There is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more necessary,
+which is so slightly performed. The reasons whereof I conceive to be
+these: First, young scholars make this calling their refuge; yea,
+perchance before they have taken any degree in the university,
+commence schoolmasters in the country, as if nothing else were
+required to set up this profession but only a rod and a ferula.
+Secondly, others who are able use it only as a passage to better
+preferment, to patch the rents in their present fortune, till they can
+provide a new one and betake themselves to some more gainful calling.
+Thirdly, they are disheartened from doing their best with the
+miserable reward which in some places they receive, being masters to
+their children and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown
+rich, they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the
+proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves
+himself....</p>
+
+<p>He studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were books, and
+ranks their dispositions into several forms. And though it may seem
+difficult for him in a great school to descend to all particulars, yet
+experienced schoolmasters may quickly make a grammar of boys' natures,
+and reduce them all&mdash;saving some few exceptions&mdash;to these general
+rules:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. Those that are ingenious and industrious. The conjunction of two
+such planets in a youth presages much good unto him. To such a lad a
+frown may be a whipping, and a whipping a death; yea, where their
+master whips them once, shame whips them all the week after. Such
+natures he useth with all gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>2. Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the hare in
+the fable, that running with snails&mdash;so they count the rest of their
+schoolfellows&mdash;they shall come soon enough to the post, though
+sleeping a good while before their starting. Oh! a good rod would
+finely take them napping!</p>
+
+<p>3. Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger they be, the
+more lees they have when they are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till
+they be clarified with age, and such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6134" id="Page_6134">[Pg 6134]</a></span> afterwards prove the best.
+Bristol diamonds are both bright, and squared, and pointed by nature,
+and yet are soft and worthless; whereas Orient ones in India are rough
+and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit
+themselves afterwards the jewels of the country, and therefore their
+dullness at first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The
+schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy
+for a fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world can
+make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one minute before
+the hour Nature hath appointed.</p>
+
+<p>4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correction may
+reform the latter, not amend the former. All the whetting in the world
+can never set a razor's edge on that which hath no steel in it. Such
+boys he consigneth over to other professions. Shipwrights and
+boat-makers will choose those crooked pieces of timber which other
+carpenters refuse. Those may make excellent merchants and mechanics
+who will not serve for scholars.</p>
+
+<p>He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not leading them
+rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his precepts for children
+to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness of his own soul, that his
+scholars may go along with him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="ON_BOOKS" id="ON_BOOKS"></a>ON BOOKS</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Holy and Profane State'</h4>
+
+
+<p>It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by getting
+a great library. As soon shall I believe every one is valiant that
+hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good housekeeping by the
+smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as knowing that many of
+them&mdash;built merely for uniformity&mdash;are without chimneys, and more
+without fires.</p>
+
+<p>Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first,
+voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over;
+secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions;
+thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on
+them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of
+the index sees as much as if he were in the house. But the laziness of
+those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass over authors of
+consequence, and only trade in their tables<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6135" id="Page_6135">[Pg 6135]</a></span> and contents. These, like
+city cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make
+silly people believe they have long lived in those places where they
+never were, and flourish with skill in those authors they never
+seriously studied.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="LONDON" id="LONDON"></a>LONDON</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Worthies of England'</h4>
+
+
+<p>It is the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first for
+good government. There is no civilized part of the world but it has
+heard thereof, though many with this mistake: that they conceive
+London to be the country and England but the city therein.</p>
+
+<p>Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, because of
+late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in buildings, Covent
+Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their fear) it will be
+found to burnish round about with new structures daily added
+thereunto.</p>
+
+<p>It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the
+well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant
+rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but
+employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to commerce, by
+the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was that when King
+James, offended with the city, threatened to remove his court to
+another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough) returned that "he might
+remove his court at his pleasure, but could not remove the river
+Thames."</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of Rhodes;
+averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and customs of the
+Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no doubt knew of it)
+honoreth not this his etymology with the least mention thereof. As
+improbable in my apprehension is the deduction from Lud's-Town,&mdash;town
+being a Saxon, not British termination; and that it was so termed from
+Lan Dian, a temple of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is
+most likely in my opinion.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6136" id="Page_6136">[Pg 6136]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="MISCELLANEOUS_SAYINGS" id="MISCELLANEOUS_SAYINGS"></a>MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the pit of
+hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with the Devil's
+rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword; and from making
+of sport they come to doing of mischief.</p>
+
+<p>A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from them who
+never invited it.</p>
+
+<p>Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their power
+to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own crutches.</p>
+
+<p>Learning has gained most by those books by which the printers have
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all
+virtues.</p>
+
+<p>To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less
+are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.</p>
+
+<p>The lion is not so fierce as painted.</p>
+
+<p>... Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room for wit;
+sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much room.</p>
+
+<p>Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built many
+stories high.</p>
+
+<p>The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of
+their founders.</p>
+
+<p>... One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue must be
+confuted by his conscience.</p>
+
+<p>But our captain counts the image of God&mdash;nevertheless his image&mdash;cut
+in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest Moors he sees the
+representation of the King of Heaven.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6137" id="Page_6137">[Pg 6137]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EMILE_GABORIAU" id="EMILE_GABORIAU"></a>&Eacute;MILE GABORIAU</h2>
+
+<h4>(1835-1873)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">o speak of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He cannot be
+called the father of it; but the French novelist made his field so
+peculiarly his own, developed its type of human nature so
+painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation associated with it,
+that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to have outrivaled
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inf&eacute;rieure, in 1835,
+Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into three
+or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul together;
+and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the private
+secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul F&eacute;val. His first successful
+story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It was 'The
+Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper circumstances
+find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute
+Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the
+fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to
+another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous
+success.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In
+rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No.
+113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M.
+Lecoq' (1869),&mdash;in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of
+almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or
+five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every
+modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau a
+large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable literary
+properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken in
+consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.</p>
+
+<p>Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
+plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in a
+large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and
+purposes the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
+that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The
+unfolding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family
+secret, of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
+The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6138" id="Page_6138">[Pg 6138]</a></span> secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it
+the reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's
+novels have often been spoken of as "told backward." Most of the
+novels too gain their movement from one source&mdash;the wonderful
+shrewdness and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective
+service. M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and
+wonderfully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of
+episodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
+Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
+stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the
+family likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked
+abuses with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of
+Paris' and other books where he has set forth the merciless system of
+private blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.</p>
+
+<p>As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first order,
+even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write; and there
+is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is much to his
+credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced his work, and
+the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his profession.
+He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent. He has been
+criticized for making his denouements too simple, if one regards them
+as a whole process; but his details are full of variety, and the
+reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on the
+author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of the
+first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels is one
+of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_IMPOSTOR_AND_THE_BANKERS_WIFE_THE_ROBBERY" id="THE_IMPOSTOR_AND_THE_BANKERS_WIFE_THE_ROBBERY"></a>THE IMPOSTOR AND THE BANKER'S WIFE: THE ROBBERY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'File No. 113'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Raoul Spencer, supposed to be Raoul de Clameran, began to triumph over
+his instincts of revolt. He ran to the door and rang the bell. It
+opened.</p>
+
+<p>"Is my aunt at home?" he asked the footman.</p>
+
+<p>"Madame is alone in the boudoir next her room," replied the servant.</p>
+
+<p>Raoul ascended.</p>
+
+<p>Clameran had said to Raoul, "Above all, be careful about your
+entrance; your appearance must express everything, and thus you will
+avoid impossible explanations."</p>
+
+<p>The suggestion was useless.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6139" id="Page_6139">[Pg 6139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When Raoul entered the little reception-room, his pale face and wild
+eyes frightened Madame Fauvel, who cried:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Raoul! What has happened to you?"</p>
+
+<p>The sound of her gentle voice produced upon the young vagrant the
+effect of an electric shock. He trembled from head to foot: yet his
+mind was clear; Louis had not been mistaken in him. Raoul continued
+his role as if on the stage, and as assurance came to him his knavery
+crushed his better nature.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, the misfortune which has come to me," he replied, "is the
+last one."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Fauvel had never seen him like this. Trembling with emotion,
+she rose and stood before him, with her tender face near his. She
+fixed in a steady gaze the power of her will, as if she meant to read
+the depths of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she insisted. "Raoul, my son, tell me."</p>
+
+<p>He pushed her gently away.</p>
+
+<p>"What has happened," he replied in a choked voice which pierced the
+heart of Madame Fauvel, "proves that I am unworthy of you, unworthy of
+my noble and generous father."</p>
+
+<p>She moved her head in protestation.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" he continued, "I know and judge myself. No one could reproach my
+own infamous conduct so cruelly as my own conscience. I was not born
+wicked, but I am a miserable fool. I have hours when, as if in a
+vertigo, I do not know what I am doing. Ah! I should not have been
+like this, mother, if you had been with me in my childhood. But
+brought up among strangers, and left to myself without any guides but
+my own instincts, I am at the mercy of my own passions. Possessing
+nothing, not even my stolen name, I am vain and devoured by ambition.
+Poor and without resources but your help, I have the tastes and vices
+of a millionaire's son. Alas! when I recovered you, the harm was done.
+Your affection, your maternal tenderness which have given me my only
+days of happiness, could not save me. I who have suffered so much, who
+have endured so many privations, who have known hunger, have been
+spoiled by this new luxury with which you have surrounded me. I threw
+myself into pleasure as a drunkard rushes for the strong drink of
+which he has been deprived."</p>
+
+<p>Raoul expressed himself with such intense conviction and assurance
+that Madame Fauvel did not interrupt.</p>
+
+<p>Mute and terrified, she dared not question him, fearful of learning
+some horrible news.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6140" id="Page_6140">[Pg 6140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He however continued:&mdash;"Yes, I have been a fool. Happiness has passed
+by me, and I did not know enough to stretch out my hand to take it. I
+have rejected an exquisite reality for the pursuit of a phantom. I,
+who should have spent my life by your side and sought constantly for
+new proofs of my love and gratitude, I, a dark shadow, give you a
+cruel stab, cause you sorrow, and render you the most unfortunate of
+beings. Ah! what a brute I have been! For the sake of a creature whom
+I should despise, I have thrown to the wind a fortune whose every
+piece of gold has cost you a tear! With you lies happiness. I know it
+too late."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, overcome by the thought of his evil conduct, ready to
+burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>"It is never too late to repent, my son," murmured Madame Fauvel, "and
+redeem your wrong."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, if I could!" cried Raoul; "but no, it is too late. Who knows how
+long my good resolutions will last? It is not only to-day that I have
+condemned myself without pity. Seized by remorse at each new failure,
+I have sworn to regain my self-respect. Alas! to what has my
+periodical repentance amounted? At the first new temptation I forget
+my remorse and my oaths. You consider me a man: I am only an unstable
+child. I am weak and cowardly, and you are not strong enough to
+dominate my weakness and control my vacillating character. I have the
+best intentions in the world, yet my actions are those of a scoundrel.
+The gap between my position and my nature is too wide for me to
+reconcile them. Who knows where my deplorable character may lead me?"</p>
+
+<p>He gave a gesture expressing recklessness, and added, "I myself will
+bring justice upon myself."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Fauvel was too deeply agitated to follow Raoul's sudden moods.</p>
+
+<p>"Speak!" she cried; "explain yourself. Am I not your mother? You must
+tell me the truth; I must hear all."</p>
+
+<p>He appeared to hesitate, as if he feared to give so terrible a shock
+to his mother. Finally, in a hollow voice he said, "I am ruined!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ruined!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and I have nothing more to wait for nor to hope for. I am
+dishonored, and through my own fault, my own grievous fault!"</p>
+
+<p>"Raoul!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6141" id="Page_6141">[Pg 6141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is true. But fear not, mother; I will not drag the name that you
+bestowed upon me in the dirt. I have the vulgar courage not to survive
+my dishonor. Go, waste no sympathy on me. I am one of those creatures
+of destiny who have no refuge save death. I am the victim of fate.
+Have you not been forced to deny my birth? Did not the memory of me
+haunt you and deprive your nights of sleep? And now, having found you,
+in exchange for your devotion I bring into your life a bitter curse."</p>
+
+<p>"Ungrateful child! Have I ever reproached you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never. And therefore with your blessing, and with your loved name on
+his lips, your Raoul will&mdash;die!"</p>
+
+<p>"Die? You?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mother: honor bids it. I am condemned by inexorable judges&mdash;my
+will and my conscience."</p>
+
+<p>An hour earlier Madame Fauvel would have sworn that Raoul had made her
+suffer all that a woman could endure; and now he had brought her a new
+grief so acute that the former ones seemed naught in comparison.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you done?" she stammered.</p>
+
+<p>"Money was intrusted to me. I played, and lost it."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it a large amount?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but neither you nor I can replace it. Poor mother, have I not
+taken everything from you? Haven't you given me your last jewel?"</p>
+
+<p>"But M. De Clameran is rich; he has put his fortune at my disposal. I
+will order the carriage and go to him."</p>
+
+<p>"M. De Clameran, mother, is absent for eight days; and I must have the
+money to-night, or I am lost. Go! I have thought of everything before
+deciding. But one loves life at twenty!"</p>
+
+<p>He drew a pistol half out of his pocket, saying with a grim smile,
+"This will arrange everything."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Fauvel was too unnerved in reflecting upon the horror of the
+conduct of the supposed Raoul de Clameran to fancy that this last wild
+menace was but a means for obtaining money.</p>
+
+<p>Forgetting the past, ignoring the future, and concentrating her
+thought on the present situation, she saw but one thing&mdash;that her son
+was about to kill himself, and that she was powerless to arrest his
+suicide.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, wait," she said; "Andr&eacute; will soon return, and I will tell him
+that I have need of&mdash;How much did you lose?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6142" id="Page_6142">[Pg 6142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Thirty thousand francs."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall have them to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"I must have them to-night."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to be going mad; she wrung her hands in despair.</p>
+
+<p>"To-night!" she said: "why didn't you come sooner? Do you lack
+confidence in me? To-night there is no one to open the safe&mdash;without
+that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The expectant Raoul caught the word. He gave an exclamation of joy, as
+if a light had broken upon his dark despair.</p>
+
+<p>"The safe!" he cried; "do you know where the key is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is here."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank heaven!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Madame Fauvel with such a demoniacal glance that she
+dropped her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Give it to me, mother," he entreated.</p>
+
+<p>"Miserable boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is life that I ask of you."</p>
+
+<p>This prayer decided her. Taking a candle, she stepped quickly into her
+room, opened the writing-desk, and there found M. Fauvel's own key.</p>
+
+<p>But as she was handing it to Raoul, reason returned.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she murmured; "no, it is impossible."</p>
+
+<p>He did not insist, and indeed seemed willing to retire.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well!" he said. "Then, my mother, one last kiss."</p>
+
+<p>She stopped him:&mdash;"What will you do with the key, Raoul? Have you also
+the secret word?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I can try."</p>
+
+<p>"You know there is never money in the safe."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us try. If I open it by a miracle, and if there is money in the
+box, then I shall believe that God has taken pity upon us."</p>
+
+<p>"And if you do not succeed? Then will you swear that you will wait
+until to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the memory of my father, I swear it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then here is the key! Come." ...</p>
+
+<p>They had now reached Prosper's office, and Raoul had placed the lamp
+on a high shelf, from which point it lighted the entire room. He had
+recovered all of his self-possession, or rather that peculiar
+mechanical precision of action which seems to be independent of the
+will, and which men accustomed to peril always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6143" id="Page_6143">[Pg 6143]</a></span> find at their service
+in times of pressing need. Rapidly, and with the dexterity of
+experience, he placed the five buttons of the iron box upon the
+letters forming the name g,y,p,s,y. His expression during this short
+performance was one of intense anxiety. He began to fear that the
+excited energy which he had summoned might fail him, and also that if
+he did open the box he might not find the hoped-for sum. Prosper might
+have changed the letters, and he might have been sent to the bank that
+day.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Fauvel watched Raoul with pathetic distress. She read in his
+wild eyes that despair of the unfortunate, who so passionately desire
+a result that they fancy their unassisted will can overcome all
+obstacles.</p>
+
+<p>Being intimate with Prosper, and having frequently watched him close
+the office, Raoul knew perfectly well&mdash;indeed, he had made it a study
+and attempted it himself, for he was a far-seeing youth&mdash;how to
+manipulate the key in the lock.</p>
+
+<p>He inserted it gently, turned it, pushed it in deeper, and turned it
+again, then he pushed it in with a violent shock and turned it once
+more. His heart beat so loudly that Madame Fauvel could hear it.</p>
+
+<p>The word had not been changed: the box opened.</p>
+
+<p>Raoul and his mother uttered cries&mdash;hers of terror, his of triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut it!" screamed Madame Fauvel, frightened at this inexplicable and
+incomprehensible result; "leave it&mdash;come!"</p>
+
+<p>And half mad, she threw herself upon Raoul, clinging to his arm in
+desperation and drawing him to her with such violence that the key was
+dragged from the lock and along the door of the coffer, leaving a long
+and deep mark.</p>
+
+<p>But Raoul had had time to notice upon the upper shelf of the box three
+bundles of bank-notes. These he quickly snatched with his left hand,
+slipped them under his coat and placed them between his waistcoat and
+shirt.</p>
+
+<p>Exhausted by her efforts, and yielding to the violence of her
+emotions, Madame Fauvel dropped Raoul's arm, and to avoid falling,
+supported herself on the back of Prosper's arm-chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I implore you, Raoul," she said, "I beseech you to put those
+bank-notes back in the box. I shall have money to-morrow, I swear it
+to you a hundred times over, and I will give it to you, my son. I beg
+you to take pity on your mother!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6144" id="Page_6144">[Pg 6144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He paid no attention to her. He was examining the long scratch on the
+door. This mark of the theft was very convincing and disturbing.</p>
+
+<p>"At least," implored Madame Fauvel, "don't take all. Keep what you
+need to save yourself, and leave the rest."</p>
+
+<p>"What for? Would a balance make discovery less easy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, because I&mdash;you see I can manage it. Let me arrange it! I can
+find an explanation! I will tell Andr&eacute; that I needed money&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>With precaution, Raoul closed the safe.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said to his mother, "let us leave, so that we may not be
+suspected. One of the servants might go to the drawing-room and be
+surprised not to find us there."</p>
+
+<p>His cruel indifference and cold calculation at such a moment filled
+Madame Fauvel with indignation. Yet she still hoped that she might
+influence her son. She still believed in the power of her entreaties
+and tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah me!" she said, "it might be as well! If they discover us, I care
+little or nothing. We are lost! Andr&eacute; will drive me from the house, a
+miserable creature. But at least, I will not sacrifice the innocent.
+To-morrow Prosper will be accused. Clameran has taken from him the
+woman he loves, and you, now you will rob him of his honor. I will
+not."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke so loud and with such a penetrating voice that Raoul was
+alarmed. He knew that the office clerk slept in an adjoining room.
+Although it was not late, he might have gone to bed; and if so, he
+could hear every word.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go," he said, seizing Madame Fauvel by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>But she resisted, and clung to a table, the better to resist.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been a coward to sacrifice Madeleine," she said quietly. "I
+will not sacrifice Prosper!"</p>
+
+<p>Raoul knew of a victorious argument which would break Madame Fauvel's
+resolution.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" he cried with a cynical laugh; "you do not know, then, that
+Prosper and I are in league, and that he shares my fate."</p>
+
+<p>"That is impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think? Do you imagine that it was chance which gave me
+the secret word and opened the box?"</p>
+
+<p>"Prosper is honest."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, and so am I. But&mdash;we need the money."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak falsely!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6145" id="Page_6145">[Pg 6145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, dear mother. Madeleine left Prosper, and&mdash;well, bless me! he has
+tried to console himself, the poor fellow; and such consolations are
+expensive."</p>
+
+<p>He had lifted the lamp; and gently but with much force pushed Madame
+Fauvel towards the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to be more dumbfounded than when she saw the open safe.</p>
+
+<p>"What," she said, "Prosper a thief?"</p>
+
+<p>She asked herself if she were not the victim of a terrible nightmare;
+if an awakening would not rid her of this unspeakable torture. She
+could not control her thoughts, and mechanically, supported by Raoul,
+she placed her foot on the narrow stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"The key must be returned to the writing-desk," said Raoul, when they
+reached the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>She appeared not to hear, and it was Raoul who replaced the key in the
+box from which he had seen her take it.</p>
+
+<p>He then led or rather carried Madame Fauvel to the little drawing-room
+where he had found her upon his arrival, and placed her in an
+easy-chair. The utter prostration of this unhappy woman, her fixed
+eyes, and her loss of expression, revealed only too well the agony of
+her mind. Raoul, frightened, asked if she had gone mad?</p>
+
+<p>"Come, mother dear," he said, as he tried to warm her icy hands, "come
+to yourself. You have saved my life, and we have both rendered a great
+service to Prosper. Fear nothing: all will come straight. Prosper will
+be accused, perhaps arrested. He expects that; but he will deny it,
+and as his guilt cannot be proved, he will be released."</p>
+
+<p>But his lies and his efforts were lost upon Madame Fauvel, who was too
+distracted to hear them.</p>
+
+<p>"Raoul," she murmured, "my son, you have killed me!"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was so impressive in its sorrow, her tone was so tender in
+its despair, that Raoul was affected, and even decided to restore the
+stolen money. But the thought of Clameran returned.</p>
+
+<p>Then, noticing that Madame Fauvel remained in her chair, bewildered
+and as still as death, trembling at the thought that M. Fauvel or
+Madeleine might enter at any moment, he pressed a kiss upon his
+mother's forehead&mdash;and fled.</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6146" id="Page_6146">[Pg 6146]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="M_LECOQS_SYSTEM" id="M_LECOQS_SYSTEM"></a>M. LECOQ'S SYSTEM</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'File No. 113'</h4>
+
+<p>In the centre of a large and curiously furnished room, half library
+and half actor's study, was seated at a desk the same person wearing
+gold spectacles who had said at the police station to the accused
+cashier Prosper Bertomy, "Take courage!" This was M. Lecoq in his
+official character.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the entrance of Fanferlot, who advanced respectfully, curving his
+backbone as he bowed, M. Lecoq slightly lifted his head and laid down
+his pen, saying, "Ah! you have come at last, my boy! Well, you don't
+seem to be progressing with the Bertomy case."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, really," stammered Fanferlot, "you know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know that you have muddled everything, until you are so blinded
+that you are ready to give over."</p>
+
+<p>"But master, it was not I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>M. Lecoq had arisen and was pacing the floor. Suddenly he stopped
+before Fanferlot, nicknamed "the Squirrel."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think, Master Squirrel," he asked in a hard and ironical
+tone, "of a man who abuses the confidence of those who employ him, who
+reveals enough of what he has discovered to make the evidence
+misleading, and who betrays for the benefit of his foolish vanity the
+cause of justice&mdash;and an unhappy prisoner?"</p>
+
+<p>The frightened Fanferlot recoiled a step.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say," he began, "I should say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You think this man should be punished and dismissed; and you are
+right. The less a profession is honored, the more honorable should be
+those who follow it. You however are treacherous. Ah! Master Squirrel,
+we are ambitious, and we try to play the police in our own way! We let
+Justice wander where she will, while we search for other things. It
+takes a more cunning bloodhound than you, my boy, to hunt without a
+hunter and at his own risk."</p>
+
+<p>"But master, I swear&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Be silent. Do you wish me to prove that you have told everything to
+the examining magistrate, as was your duty? Go to! While others were
+charging the cashier, <i>you</i> informed against the banker! <i>You</i> watched
+him; you became intimate with his <i>valet de chambre</i>!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6147" id="Page_6147">[Pg 6147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Was M. Lecoq really in anger? Fanferlot, who knew him well, doubted it
+a little; but with this devil of a man one never quite knew how to
+take him.</p>
+
+<p>"If you were only clever," he continued, "but no! You wish to be a
+master, and you are not even a good workman."</p>
+
+<p>"You are right, master," said Fanferlot piteously, who could deny no
+longer. "But how could I work upon a business like this, when there
+was no trace, no mark, no sign, no conviction,&mdash;nothing, nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>M. Lecoq raised his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor boy!" he said. "Know, then, that the day when you were summoned
+with the commissary to verify the robbery, you had&mdash;I will not say
+certainly but very probably&mdash;between your two large and stupid hands
+the means of knowing which key, the banker's or the cashier's, had
+been used in committing the theft."</p>
+
+<p>"What an idea!"</p>
+
+<p>"You want proof? Very well. Do you remember that mark which you
+observed on the side of the copper? It struck you, for you did not
+repress an exclamation when you saw it. You examined it carefully with
+a glass; and you were convinced that it was quite fresh, and therefore
+made recently. You said, and with reason, that this mark dated from
+the moment of the theft. But with what had it been made? With a key,
+evidently. That being the case, you should have demanded the keys of
+the banker and the cashier, and examined them attentively. One of
+these would have shown some atoms of the green paint with which a
+strong-box is usually coated."</p>
+
+<p>Fanferlot listened with open mouth to this explanation. At the last
+words, he slapped his forehead violently, and cried&mdash;of
+himself&mdash;"Imbecile!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are right," replied M. Lecoq&mdash;"imbecile. What! With such a guide
+before your eyes, you neglected it and drew no conclusion! This is the
+one clue to the affair. If I find the guilty one, it will be by means
+of this mark, and I will find him; I am determined to do it."</p>
+
+<p>When away from Lecoq, Fanferlot, nicknamed the Squirrel, often
+slandered and defied him; but in his presence he yielded to the
+magnetic influence which this extraordinary man exercised upon all who
+came near him.</p>
+
+<p>Such exact information and such minute details perplexed his mind.
+Where and how could M. Lecoq have gathered them?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6148" id="Page_6148">[Pg 6148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You have been studying the case, master?"</p>
+
+<p>"Probably. But as I am not infallible, I may have let some valuable
+point escape me. Sit down, and tell me all that you know."</p>
+
+<p>One could not prevaricate with M. Lecoq. Therefore Fanferlot told the
+exact truth,&mdash;which was not his custom. However, before the end of his
+recital, his vanity prevented him from telling how he had been tricked
+by Mademoiselle Nina Gypsy and the stout gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, M. Lecoq was never informed by halves.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me, Master Squirrel," he said, "that you have forgotten
+something. How far did you follow the empty cab?"</p>
+
+<p>Fanferlot, despite his assurance, blushed to his ears, and dropped his
+eyes like a schoolboy caught in a guilty act.</p>
+
+<p>"O patron," he stammered, "you know that too? How could you have&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a thought flashed through his brain: he stopped, and bounding
+from his chair, cried, "Oh, I am sure&mdash;that stout gentleman with the
+red whiskers was you!"</p>
+
+<p>Fanferlot's surprise gave such a ridiculous expression to his face
+that M. Lecoq could not help smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it <i>was</i> you," continued the amazed detective, "it was you, that
+fat man at whom I stared. I did not recognize you! Ah, patron, what an
+actor you would make if you pleased! And <i>I</i> was disguised also!"</p>
+
+<p>"But very poorly, my poor boy, I tell you for your own good. Do you
+think a heavy beard and a blouse sufficient to evade detection? But
+the eye, stupid fellow, the eye! It is the eye that must be changed.
+There is the secret."</p>
+
+<p>This theory of disguise explains why the official, lynx-like Lecoq
+never appeared at the police office without his gold spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>"But then, patron," continued Fanferlot, working out the idea, "you
+have made the little girl confess, although Madame Alexandre failed?
+You know then why she left 'The Grand-Archange'; why she did not wait
+for M. Louis de Clameran; and why she bought calico dresses for
+herself?"</p>
+
+<p>"She never acts without my instructions."</p>
+
+<p>"In this case," said the detective, greatly discouraged, "there is
+nothing more for me to do except acknowledge myself a fool."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6149" id="Page_6149">[Pg 6149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, Squirrel," replied M. Lecoq with kindness; "no, you are not a
+fool; you are simply wrong in undertaking a task beyond your powers.
+Have you made one progressive step since you began this case? No. This
+only proves that you are incomparable as a lieutenant, but that you
+have not the <i>sang-froid</i> of a general. I will give you an aphorism;
+keep it, and make it a rule of conduct&mdash;'Some men may shine in the
+second who are eclipsed in the first rank.'"...</p>
+
+<p>Egotist, like all great artists, M. Lecoq had never had, nor did he
+wish to have, a pupil. He worked alone. He despised assistants; for he
+did not wish to share the pleasures of triumph nor the bitterness of
+defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore Fanferlot, who knew his patron so well, was astonished to
+hear him, who had heretofore given nothing but orders, helping him
+with counsel.</p>
+
+<p>He was so mystified that he could not help showing his surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me, patron," he risked saying, "that you take a strong
+personal interest in this case, that you study it so closely."</p>
+
+<p>M. Lecoq started nervously,&mdash;which motion escaped his detective,&mdash;and
+then, frowning, he said in a hard voice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is your nature to be curious, Master Squirrel; but take care that
+you do not go too far. Do you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>Fanferlot began to offer excuses.</p>
+
+<p>"Enough! Enough!" interrupted M. Lecoq. "If I lend you a helping hand,
+it is because I wish to. I wish to be the head while you are the arm.
+Alone, with your preconceived ideas, you never would find the guilty
+one. If we two do not find him together, then I am not M. Lecoq."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall succeed, if you make it your business."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am entangled in it, and during four days I have learned many
+things. However, keep this quiet. I have reasons for not being known
+in this case. Whatever happens, I forbid you to mention my name. If we
+succeed, the success must be given to you. And above all, do not seek
+explanations. Be satisfied with what I tell you."</p>
+
+<p>These charges seemed to fill Fanferlot with confidence.</p>
+
+<p>"I will be discreet, patron," he promised.</p>
+
+<p>"I depend upon you, my boy. To begin: Carry this photograph of the
+strong box to the examining magistrate. M. Patrigent, I know, is as
+perplexed as possible upon the subject of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6150" id="Page_6150">[Pg 6150]</a></span> the prisoner. You must
+explain, as if it were your own discovery, what I have just shown you.
+When you repeat all this to him with these indications, I am sure he
+will release the cashier. Prosper Bertomy, the accused cashier, must
+be free before I begin my work."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand, patron. But shall I let M. Patrigent see that I suspect
+another than the banker or the cashier?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. Justice demands that you follow up the case. M. Patrigent
+will charge you to watch Prosper; reply that you will not lose sight
+of him. I assure you that he will be in good hands."</p>
+
+<p>"And if he asks news of&mdash;Mademoiselle Gypsy?"</p>
+
+<p>M. Lecoq hesitated for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"You will say to him," he said finally, "that you have decided, in the
+interest of Prosper, to place her in a house where she can watch some
+one whom you suspect."</p>
+
+<p>The joyous Fanferlot rolled the photograph, took his hat, and prepared
+to leave. M. Lecoq detained him by a gesture:&mdash;"I have not finished,"
+he said. "Do you know how to drive a carriage and take care of a
+horse?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, patron, you ask me that&mdash;an old rider of the Bouthor Circus?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. As soon as the judge has dismissed you, return home, and
+prepare a wig and livery of a <i>valet de chambre</i> of the first class;
+and having dressed, go with this letter to the Agency on the Rue
+Delorme."</p>
+
+<p>"But, patron&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There are no 'buts,' my boy; for this agent will send you to M. Louis
+de Clameran, who needs a new <i>valet de chambre</i>, his own having left
+yesterday evening."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me if I dare say that you are deceived. Clameran will not
+agree to the conditions: he is no friend of the cashier."</p>
+
+<p>"How you always interrupt me," said M. Lecoq, in his most imperative
+tones. "Do only what I tell you, and let everything else alone. M.
+Clameran is not a friend to Prosper. I know that. But he is the friend
+and protector of Raoul de Lagors. Why? Who can explain the intimacy of
+these two men of such different ages? We must know this. We must also
+know who <i>is</i> M. Louis de Clameran&mdash;this forge-master who lives in
+Paris and never goes to his own factories! A jolly dog who has taken
+it into his head to live at the H&ocirc;tel du Louvre and who mingles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6151" id="Page_6151">[Pg 6151]</a></span> in
+the whirling crowd, is difficult to watch. Through you, I shall have
+my eye on him. He has a carriage; you will drive it; and in the
+easiest way you will know his acquaintances, and be able to give me an
+account of his slightest proceedings."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall be obeyed, patron."</p>
+
+<p>"Still another word. M. De Clameran is very irritable and suspicious.
+You will be introduced to him as Joseph Dubois. He will ask for your
+recommendations. Here are three, showing that you have served the
+Marquis de Sairmeuse, the Count de Commarin, and your last place&mdash;the
+house of the Baron de Wortschen, who has just gone to Germany. Keep
+your eyes open, be correct, and watch his movements. Serve well, but
+without excess of manner. But don't be too cringing, for that would
+arouse suspicion."</p>
+
+<p>"Make yourself easy, patron: now, where shall I report?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will come to see you every day. Until you have an order, don't step
+inside of this house: you might be followed. If anything unforeseen
+occurs, send a dispatch to your wife, and she will advise me. Now go;
+and be prudent."</p>
+
+<p>The door shut behind Fanferlot, and M. Lecoq passed quickly into his
+bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>In the twinkling of an eye he stripped off all traces of the official
+detective chief,&mdash;the starched cravat, the gold spectacles, and the
+wig, which when removed released the thick black hair.</p>
+
+<p>The official Lecoq disappeared; the true Lecoq remained, a person that
+no one knew,&mdash;a handsome young man with brilliant eyes and a resolute
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>Only a moment was he visible. Seated before a dressing-table, on which
+were spread a greater array of paints, essences, rouge, cosmetics, and
+false hair than is required for a modern belle, he began to substitute
+a new face for the one accorded him by nature.</p>
+
+<p>He worked slowly, handling his little brushes with extreme care, and
+in about an hour had achieved one of his periodical masterpieces. When
+he had finished, he was no longer Lecoq: he was the stout gentleman
+with the red whiskers, not recognized by Fanferlot.</p>
+
+<p>"There," he exclaimed, giving a last glance in the mirror, "I have
+forgotten nothing; I have left nothing to chance. All my threads are
+tied, and I can progress. I hope the Squirrel will not lose time."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6152" id="Page_6152">[Pg 6152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Fanferlot was too joyous to squander a moment. He did not run,&mdash;he
+flew along the way toward the Palais de Justice and M. Patrigent the
+judge.</p>
+
+<p>At last he had the opportunity of demonstrating his own superior
+perspicacity.</p>
+
+<p>It never occurred to him that he was striving to triumph through the
+ideas of another man. The greater part of the world is content to
+strut, like the jackdaw, in peacock's feathers.</p>
+
+<p>The result did not blight his hopes. If M. Patrigent was not
+altogether convinced, he at least admired the ingenuity of the
+proceeding.</p>
+
+<p>"This is what I will do," he said in dismissing Fanferlot: "I will
+present a favorable report to the council chamber, and to-morrow,
+most likely, the cashier will be released."</p>
+
+<p>Immediately he began to write one of those terrible decisions of "Not
+Proven," which restores liberty to the accused man, but not honor;
+which says that he is not guilty, but which does not declare him
+innocent:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Whereas, against the prisoner Prosper Bertomy sufficient charges do
+not exist, in accordance with Article 128 of the Criminal Code, we
+declare there are no grounds at present for prosecution against the
+aforesaid prisoner: we therefore order that he be released from the
+prison where he is now detained, and set at liberty by the jailer,"
+etc.</p>
+
+<p>When this was finished, M. Patrigent remarked to his registrar
+Sigault:&mdash;"Here is one of those mysterious crimes which baffle
+justice! This is another file to be added to the archives of the
+record office." And with his own hand he wrote upon the outside the
+official number, "<i>File No. 113</i>."</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6153" id="Page_6153">[Pg 6153]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="BENITO_PEREZ_GALDOS" id="BENITO_PEREZ_GALDOS"></a>B&Eacute;NITO PEREZ GALD&Oacute;S</h2>
+
+<h4>(1845-)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP</h4>
+
+
+<h5>I</h5>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he contemporary school of Spanish fiction dates from about the
+revolution of 1868, which drove out Isabel II. and brought in a more
+liberal form of government. Without this revolution, it would scarcely
+have found opportunity for the free expression of opinion and the bold
+critical tone towards ancient institutions which are among its leading
+characteristics. It is a fresh stirring of the human intellect, a
+distinctly new product, and a valuable contribution to the world's
+literature. It has affiliation with the Russian, the English, and
+other vital modern movements in fiction, and yet it can by no means be
+confused with that of any other country. Its method is realistic; but
+one of its leading figures, De Pereda, a strong delineator of rural
+life, protests, as to him and his works, against the use of the
+word,&mdash;"if," he says vigorously, "it means to rank me under the
+triumphal French banner of foul-smelling realism." That is to say,
+they consider the best material for fiction to be the better and
+sweeter part of life and its higher aspirations, and not that coarse
+part of it to which the French would seem to have devoted an undue
+amount of attention. The reader of Anglo-Saxon origin approaches this
+fiction with ease and sympathy; he has not to acquire any new point of
+view in order to understand it, nor to unlearn any wonted standards of
+taste or morals.</p>
+
+<p>An informing Spanish critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, herself a novelist of
+talent, points out that the present Spanish school cannot be said to
+have a "yesterday," but only "a day before yesterday." She means that
+it has skipped a certain interval, and connects itself with remoter,
+and not with recent, tradition. It really comes down from a time
+antedating even the great "Golden Age." It takes its rise in the
+wonderful naturalness of the 'Celestina,' a quaint "tragi-comedy" of
+the year 1499. It bears a close relationship, next, to Don Quixote and
+to the "Novelas Picarescas," the stories of amusing knaves in very low
+life, of which 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and 'Guzman de Alfarache' are the
+best examples, and that French imitation, 'Gil <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6154" id="Page_6154">[Pg 6154]</a></span>Blas,' better than the
+originals. A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth
+century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the
+nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then
+arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question.
+The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor,
+and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish
+fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary
+novelists in a higher degree than ever before. The Picaresque or Rogue
+stories seem to be&mdash;their naturalness admitted&mdash;a mere string of
+disconnected adventures, written to the taste of a period that had not
+the habit of keeping its attention fixed upon anything long; and we
+scarcely know any leading character more intimately at the end than at
+the beginning. As against this, we have now complete and lengthy
+novels, in which situations and characters are all worked out upon a
+symmetrical plan, and in which the conclusions generally follow like
+those of fate; that is to say, they are not arbitrary, but inevitably
+result from the conditions and circumstances given.</p>
+
+<p>So far as there is English influence in this literature, it may be
+said to be more in the form of example than as a direct component. It
+has given the Spanish movement courage and persistence, to see the
+same ideals elsewhere affording profit and pleasure to millions of
+men. Otherwise it is a mere coloring, a superficial trace. In
+particular, P&eacute;rez Gald&oacute;s is fond of introducing English characters.
+Some of them have the Dickens-like trait of a beaming, exuberant
+benevolence, and the athletic parson in 'Gloria' who risks his life
+pulling out to the rescue of a wrecked steamer is like Barrie's Little
+Minister. Many of his leading characters are of that mixed blood, at
+Cadiz and elsewhere in the South, where one parent is English and the
+other Spanish, and the offspring have had the advantage of an
+education in England. He admires English types and ways, and yet with
+a reluctance too; which brings it about that they are generally
+introduced subject to considerable satire and mockery. English
+steadiness and thrift,&mdash;yes, very well; but he has a lingering
+tenderness still for Spanish levity and improvidence. In 'Halma,' all
+the Marquis de Feramor's children have English names, as "Sandy"
+(<i>Alexandrito</i>), "Frank" (<i>Paquito</i>), and "Kitty" (<i>Catalanita</i>). The
+Marquis has been a student at Cambridge, and he imports into his
+career in Spanish politics the thorough study of the question at
+issue, the conservative temper and abhorrence of extremes, and the
+correct "good form" of some finished English statesman. These ideas of
+English policy and conservatism are talked over again, in the
+<i>tertulias</i> of the amusing family in 'El Amigo Manso,' who have come
+back wealthy from Cuba, the head of the household with the purpose of
+going into Parliament <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6155" id="Page_6155">[Pg 6155]</a></span>and securing a title. The English and the
+Spanish literary movements may be said to accompany each other
+amicably, much as Wellington's red-coats and the Spanish troops
+marched side by side in the War of Independence, which has left a
+feeling of friendship between the two nations ever since.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of the school of fiction in question are four writers,
+namely, Jos&eacute; Mar&iacute;a de Pereda, Armando Palacio Vald&eacute;s, Benito P&eacute;rez
+Gald&oacute;s, and Juan Valera. They may be considered, in their various
+ways, as of well-nigh equal merit; each one has some very
+distinguished and distinguishing quality, in virtue of which he cannot
+justly be rated below the others. De Pereda occupies a position apart
+in devoting himself wholly to the lives of humble people, the
+mountaineers and fishermen of the Biscayan Provinces. He never
+willingly departs from these scenes either in his literary or personal
+excursions; he has his home among them, near Santander. Valera stands
+apart in a different way, and would occupy himself by preference with
+the opposite class of society. He is the most learned and scholarly of
+the quartette, and his writing is the most carefully polished in
+style. He is a scholarly critic and essayist as well as a novelist. He
+is a realist like the rest, yet eschews, for instance, the imitation
+of dialect: he is not a realist in quite the same energetic and
+conscientious way; his atmosphere, while no doubt equally true, is
+rather dreamy and poetic. Vald&eacute;s and Gald&oacute;s are much more vividly
+modern, and they treat many of the same kind of subjects, the events
+of real life such as we see it all around us. Of the four, Vald&eacute;s has
+perhaps, in certain passages, the truest tenderness and most delicate
+pathos, and the most genuine humor, of that sunny kind which allows us
+to laugh without bitterness. He can sometimes be bitter too, and such
+a severe social satire as 'Froth' and such books as 'The Grandee' and
+'The Origin of Thought' leave, like many of those of Gald&oacute;s, an
+impression of gloom; yet even in these we are charmed on the way by
+his light touch and easy grace of treatment. Gald&oacute;s is he who takes
+the gravest attitude; many great problems of life and destiny occupy
+him seriously; he not only is very earnest, but seems so,&mdash;which does
+not however preclude a plentiful use of humor, as will be seen in the
+examples given. Furthermore, he is much the most prolific of the
+distinguished group, and to that extent he may be said to have the
+widest range.</p>
+
+<p>These writers are a highly beneficent influence in Spain at the
+present time, spreading over it as they do a multitude of stimulating
+pictures and liberalizing ideas, cast into charming literary form.
+They cannot fail to have a considerable effect upon conduct. In its
+manner, its aversion to obscurity, and fondness for floods of daylight
+that almost abolish shadow, this fiction is like the Spanish-Roman
+school <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6156" id="Page_6156">[Pg 6156]</a></span>of art, the painting of Fortuny, the two Madrazos, and others:
+the two seem but manifestations of a common impulse. On another side
+it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of
+information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain,
+and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its
+interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets
+an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and
+mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely
+the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells.
+With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature
+that makes the world akin; and we see, with pleasure and hope, the
+breaking up of the forces of medi&aelig;valism, the working of a mental and
+moral turmoil that is preparing the way for a general betterment.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be reasonable to suppose that Spanish literature remained
+wholly unaffected by the vigorous French movement just across the
+border. On the contrary, it clearly shows the trace of the robust
+modern style that has prevailed in France from Balzac to Zola. This
+trace, however, is in the style and not in the matter. It may possibly
+have aided the plainness of speech in the Spanish work, which is
+greater than in English books; and yet this plainness of speech is
+probably not greater than all books should be allowed, in the interest
+of their own usefulness, and in order not to be narrow instead of
+broad pictures of life. The tone towards sexual problems is never
+flippant; immorality is never put in an attractive light; there is
+hardly anywhere a more severe homily on the text that "the wages of
+sin is death" than is found in the wretched career of the
+transgressors in such books as Gald&oacute;s's 'Lo Prohibido,' 'Tormento,'
+and 'La Desheredada.'</p>
+
+<p>Just as in English books, the young girl, her aspirations and her
+innocent love affairs before marriage, figure largely in these novels.
+It is not necessary for her to wait until she is married in order to
+become a suitable heroine for fiction. Religious revolt or dissent,
+again, is one of the features most often used. There is still a very
+close union of Church and State in Spain, and life has a very
+ecclesiastical coloring. Nearly every family has ties of relationship
+or intimacy with some ecclesiastical person of either sex. This brings
+it about that such figures are as frequent in books as,
+correspondingly, in real life. In Valera's 'Pepita Ximenez' we find an
+earnest young student, a candidate for the priesthood, son of a noble
+house, turned aside from his holy career&mdash;through his father's
+connivance&mdash;by the fascinations of a most charming woman, their
+neighbor. In Vald&eacute;s's 'Sister San Sulpicio' it is a young novice, a
+delightfully gay and bright creature, whom love and matrimony withdraw
+from her convent. In the same author's 'Marta y Maria' a fair young
+girl is seen <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6157" id="Page_6157">[Pg 6157]</a></span>endeavoring to conform in the midst of modern life to
+the ascetic ideals of the medi&aelig;val saints, even to the point of
+wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge.
+Gald&oacute;s's 'Do&ntilde;a Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the
+undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family,
+and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews.
+As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant
+way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such
+is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely
+critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this
+century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of
+the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards
+living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Gald&oacute;s attacks only
+the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be
+known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from
+within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the
+sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their
+efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a
+curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern
+and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion
+of monarchy in its most absolute form.</p>
+
+<p>The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in
+Antonio de Trueba, and Madame B&ouml;hl de Faber, who signed herself
+"Fernan Caballero,"&mdash;one of the first of those who took a man's name,
+after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things
+than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott
+and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist
+who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue.
+Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian
+cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a
+torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de
+Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the
+present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The
+Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present
+generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no
+great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in
+it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of
+the movement should read Madame Pardo Bazan's valuable critical study,
+'La Cuestion Palpitante' (The Vital Question). Various books by the
+leading authors named have been well translated into English by Clara
+Bell, Mrs. Mary J. Serrano, Mary Springer, Rollo Ogden, Nathan Haskell
+Dole, and others.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6158" id="Page_6158">[Pg 6158]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h5>II</h5>
+
+<p>Benito P&eacute;rez Gald&oacute;s was born May 10th, 1845, in the Canary Islands.
+Las Palmas, his birthplace, capital of the Grand Canary, is a
+well-built little town of about eighteen thousand people, and the
+island is the most fertile of the group. In climate and situation the
+islands belong rather to Africa than Europe. The people are considered
+descendants of the Gothic inhabitants of Spain, who sought refuge
+there from the Saracen invasion. Their existence was all but lost to
+sight for some centuries, and they were only brought under European
+sway about the time of the discovery of America. These Fortunate
+Islands, the somewhat unusual scene where Gald&oacute;s was born and passed
+his youth, would seem to offer a fresh literary field, yet no word of
+description or reminiscence concerning them appears in any of his
+books. This is perhaps part of the policy of reserve that induces him
+to deny, even by implication, any biographical details concerning
+himself,&mdash;a reserve so marked as to have been generally noted as an
+eccentricity. Leopoldo Alas, his biographer, in the 'Celebridades
+Espa&ntilde;iolas Contemporan&eacute;as,' assures us that it was only with the
+greatest difficulty he drew from him the bare admission that he was
+born in the Canary Islands. He made his studies there in the State
+college, and came to Madrid at the age of eighteen to study law. He
+had no great liking for it, and did not follow it further, unless as
+it became a step for entrance into political life, for he has been a
+deputy in the National Cortes, for Porto Rico. He did not acquire
+skill in forensic eloquence; his biographer, above, states that he
+cannot put four words together in public, nor in private either. A
+reticent man, he is forced to write in order to find expression.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote his first book in 1867 and '68, but it was not published till
+1871. In the mean time the revolution of 1868 took place, which
+enlarged the boundaries of freedom in literature as in many other
+directions; and Gald&oacute;s at Barcelona had some small part in it. The
+book was 'La Fontana de Oro' (The Fount of Gold). It treats of the
+aspirations of the "ardent youth" of 1820, who rebelled against the
+reactionary policy brought in by Ferdinand VII. after the expulsion of
+the French from the country; and in the student hero L&aacute;zaro he perhaps
+displays his own ideas at the period. Violent political clubs were
+formed, on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of the French Revolution,
+and it is from the name of a caf&eacute; that was the meeting-place of the
+most famous of these clubs that the name of the story is derived. His
+next book was 'El Audaz' (The Fearless: 1872). The period is the same.
+The hero is an utterly fearless young radical, who has been driven to
+revolt through wrongs done <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6159" id="Page_6159">[Pg 6159]</a></span>his family by the Count de Cerezuelo. By a
+peculiar hazard, though far below her in social station, he meets the
+daughter of the count, a very proud and disdainful beauty. It is her
+caprice to fall in love with him, and she remains true to him to the
+end, when he dies in a street tumult, having first gone mad with his
+superheated enthusiasm. These early books are conceived upon
+conventional romantic lines, and hardly gave promise of their
+author's future fame. They contain however passages of strong
+character-drawing, like that of the Porre&ntilde;os, three ancient spinster
+sisters of a fallen patrician house in 'El Audaz,' which are equal to
+his later work.</p>
+
+<p>He next entered upon an extensive enterprise which soon began to give
+him both reputation and profit. This was the writing of a score of
+historical romances, after the model of those of Erckmann-Chatrian,
+called 'Epis&oacute;dios Nacionales' (National Episodes). They are divided
+into two series, the first beginning with 'Trafalgar' (1873), the
+second with 'El Equipaje del Rey Jos&eacute;' (King Joseph's Baggage: 1875).
+They deal with the two modern periods comprising the deliverance of
+the country from the usurpation of the French, and the more obscure
+struggles against Ferdinand VII., who sought to reduce the country
+under the same absolutist rule that had prevailed before the ideas of
+the French Revolution liberalized the whole of Europe. The history in
+these romances is intermingled with personal interests and adventures,
+to give it an air of informality; and though each is complete in
+itself, some knowledge of Spanish history is desirable as an aid to
+understanding them. They are considerably interlinked among
+themselves, the same characters appearing more or less in successive
+volumes. The hero of the first series is one Gabriel, who narrates
+them all in the first person. He is a poor boy who becomes servant to
+a family near Cadiz. He accompanies his master on board the huge
+Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship of her age, and is able to
+describe in detail the action of Trafalgar, the description being the
+more interesting for us as coming from the Spanish point of view. In
+'La Corte de Carlos IV.' (The Court of Charles IV.: 1873), we find him
+page to a leading actress, and an eye-witness to the degeneracy of
+that monarch and his favorite Godoy, which resulted in the seizure of
+the country by Napoleon for his brother Joseph. In 'La Batalla de los
+Arapiles' (translated by Rollo Ogden as 'The Battle of Salamanca':
+1875), the last of the series, the same Gabriel is a major, and
+performs an important commission for Wellington. He has risen to this
+level step by step, and on the way has had as many adventures as one
+of Dumas's guardsmen, and has carried them off as gallantly. In the
+second series of 'Epis&oacute;dios,' Salvador Monsalud is the principal
+character. He is a young fellow who is led by dire want&mdash;and also by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6160" id="Page_6160">[Pg 6160]</a></span>sharing the liberalized French view of the decadence and
+worthlessness of the Spanish form of rule&mdash;to take service in the
+body-guard of Joseph Bonaparte. A chapter full of strength and pathos,
+in 'King Joseph's Baggage,' shows him disowned by his mother and cast
+off by his village sweetheart on account of such service, both of them
+frantic with a spirit of independence like that which animated the
+Maid of Saragossa. A feature of this book that gives it originality is
+that the action turns not upon the usual principal features of battle,
+but upon the fate of the rich baggage train of booty with which Joseph
+Bonaparte had hoped to escape to France after his brief, disastrous
+reign.</p>
+
+<p>The 'Epis&oacute;dios' have had an extensive influence, and have been
+imitated, under a like title, in the Spanish Americas. The author's
+tone toward the past is generally severe and disdainful. "Had Spain,
+perchance, a 'constitution' when she was the foremost nation in the
+world?" he puts into the mouth of one of his characters, with sardonic
+intent. He has been called unappreciative, and his attitude towards
+Spanish antiquity has been protested against by other leading writers,
+of more conservative feeling, as unwarranted. These romances contain
+some passages showing aversion to the barbarities of war, but in
+general they are less humanitarian than those of Erckmann-Chatrian:
+they are principally devoted to glorifying Spanish fortitude and
+courage. These books are a great advance upon the two earlier novels;
+from the first they showed literary workmanship of a high order: they
+possess ingenuity of plot, sufficient probability, and graphic power
+of description, movement, and conversation. In the latter respects,
+indeed, they surpass some of the author's later works that make more
+serious pretensions.</p>
+
+<p>The wider and more definitely literary reputation of P&eacute;rez Gald&oacute;s
+rests upon more than a score of other works, in addition to the above.
+These are distinctly novels, as contrasted with romances; and they
+treat of contemporary life, in a method that aims to be
+conscientiously observant and impartial. It is often said, without
+much reflection, that we see enough of the things close about us, and
+need our literary recreation in the remote and strange. But it must be
+recalled that we see those things without the eyes of genius, and he
+is a true benefactor who poetizes and dignifies life in making evident
+that all of life is vivid with interest, even that part of it nearest
+to us, which without such illumination we may have thought devoid of
+it. The words in which the ostensible narrator of 'Lo Prohibido'
+(Forbidden Fruit: 1885), explains the purpose of his journal may well
+enough be taken to exhibit the method of Gald&oacute;s. It was to set down
+"my prosaic adventures, events that in no way differ from those that
+fill and make up the lives of other men. I aspire to no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6161" id="Page_6161">[Pg 6161]</a></span>further
+effects than such as the sincere and unaffected presentation of the
+truth may produce; and I have no design upon the reader's emotions by
+means of calculated surprises, frights, or conjurer's tricks, through
+which things look one way for a time and then turn out in a manner
+diametrically opposite."</p>
+
+<p>The titles of a number of his principal books, not hitherto given,
+with dates, are as follows. The dates are those when they were
+written, and they were generally published shortly after: 'Do&ntilde;a
+Perfecta,' 1876; 'Gloria,' 1876; 'Torquemada en la Hoguera'
+(Torquemada at the Stake: 1876); 'Marianela,' 1878; 'La Familia de
+Leon Roch' (Leon Roch's Family: 1878); 'Los Cien Mil Hijos de San
+Luis' (The Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis: 1877) of the
+Epis&oacute;dios; 'Un Faccioso M&aacute;s' (A Rebel the More: 1879) the completion
+of the Epis&oacute;dios; 'La Desheredada' (The Disowned: 1881); 'El Amigo
+Manso' (Friend Mildman: 1882); 'El Doctor Centeno,' 1883; 'Tormento,'
+1884; 'La de Bringas' (That Mrs. de Bringas: 1884); 'Fortunata y
+Jacinta,' 1886; 'Miau,' 1888; 'La Inc&oacute;gnita' (The Unknown: 1889);
+'Realidad' (Reality: 1890); 'Angel Guerra,' 1891; 'Torquemada en la
+Cruz' (Torquemada on the Cross: 1894); 'Torquemada en el Purgatorio'
+(Torquemada in Purgatory: 1894); 'Torquemada y San Pedro,' 1895;
+'Nazarin,' 1895; 'Halma,' 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Even in his new departure, Gald&oacute;s did not at once enter upon his final
+manner. 'Do&ntilde;a Perfecta,' 'The Family of Leon Roch,' and 'Gloria' are
+quite distinctly didactic, or "novels with a purpose"; while
+'Marianela' is somewhat cloyingly sentimental, a prose poem after the
+manner of Ouida. In spite of all this, however, 'Do&ntilde;a Perfecta' has
+been pronounced by many his best work. It is the one that has obtained
+greatest celebrity abroad, and it is the one, all things considered,
+likely to be the most satisfactory example of his work to the English
+reader. 'La Desheredada' marks the transition to his final period, and
+he has put it upon record that with this book the real difficulties of
+his vocation began. It is a poignantly affecting story of a poor girl
+who was brought up, by a parent half knave and half insane, to believe
+that she was not his daughter but that of a noble house. After his
+death she undertakes in all good faith to prosecute her claim, and is
+thrown into prison as an impostor. Her heart is broken by the
+disillusionment; she cannot adjust herself to life again without the
+sweetness of that beguiling belief, and so, in the end, not having the
+boldness to die, she throws herself upon the street, a social outcast.
+Both in the person of Isidora and others, the book is a moving
+treatise on false education. Other leading figures are her brother, a
+young "hoodlum" and thief, the burden of whose career she has also to
+bear upon her slender shoulders, and the pampered son of the poor
+Sastres, who have denied themselves bread that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6162" id="Page_6162">[Pg 6162]</a></span>he might have an
+education and luxuries. He has a hundred fine schemes for getting a
+living, but never a one of them includes turning his hand to a stroke
+of honest labor.</p>
+
+<p>'El Amigo Manso' is an extended piece of character-drawing, self-told,
+in a gently humorous vein. It gives an account of a college
+instructor, very benevolent, very methodical and prudent, and a trifle
+conceited and patronizing, who is in love with a pretty governess. By
+the time he has settled all his judicious pros and cons, the pretty
+governess, who really cared nothing about him, is engaged to a suitor
+of a more dashing sort. The scenes of 'Tormento,' 'La de Bringas,' and
+'Miau' are laid chiefly among the class of minor office-holders, with
+whose manners the author shows an exhaustive familiarity, and each has
+its peculiar tragic situation in itself. 'Realidad,' written once in
+the form of a novel, and again as a drama, treats of the subject of a
+wife's infidelity, as it might pass in real life, instead of in the
+conventional and hackneyed way. Its title seems to propose to adhere
+even closer to the exact truth than do the others. There come to mind,
+in its suppressed passion and its calm, intellectual, and bitter
+philosophy, suggestions both of Ibsen and Suderman. The banker Orozco,
+a noble and reserved nature, does not slay his wife, does not banish
+her from him, nor even make her reproaches. Augusta, on her side,
+wonders if his mind is not giving way. This bitter commentary on life
+is as near as her smaller mind can approach to a comprehension of his
+magnanimous conduct. The same Augusta, earlier, has said in
+conversation, "Real life is the greatest of all inventors; the only
+one who is ever ready, fresh, and inexhaustible in resource." In these
+books, however serious, the purpose does not obtrude to the detriment
+of art; the reader is left free to draw his own conclusions, as from
+events in actual life; the author ostensibly is neither for nor
+against, and yet he leaves us in no doubt as to his decision, always a
+moral and stimulating one.</p>
+
+<p>The favorite scenes of Gald&oacute;s's books are in Madrid and the small
+suburban resorts round about it, or at the numerous mineral springs
+which are so important a feature of Spanish summer life. He himself
+lives at Madrid, but goes for the season to a summer place he owns on
+the bold cliffs of the Bay of Biscay, at Santander. There, too he is
+near to Pereda, between whom and himself a remarkable friendship
+exists. A friendship so strong, warm, and long continued has been
+recognized as a notable feature in the careers of both. It is the more
+remarkable because except in literature, which both set above
+everything else, he is violently opposed to most of the views of
+Pereda&mdash;a conservative of the conservatives, even to the point of
+preferring the absolutist pretender Don Carlos for king. Even at
+Madrid and at Santander, however, Gald&oacute;s's scenery is mere stage
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6163" id="Page_6163">[Pg 6163]</a></span>setting; he does not describe nature sympathetically nor aim to
+render local color in an accurate way. As the action must pass
+somewhere, he gives it just as much of a setting as will suffice, and
+seems satisfied with that. The impression of his books, on the whole,
+is a gloomy one. He who sees life clearly must perchance see it
+darkly, and few see it more clearly than Gald&oacute;s. Yet his admirers will
+not have it that he is pessimistic, because Nature herself is not
+pessimistic. Even the sadness of nightfall ought not to be considered
+gloomy, they say, with much show of reason, since it is only the
+preparation for another day.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 454px;">
+<img src="images/sign335.png" width="454" height="100" alt="William Henry Bishop" title="William Henry Bishop" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_FIRST_NIGHT_OF_A_FAMOUS_PLAY_IN_THE_YEAR_1807" id="THE_FIRST_NIGHT_OF_A_FAMOUS_PLAY_IN_THE_YEAR_1807"></a>THE FIRST NIGHT OF A FAMOUS PLAY, IN THE YEAR 1807</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Court of Charles IV.' Copyright 1888, by W.S. Gottsberger.
+Reprinted by permission of George G. Peck, publisher, New York</h4>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[Gabriel, a boy of sixteen, has taken service as page with a very
+charming actress of the Principe Theatre. Between this theatre and La
+Cruz exists the same sort of hostility as between the rival theatres
+at Venice when Goldoni inaugurated his reform. La Cruz represents the
+new and "natural" spirit in the drama, as against the absurd
+artificial tradition that had prevailed up to that time. A part of
+Gabriel's duties is to go and hiss the plays at that theatre. The
+principal occasion of this kind is when he accompanies a band, led by
+a rival playwright, to the first performance of 'El S&iacute; de las Ni&ntilde;as'
+(The Maidens' Yes), by the famous Moratin, the leading piece of the
+new school.]</p></div>
+
+<p>"What an opening!" he [the rival poet and playwright] exclaimed, as he
+listened to the first dialogue between Don Diego and Simon. "A pretty
+way to begin a comedy! The scene a village inn! What can happen of any
+interest in a village inn? In all my plays, and they are many,&mdash;though
+never a one has been represented,&mdash;the action opens in a Corinthian
+garden, with monumental fountains to the right and left, and a temple
+of Juno in the background; or in a wide square with three regiments
+drawn up, and in the background the city of Warsaw, with a bridge, and
+so forth. And just listen to the twaddle this old man is made to talk!
+He is about to marry a young girl who has been brought up by the nuns
+of Guadalajara. Well, is that very remarkable? Is not that a matter of
+every-day occurrence?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6164" id="Page_6164">[Pg 6164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Pouring out these remarks, that confounded poet did not allow me to
+hear a word of the piece, and though I answered all his comments with
+humbly acquiescent monosyllables, I only wished that he would hold his
+tongue, deuce take him!...</p>
+
+<p>"What a vulgar subject! what low ideas!" he exclaimed, loud enough for
+every one to hear. "And this is how comedies are written!"...</p>
+
+<p>"But let us listen to it," said I, finding my chief's comments quite
+intolerable. "We can laugh at Moratin afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>"But I cannot bear such a medley of absurdities," he went on. "We do
+not come to the theatre to see just what is to be seen any day in the
+streets, or in every house you go into. If instead of enlarging on her
+matrimonial experiences, the lady were to come in invoking curses on
+an enemy because he had killed one-and-twenty of her sons in battle,
+and left her with only the twenty-second, still an infant at the
+breast, and if she had to carry that one off to save him from being
+eaten by the besieged, all dying of famine&mdash;then there would be some
+interest in the plot, and the public would clap their hands till they
+were sore. Gabriel, my boy, we must protest, protest vehemently. We
+must thump the floor with our feet and sticks to show that we are
+bored and out of patience. Yawn; open your mouth till your jaws are
+dislocated; look about you; let all the neighbors see that we are
+people of taste, and utterly weary of this tiresome and monstrous
+piece."</p>
+
+<p>No sooner said than done: we began thumping on the floor, and yawning
+in chorus, exclaiming, "What a bore!" "What a dreary piece!" "What
+waste of money!" and other phrases to the same effect; all of which
+soon bore fruit. The party in the pit imitated our patriotic example
+with great exactness. A general murmur of dissatisfaction was
+presently audible from every part of the theatre; for though the
+author had enemies, he had no lack of friends too, scattered
+throughout the pit, boxes, and upper tiers, and they were not slow to
+protest against our demonstration, sometimes by applauding, and then
+again by roaring at us with threats and oaths, to be silent; till a
+stentorian voice from the very back of the pit bellowed, "Turn the
+blackguards out!" raising a noisy storm of applause that reduced us to
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>Our poetaster was almost jumping out of his skin with indignation, and
+persisted in making his remarks as the piece went on....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6165" id="Page_6165">[Pg 6165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A pretty plot indeed! It seems hardly credible that a civilized
+nation should applaud it. I would sentence Moratin to the galleys, and
+forbid his writing such coarse stuff as long as he lives. So you call
+this a play, Gabrielito? There is no intrigue, no plot, no surprise,
+no catastrophe, no illusion, no <i>quid pro quo</i>; no attempt at
+disguising a character to make it seem another&mdash;not even the little
+complication that comes of two men provoking each other as enemies,
+and then discovering that they are father and son. If Don Diego now,
+were to catch his nephew and kill him out of hand in the cellar, and
+prepare a banquet and have a dish of the victim's flesh served up to
+his bride, well disguised with spice and bay leaves, there would be
+some spirit in the thing."...</p>
+
+<p>I could not, in fact, conceal my enjoyment of the scene, which seemed
+to me a masterpiece of nature, grace, and interesting comedy. The poet
+however called me to order, abusing me for deserting to the hostile
+camp.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," said I. "It was a mistake. And yet&mdash;does it not
+strike you, too, that this scene is not altogether bad?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should you be able to judge?&mdash;a mere novice who never wrote a
+line in your life! Pray what is there in this scene in the least
+remarkable, or pathetic, or historical?"</p>
+
+<p>"But it is nature itself. I feel that I have seen in the real world
+just what the author has set on the stage."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaby! simpleton! that is exactly what makes it so bad. Have you not
+observed that in 'Frederick the Second,' in 'Catharine of Russia,' in
+'The Slave of Negroponte,' and other fine works, nothing ever takes
+place that has the smallest resemblance to real life? Is not
+everything in those plays strange, startling, exceptional, wonderful,
+and surprising? That is why they are so good. The poets of to-day do
+not choose to imitate those of my time, and hence art has fallen to
+the lowest depths."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet, begging your pardon," I said, "I cannot help thinking&mdash;The
+play is wretched, I quite agree, and when you say so there must be a
+good reason for it. But the idea here seems to me a good one, since I
+fancy the author has intended to censure the vicious system of
+education which young girls get nowadays."...</p>
+
+<p>"And who asks the author to introduce all this philosophy?" said the
+pedant. "What has the theatre to do with moralizing?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6166" id="Page_6166">[Pg 6166]</a></span> In the 'Magician
+of Astrakhan,' in 'Leon and the Asturias Gave Heraldry to Spain,' and
+in the 'Triumphs of Don Pelayo'&mdash;plays that all the world admires&mdash;did
+you ever find a passage that describes how girls are to be brought
+up?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have certainly read or heard somewhere that the theatre was to
+serve the purposes of entertainment and instruction."</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff and nonsense!"</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Clara Bell.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 1024px;">
+<a name="PWedding" id="PWedding"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>THE WEDDING DRESS.</i></big><br />
+Photogravure from a Painting by Worms.</span>
+<img src="images/wedding.jpg" width="1024" height="652" alt="THE WEDDING DRESS" title="THE WEDDING DRESS" />
+</div>
+
+<h3><a name="DONA_PERFECTAS_DAUGHTER" id="DONA_PERFECTAS_DAUGHTER"></a>DO&Ntilde;A PERFECTA'S DAUGHTER</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Do&ntilde;a Perfecta.' Copyright 1895, by Harper &amp; Brothers</h4>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[Pepe Rey, a young engineer, arrives at Orbajosa to marry his cousin
+Rosario, the match having been made up between his father and Do&ntilde;a
+Perfecta, the girl's mother, who is warmly attached to the father of
+Pepe, her brother, and furthermore under heavy obligations to him for
+his excellent management of her large property interests. The
+landscape is the arid and poverty-stricken country of central Spain,
+though the town itself&mdash;"seated on the slope of a hill from the midst
+of whose closely clustered houses arose many dark towers, and on the
+height above it the ruins of a dilapidated castle"&mdash;such a town would
+probably be more appreciated by a traveler from abroad and a lover of
+the picturesque, than by a Spaniard, too familiar with its type.
+Orbajosa is a little place, full of narrow prejudices and vanities.
+Pepe Rey, with his modern ways, soon finds that he is wounding these
+prejudices at every turn. We look on with pained surprise at the
+difficulties that grow up around the young man, an excellent and
+kind-hearted fellow. Lawsuits are multiplied against him; he is turned
+out of the cathedral by order of the bishop for strolling about during
+service-time to look at some architectural features; and he is refused
+the hand of his cousin. Do&ntilde;a Perfecta herself joins in this hostility,
+which finally develops into a venomous bitterness that menaces his
+life. Such a feeling was not the outgrowth of mere provincial
+narrowness: we see in the end that it was the result of the plot of
+Maria Remedios, a woman of a humble sort, who aspired to secure the
+heiress Rosario for her own chubby-faced home-bred son. She influenced
+the village priest, and he influenced Do&ntilde;a Perfecta. Early in the day
+the young engineer would have abandoned the sinister place but for
+Rosario, who really loved him. She conveyed to him, on a scrap from
+the margin of a newspaper, the message:</p>
+
+<p>"They say you are going away. If you do, I shall die."</p>
+
+<p>She is a charming picture of girlhood,&mdash;lovely, true-hearted,
+affectionate, aspiring to be heroic, and yet crippled at last by a
+filial conscience and the long habit of clinging dependence. She has
+agreed to flee at night with her lover, and he is already in the
+garden. Her mother, the stern Do&ntilde;a Perfecta, ranging uneasily through
+the house, enters her room about the appointed time for the escape.]</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6167" id="Page_6167">[Pg 6167]</a></span>
+"Why don't you sleep?" her mother asked her.</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it?" asked the girl.</p>
+
+<p>"It will soon be midnight."...</p>
+
+<p>Rosario was trembling, and everything about her denoted the keenest
+anxiety. She lifted her eyes to heaven supplicatingly, and then turned
+them on her mother with a look of the utmost terror.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what is the matter with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you not say it was midnight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;but is it already midnight?"...</p>
+
+<p>"Something is the matter with you; you have something on your mind,"
+said her mother, fixing on her daughter her penetrating eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;I wanted to tell you," stammered the girl, "I wanted to
+say&mdash;Nothing, nothing; I will go to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Rosario, Rosario! your mother can read your heart like an open book,"
+exclaimed Do&ntilde;a Perfecta with severity. "You are agitated. I have
+already told you that I am willing to pardon you if you will repent,
+if you are a good and sensible girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, am I not good? Ah, mamma, mamma! I am dying." Rosario burst into
+a flood of bitter and disconsolate tears.</p>
+
+<p>"What are these tears about?" said her mother, embracing her. "If they
+are tears of repentance, blessed be they."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't repent! I can't repent!" cried the girl, in a burst of
+sublime despair. She lifted her head, and in her face was depicted a
+sudden inspired strength. Her hair fell in disorder over her
+shoulders. Never was there seen a more beautiful image of a rebellious
+angel.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this? Have you lost your senses?" said Do&ntilde;a Perfecta, laying
+both hands on her daughter's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going away! I am going away!" said the girl with the exaltation
+of delirium. And she sprang out of bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Rosario, Rosario&mdash;my daughter! For God's sake, what is this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah mamma, se&ntilde;ora!" exclaimed the girl, embracing her mother; "bind me
+fast!"</p>
+
+<p>"In truth, you would deserve it. What madness is this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bind me fast! I am going away&mdash;I am going away with him!"...<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6168" id="Page_6168">[Pg 6168]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Has he told you to do so? has he counseled you to do that? has he
+commanded you to do that?" asked the mother, launching these words
+like thunderbolts against her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>"He has counseled me to do it. We have agreed to be married. We must
+be married, mamma, dear mamma. I will love you&mdash;I know that I ought to
+love you&mdash;I shall be forever lost if I do not love you."</p>
+
+<p>"Rosario, Rosario!" cried Do&ntilde;a Perfecta in a terrible voice, "rise!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a short pause.</p>
+
+<p>"This man&mdash;has he written to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen him again since that night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have written to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have written to him also. O se&ntilde;ora! why do you look at me in that
+way? You are not my mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Would to God that I were not! Rejoice in the harm you are doing me.
+You are killing me; you have given me my death-blow!" cried Do&ntilde;a
+Perfecta, with indescribable agitation. "You say that that man&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Is my husband&mdash;I will be his wife, protected by the law. You are not
+a woman! Why do you look at me in that way? You make me tremble.
+Mother, mother, do not condemn me!"</p>
+
+<p>"You have already condemned yourself&mdash;that is enough. Obey me, and I
+will forgive you. Answer me&mdash;when did you receive letters from that
+man?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-day."</p>
+
+<p>"What treachery! what infamy!" cried her mother, roaring rather than
+speaking. "Had you appointed a meeting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"When?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here, here! I will confess everything, everything! I know it is a
+crime. I am a wretch; but you, my mother, will take me out of this
+hell. Give your consent. Say one word to me, only one word!"</p>
+
+<p>"That man here in my house!" cried Do&ntilde;a Perfecta, springing back
+several paces from her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Rosario followed her on her knees.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6169" id="Page_6169">[Pg 6169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At the same instant three blows were heard, three crashes, three
+explosions. [Maria Remedios had spied upon Pepe Rey, the lover; shown
+Caballuco, a brutal servant and ally, how to follow him stealthily
+into the garden; and had then come to arouse the house.] It was the
+heart of Maria Remedios knocking at the door through the knocker. The
+house trembled with an awful dread. Mother and daughter stood as
+motionless as statues.</p>
+
+<p>A servant went down-stairs to open the door, and shortly afterward
+Maria Remedios, who was not now a woman but a basilisk enveloped in a
+mantle, entered Do&ntilde;a Perfecta's room. Her face, flushed with anxiety,
+exhaled fire.</p>
+
+<p>"He is there, he is there," she said, as she entered. "He got into the
+garden through the condemned door." She paused for breath at every
+syllable.</p>
+
+<p>"I know already," returned Do&ntilde;a Perfecta, with a sort of bellow.</p>
+
+<p>Rosario fell senseless to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go down-stairs," said Do&ntilde;a Perfecta, without paying any
+attention to her daughter's swoon.</p>
+
+<p>The two women glided down-stairs like two snakes. The maids and the
+man-servant were in the hall, not knowing what to do. Do&ntilde;a Perfecta
+passed through the dining-room into the garden, followed by Maria
+Remedios.</p>
+
+<p>"Fortunately we have Ca-Ca-Ca-balluco there," said the canon's niece.</p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"In the garden, also. He cli-cli-climbed over the wall."</p>
+
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Perfecta explored the darkness with her wrathful eyes. Rage gave
+them the singular power of seeing in the dark that is peculiar to the
+feline race.</p>
+
+<p>"I see a figure there," she said. "It is going towards the oleanders."</p>
+
+<p>"It is he," cried Remedios. "But there comes Ramos&mdash;Ramos!" [Crist&oacute;bal
+Ramos, or "Cabulluco."]</p>
+
+<p>The colossal figure of the Centaur was plainly distinguishable.</p>
+
+<p>"Towards the oleanders, Ramos! Towards the oleanders!"</p>
+
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Perfecta took a few steps forward. Her hoarse voice, vibrating
+with a terrible accent, hissed forth these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Cristobal, Cristobal,&mdash;kill him!"</p>
+
+<p>A shot was heard. Then another.</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Mary J. Serrano.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6170" id="Page_6170">[Pg 6170]</a></span></p>
+<h4>A FAMILY OF OFFICE-HOLDERS</h4>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Don Francisco de Bringas y Caballero had a second-class clerkship in
+one of the most ancient of the royal bureaus. He belonged to a family
+which had held just such offices for time out of mind. "Government
+employees were his parents and his grandparents, and it is believed
+that his great-grandparents, and even the ancestors of these, served
+in one way and another in the administration of the two worlds." His
+wife Do&ntilde;a Rosalia Pipaon was equally connected with the official
+class, and particularly with that which had to do with the domestic
+service of the royal abodes. Thus, "on producing her family tree, this
+was found to show not so much glorious deeds of war and statesmanship
+as those humbler doings belonging to a long and intimate association
+with the royal person. Her mother had been lady of the queen's
+wardrobe, her uncle a halberdier of the royal guard, her grandfather
+keeper of the buttery, other uncles at various removes, equerries,
+pages, dispatch-bearers, huntsmen, and managers of the royal farm at
+Aranjuez, and so forth and so on.... For this dame there existed two
+things wholly Divine; namely, heaven and that almost equally desirable
+dwelling-place for the elect which we indicate by the mere laconic
+word 'the Palace.' In the Palace were her family history and her
+ideal; her aspiration was that Bringas might obtain a superior post in
+the royal exchequer, and that then they should go and take up their
+abode in one of the apartments of the second story of the great
+mansion which were conceded to such tenants." The above is from
+'Tormento.' In the next succeeding novel, 'La de Bringas,' this
+aspiration is gratified; the Bringas family are installed in the
+Palace, in the quarters assigned to the employees of the royal
+household. The efforts of two of their acquaintances to find them, in
+the puzzling intricacies of the place, are thus amusingly described.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="ABOVE-STAIRS_IN_A_ROYAL_PALACE" id="ABOVE-STAIRS_IN_A_ROYAL_PALACE"></a>ABOVE-STAIRS IN A ROYAL PALACE</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'La de Bringas'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Well, this is about the way it was. We threw ourselves bravely into
+the interminable corridor, a veritable street, or alley at least,
+paved with red tiles, feebly lighted with gas jets, and full of
+doublings and twistings. Now and then it spread out into broad
+openings like little plazas, inundated with sunlight which entered
+through large openings from the main court-yard. This illumination
+penetrated lengthwise along the white walls of the narrow passageways,
+alleys, or tunnels, or whatever they may be called, growing ever
+feebler and more uncertain as it went, till finally it fainted away
+entirely at sight of the fan-shaped yellow gas flames, smoking little
+circlets upon their protecting metal disks. There were uncounted
+paneled doors with numbers on them, some newly painted and others<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6171" id="Page_6171">[Pg 6171]</a></span>
+moldering and weather-stained, but not one displaying the figure we
+were seeking. At this one you would see a rich silken bell cord, some
+happy find in the royal upholstery shop, while the next had nothing
+more than a poor frayed rope's-end; and these were an indication of
+what was likely to be found within, as to order and neatness or
+disarray and squalor. So, too, the mats or bits of carpet laid before
+the doors threw a useful light upon the character of the lodgings. We
+came upon vacant apartments with cobwebs spun across the openings, and
+the door gratings thick with dust, and through broken transoms, drew
+chill drafts that conveyed the breath of silence and desolation. Even
+whole precincts were abandoned, and the vaultings, of unequal height,
+returned the sound of our footsteps hollowly to our ears. We passed up
+one stairway, then down another, and then, as likely as not, we would
+ascend again.... The labyrinthine maze led us on and ever onward....</p>
+
+<p>"It is useless to come here," at length said Pez, decidedly losing
+patience, "without charts and a mariner's compass. I suppose we are
+now in the south wing of the palace. The roofs down there must be
+those of the Hall of Columns and the outer stairway, are they not?
+What a huge mass of a place!" The roofs of which he spoke were great
+pyramidal shapes protected with lead, and they covered in the ceilings
+on which Bayeu's frescoed cherubs cut their lively pigeon-wings and
+pirouettes.</p>
+
+<p>Still going on and on and onward without pause, we found ourselves
+shut up in a place without exit, a considerable inclosure lighted from
+the top, and we had to turn round and beat a retreat by the way we had
+entered. Any one who knows the palace and its symmetrical grandeur
+only from without could never divine all these irregularities that
+constitute a veritable small town in its upper regions. In truth, for
+an entire century there has been but one continual modifying of the
+original plan, a stopping up here and an opening there, a condemning
+of staircases, a widening of some rooms at the expense of others, a
+changing of corridors into living-rooms and of living-rooms into
+corridors, and a cutting through of partitions and a shutting up of
+windows. You fall in with stairways that begin but never arrive
+anywhere, and with balconies that are but the made-over roof coverings
+of dwelling-places below. These dove-cotes were once stately
+drawing-rooms, and on the other hand, these fine salons have been made
+out of the inclosing space of a grand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6172" id="Page_6172">[Pg 6172]</a></span> staircase. Then again winding
+stairs are frequent; but if you should take them, Heaven knows what
+would become of you; and frequent, too, are glazed doors permanently
+closed, with naught behind them but silence, dust, and darkness....</p>
+
+<p>"We are looking for the apartment of Don Francisco Bringas."</p>
+
+<p>"Bringas? yes, yes," said an old woman; "you're close to it. All you
+have got to do is, go down the first circular stairway you come to,
+and then make a half-turn. Bringas? yes to be sure; he's sacristan of
+the chapel."</p>
+
+<p>"Sacristan,&mdash;he? What is the matter with you? He is head clerk of the
+Administrative Department."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then he must be lower down, just off the terrace. I suppose you
+know your way to the fountain?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not we."</p>
+
+<p>"You know the stairs called the C&aacute;ceres Staircase?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not that either."</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate, you know where the Oratory is?"</p>
+
+<p>"We know nothing about it."</p>
+
+<p>"But the choir of the Oratory? but the dove-cotes?"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Sum total, we had not the slightest acquaintance with any of that
+congeries of winding turns, sudden tricks, and baffling surprises. The
+architectural arrangement was a mad caprice, a mocking jest at all
+plan and symmetry. Nevertheless, despite our notable lack of
+experience we stuck to our quest, and even carried our infatuation so
+far as to reject the services of a boy who offered himself as our
+guide.</p>
+
+<p>"We are now in the wing facing on the Plaza de Oriente," said Pez;
+"that is to say, at exactly the opposite extreme from the wing in
+which our friend resides." His geographical notions were delivered
+with the gravity and conviction of some character in Jules Verne.
+"Hence, the problem now demanding our attention is by what route to
+get from here to the western wing. In the first place, the cupola of
+the chapel and the grand stairway roof-covering furnish us with a
+certain basis; we should take our bearings from them. I assume that,
+having once arrived in the western wing, we shall be numskulls indeed
+if we do not strike Bringas's abode. All the same, I for one will
+never return to these outlandish regions without a pocket compass, and
+what is more, without a good supply of provender too, against such
+emergencies as this."</p>
+
+<p>Before striking out on the new stage of our explorations, as thus
+projected, we paused to look down from the window. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6173" id="Page_6173">[Pg 6173]</a></span> Plaza de
+Oriente lay below us in a beautiful panorama, and beyond it a portion
+of Madrid crested with at least fifty cupolas, steeples, and bell
+towers. The equestrian Philip IV. appeared a mere toy, and the Royal
+Theatre a paltry shed.... The doves had their nests far below where we
+stood, and we saw them, by pairs or larger groups, plunge headlong
+downward into the dizzy abyss, and then presently come whirling upward
+again, with swift and graceful motion, and settle on the carved
+capitals and moldings. It is credibly stated that all the political
+revolutions do not matter a jot to these doves, and there is nothing
+either in the ancient pile they inhabit or in the free realms of air
+around it, to limit their sway. They remain undisputed masters of the
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Away we go once more. Pez begins to put the geographical notions he
+has acquired from the books of Jules Verne yet further into practice.
+At every step he stops to say to me, "Now we are making our way
+northward.&mdash;We shall undoubtedly soon find a road or trail on our
+right, leading to the west.&mdash;There is no cause to be alarmed in
+descending this winding stairway to the second story.&mdash;Good, it is
+done! Well, bless me! where are we now? I don't see the main dome any
+longer, not so much as a lightning-rod of it.&mdash;We are in the realms of
+the feebly flickering gas once more.&mdash;Suppose we ascend again by this
+other stairway luckily just at hand. What now? Well, here we are back
+again in the eastward wing and nothing else, just where we were
+before. Are we? no, yes; see, down there in the court the big dome is
+still on our right. There's a regular grove of chimney stacks. You may
+believe it or not, but this sort of thing begins to make my head swim;
+it seems as if the whole place gave a lurch now and then, like a ship
+at sea.&mdash;The fountain must be over that way, do you see? for the maids
+are coming and going from there with their pitchers.&mdash;Oh well, I for
+one give the whole thing up. We want a guide, and an expert, or we'll
+never get out of this. I can't take another step; we've walked miles
+and I can't stand on my legs.&mdash;Hey, there, halloo! send us a
+guide!&mdash;Oh for a guide! Get me out of this infernal tangle
+quickly!"...</p>
+
+<p>We came at last to Bringas's apartment. When we got there, we
+understood how we must have passed it, earlier, without knowing it,
+for its number was quite rubbed out and invisible.</p>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of William Henry Bishop.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6174" id="Page_6174">[Pg 6174]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FRANCIS_GALTON" id="FRANCIS_GALTON"></a>FRANCIS GALTON</h2>
+
+<h4>(1822-)</h4>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he modern doctrine of heredity regards man less as an individual than
+as a link in a series, involuntarily inheriting and transmitting a
+number of peculiarities, physical and mental. The general acceptance
+of this doctrine would necessitate a modification of popular ethical
+conceptions, and consequently of social conditions. Except Darwin,
+probably no one has done so much to place the doctrine on a scientific
+basis as Francis Galton, whose brilliant researches have sought to
+establish the hereditary nature of psychical as well as physical
+qualities.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Galton first took up the subject of the transmissibility of
+intellectual gifts in his 'Hereditary Genius' (1869). An examination
+of the relationships of the judges of England for a period of two
+hundred years, of the statesmen of the time of George III., of the
+premiers of the last one hundred years, and of a certain selection of
+divines and modern scholars, together with the kindred of the most
+illustrious commanders, men of letters and science, poets, painters,
+and musicians of all times and nations, resulted in his conclusion
+that man's mental abilities are derived by inheritance under exactly
+the same limitations as are the forms and features of the whole
+organic world. Mr. Galton argued that, as it is practicable to produce
+a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several
+consecutive generations, the State ought to encourage by dowries and
+other artificial means such marriages as make for the elevation of the
+race.</p>
+
+<p>Having set forth the hereditary nature of general intellectual
+ability, he attempts to discover what particular qualities commonly
+combine to form genius, and whether they also are transmissible.
+'English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture' (1874) was a
+summary of the results obtained from inquiries addressed to the most
+eminent scientific men of England, respecting the circumstances of
+heredity and environment which might have been influential in
+directing them toward their careers. One hundred and eighty persons
+were questioned. From the replies it appeared that in the order of
+their prevalence, the chief qualities that commonly unite to form
+scientific genius are energy both of body and mind; good health; great
+independence of character; tenacity of purpose; practical business
+habits; and strong innate tastes for science generally, or for some
+branch of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6175" id="Page_6175">[Pg 6175]</a></span>it. The replies indicated the hereditary character of the
+qualities in question, showing incidentally that in the matter of
+heredity the influence of the father is greater than that of the
+mother. It would have been interesting to have had the results of
+similar inquiries in the case of other classes of eminent
+persons,&mdash;statesmen, lawyers, poets, divines, etc. However, it is
+problematical whether other classes would have entered so heartily
+into the spirit of the inquiry, and given such full and frank replies.</p>
+
+<p>Large variation in individuals from their parents is, he argues, not
+only not incompatible with the strict doctrine of heredity, but is a
+consequence of it wherever the breed is impure. Likewise, abnormal
+attributes of individual parents are less transmissible than the
+general characteristics of the family. Both these influences operate
+to deprive the science of heredity of the certainty of prediction in
+individual cases. The latter influence&mdash;<i>i. e.</i>, the law of
+reversion&mdash;is made the subject of a separate inquiry in the volume
+entitled 'Natural Inheritance' (1889).</p>
+
+<p>In 'Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development' (1883), he
+described a method of accurately measuring mental processes, such as
+sensation, volition, the formation of elementary judgments, and the
+estimation of numbers; suggested composite photography as a means of
+studying the physiognomy of criminal and other classes; treated the
+subject of heredity in crime; and discussed the mental process of
+visualizing.</p>
+
+<p>'Finger Prints' (1892) is a study from the point of view of heredity
+of the patterns observed in the skin of finger-tips. These patterns
+are not only hereditary, but also furnish a certain means of
+identification&mdash;an idea improved in Mark Twain's story of 'Pudd'nhead
+Wilson.'</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Galton is himself an example of the heredity of genius, being a
+grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the author of 'Zo&ouml;nomia,' and a cousin of
+Charles Darwin. Born near Birmingham in 1822, he studied some time at
+Birmingham Hospital and at King's College, London, with the intention
+of entering the medical profession; but abandoned this design, and was
+graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. He soon after made
+two journeys of exploration in Africa, the latter of which is
+described in his 'Narrative of an Explorer in South Africa' (1853). An
+indirect result of these journeys was 'The Art of Travel; or Shifts
+and Contrivances in Wild Countries' (1855).</p>
+
+<p>'Meteorographica' (1863) is noteworthy as the first attempt ever made
+to represent in charts on a large scale the progress of the weather,
+and on account of the theory of anti-cyclones which Mr. Galton
+advances in it.</p>
+
+<p>Although strictly scientific in aim and method, Mr. Galton's writings,
+particularly those on heredity, appeal to all classes of readers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6176" id="Page_6176">[Pg 6176]</a></span>and
+possess a distinct literary value. One may admire in them simplicity
+and purity of diction, animation of style, fertility in the
+construction of theory, resourcefulness in the search for proof, and a
+fine enthusiasm for the subject under consideration.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_COMPARATIVE_WORTH_OF_DIFFERENT_RACES" id="THE_COMPARATIVE_WORTH_OF_DIFFERENT_RACES"></a>THE COMPARATIVE WORTH OF DIFFERENT RACES</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Hereditary Genius'</h4>
+
+
+<p>Every long-established race has necessarily its peculiar fitness for
+the conditions under which it has lived, owing to the sure operation
+of Darwin's law of natural selection. However, I am not much concerned
+for the present with the greater part of those aptitudes, but only
+with such as are available in some form or other of high civilization.
+We may reckon upon the advent of a time when civilization, which is
+now sparse and feeble and far more superficial than it is vaunted to
+be, shall overspread the globe. Ultimately it is sure to do so,
+because civilization is the necessary fruit of high intelligence when
+found in a social animal, and there is no plainer lesson to be read
+off the face of Nature than that the result of the operation of her
+laws is to evoke intelligence in connection with sociability.
+Intelligence is as much an advantage to an animal as physical strength
+or any other natural gift; and therefore, out of two varieties of any
+race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most
+intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life.
+Similarly, among animals as intelligent as man, the most social race
+is sure to prevail, other qualities being equal.</p>
+
+<p>Under even a very moderate form of material civilization, a vast
+number of aptitudes acquired through the "survivorship of the fittest"
+and the unsparing destruction of the unfit, for hundreds of
+generations, have become as obsolete as the old mail-coach habits and
+customs since the establishment of railroads, and there is not the
+slightest use in attempting to preserve them; they are hindrances, and
+not gains, to civilization. I shall refer to some of these a little
+further on, but I will first speak of the qualities needed in
+civilized society. They are, speaking generally, such as will enable a
+race to supply a large contingent to the various groups of eminent men
+of whom I have treated in my several chapters. Without going so far as
+to say that this very convenient test is perfectly fair, we are at all
+events justified in making considerable use of it, as I will do in the
+estimates I am about to give.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6177" id="Page_6177">[Pg 6177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In comparing the worth of different races, I shall make frequent use
+of the law of deviation from an average, to which I have already been
+much beholden; and to save the reader's time and patience, I propose
+to act upon an assumption that would require a good deal of discussion
+to limit, and to which the reader may at first demur, but which cannot
+lead to any error of importance in a rough provisional inquiry. I
+shall assume that the <i>intervals</i> between the grades of ability are
+the <i>same</i> in all the races.... I know this cannot be strictly true,
+for it would be in defiance of analogy if the variability of all races
+were precisely the same; but on the other hand, there is good reason
+to expect that the error introduced by the assumption cannot sensibly
+affect the off-hand results for which alone I propose to employ it;
+moreover, the rough data I shall adduce will go far to show the
+justice of this expectation.</p>
+
+<p>Let us then compare the negro race with the Anglo-Saxon, with respect
+to those qualities alone which are capable of producing judges,
+statesmen, commanders, men of literature and science, poets, artists,
+and divines. If the negro race in America had been affected by no
+social disabilities, a comparison of their achievements with those of
+the whites in their several branches of intellectual effort, having
+regard to the total number of their respective populations, would give
+the necessary information. As matters stand, we must be content with
+much rougher data.</p>
+
+<p>First, the negro race has occasionally, but very rarely, produced such
+men as Toussaint L'Ouverture....</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the negro race is by no means wholly deficient in men
+capable of becoming good factors, thriving merchants, and otherwise
+considerably raised above the average of whites....</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, we may compare, but with much caution, the relative position
+of negroes in their native country with that of the travelers who
+visit them. The latter no doubt bring with them the knowledge current
+in civilized lands, but that is an advantage of less importance than
+we are apt to suppose. The native chief has as good an education in
+the art of ruling men as can be desired; he is continually exercised
+in personal government, and usually maintains his place by the
+ascendency of his character, shown every day over his subjects and
+rivals. A traveler in wild countries also fills to a certain degree
+the position of a commander, and has to confront native chiefs at
+every inhabited place. The result is familiar enough&mdash;the white
+traveler almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6178" id="Page_6178">[Pg 6178]</a></span> invariably holds his own in their presence. It is
+seldom that we hear of a white traveler meeting with a black chief
+whom he feels to be the better man. I have often discussed this
+subject with competent persons, and can only recall a few cases of the
+inferiority of the white man,&mdash;certainly not more than might be
+ascribed to an average actual difference of three grades, of which one
+may be due to the relative demerits of native education, and the
+remaining two to a difference in natural gifts.</p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, the number among the negroes of those whom we should call
+half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants
+in America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this
+fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in
+their own matters were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like as
+frequently to make me ashamed of my own species. I do not think it any
+exaggeration to say that their <i>c</i> is as low as our <i>e</i>, which would
+be a difference of two grades, as before. I have no information as to
+actual idiocy among the negroes&mdash;I mean, of course, of that class of
+idiocy which is not due to disease.</p>
+
+<p>The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. I
+possess a few serviceable data about the natural capacity of the
+Australian, but not sufficient to induce me to invite the reader to
+consider them.</p>
+
+<p>The average standard of the Lowland Scotch and the English North
+Country men is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior to that of the
+ordinary English, because the number of the former who attain to
+eminence is far greater than the proportionate number of their race
+would have led us to expect. The same superiority is distinctly shown
+by a comparison of the well-being of the masses of the population; for
+the Scotch laborer is much less of a drudge than the Englishman of the
+Midland counties&mdash;he does his work better, and "lives his life"
+besides. The peasant women of Northumberland work all day in the
+fields, and are not broken down by the work; on the contrary, they
+take a pride in their effective labor as girls, and when married they
+attend well to the comfort of their homes. It is perfectly distressing
+to me to witness the draggled, drudged, mean look of the mass of
+individuals, especially of the women, that one meets in the streets of
+London and other purely English towns. The conditions of their life
+seem too hard for their constitutions, and to be crushing them into
+degeneracy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6179" id="Page_6179">[Pg 6179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the
+ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal
+departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed and in many
+respects unequaled, and partly because the population that gave birth
+to the creators of those masterpieces was very small. Of the various
+Greek sub-races, that of Attica was the ablest, and she was no doubt
+largely indebted to the following cause for her superiority: Athens
+opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her
+social life was such that none but very able men could take any
+pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men
+of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus
+by a system of partly unconscious selection she built up a magnificent
+breed of human animals, which in the space of one century&mdash;viz.,
+between 530 and 430 B. C.&mdash;produced the following illustrious persons,
+fourteen in number:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>Statesmen and Commanders.</i>&mdash;Themistocles (mother an alien),
+Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon (son of Miltiades), Pericles (son of
+Xanthippus, the victor at Mycale).</p>
+
+<p><i>Literary and Scientific Men.</i>&mdash;Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato.</p>
+
+<p><i>Poets.</i>&mdash;&AElig;schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sculptor.</i>&mdash;Phidias.</p>
+
+<p>We are able to make a closely approximate estimate of the population
+that produced these men, because the number of the inhabitants of
+Attica has been a matter of frequent inquiry, and critics appear at
+length to be quite agreed in the general results.... The average
+ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very
+nearly two grades higher than our own&mdash;that is, about as much as our
+race is above that of the African negro. This estimate, which may seem
+prodigious to some, is confirmed by the quick intelligence and high
+culture of the Athenian commonalty, before whom literary works were
+recited, and works of art exhibited, of a far more severe character
+than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the
+calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the
+contents of a railway book-stall.</p>
+
+<p>We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this
+marvelously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly
+lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more
+ambitious and accomplished women were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6180" id="Page_6180">[Pg 6180]</a></span> avowed courtesans and
+consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population
+were of a heterogeneous class. In a small sea-bordered country, where
+emigration and immigration are constantly going on, and where the
+manners are as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of
+which I speak, the purity of a race would necessarily fail. It can be
+therefore no surprise to us, though it has been a severe misfortune to
+humanity, that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if
+it had maintained its excellence, and had multiplied and spread over
+large countries, displacing inferior populations (which it well might
+have done, for it was exceedingly prolific), it would assuredly have
+accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree
+that transcends our powers of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>If we could raise the average standard of our race only one grade,
+what vast changes would be produced! The number of men of natural
+gifts equal to those of the eminent men of the present day would be
+necessarily increased more than tenfold;... but far more important to
+the progress of civilization would be the increase in the yet higher
+orders of intellect. We know how intimately the course of events is
+dependent on the thoughts of a few illustrious men. If the first-rate
+men in the different groups had never been born, even if those among
+them who have a place in my appendices on account of their hereditary
+gifts had never existed, the world would be very different to what it
+is....</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations,
+that the average standard of ability of the present time should be
+raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course
+of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions
+have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have
+had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the
+process of natural selection, whenever the changes were sufficiently
+slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them
+altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding.
+The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed
+under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization,
+reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world
+has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected
+over such wide areas, and with such startling rapidity, as in the case
+of savage man. In the North-American continent, in the West-Indian
+islands, in the Cape of Good Hope,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6181" id="Page_6181">[Pg 6181]</a></span> in Australia, New Zealand, and Van
+Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely
+swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure
+of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they
+were incapable of supporting. And we too, the foremost laborers in
+creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable
+of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralization,
+communication, and culture, call for more brains and mental stamina
+than the average of our race possess. We are in crying want for a
+greater fund of ability in all stations of life; for neither the
+classes of statesmen, philosophers, artisans, nor laborers are up to
+the modern complexity of their several professions. An extended
+civilization like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary
+statesmen or philosophers of our present race are capable of dealing
+with, and it exacts more intelligent work than our ordinary artisans
+and laborers are capable of performing. Our race is overweighted, and
+appears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed
+its powers....</p>
+
+<p>When the severity of the struggle for existence is not too great for
+the powers of the race, its action is healthy and conservative;
+otherwise it is deadly, just as we may see exemplified in the scanty,
+wretched vegetation that leads a precarious existence near the summer
+snow line of the Alps, and disappears altogether a little higher up.
+We want as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket to which we
+are henceforth to be exposed, and as good brains as possible to
+contrive machinery, for modern life to work more smoothly than at
+present. We can in some degree raise the nature of man to a level with
+the new conditions imposed upon his existence; and we can also in some
+degree modify the conditions to suit his nature. It is clearly right
+that both these powers should be exerted, with the view of bringing
+his nature and the conditions of his existence into as close harmony
+as possible.</p>
+
+<p>In proportion as the world becomes filled with mankind, the relations
+of society necessarily increase in complexity, and the nomadic
+disposition found in most barbarians becomes unsuitable to the novel
+conditions. There is a most unusual unanimity in respect to the causes
+of incapacity of savages for civilization, among writers on those
+hunting and migratory nations who are brought into contact with
+advancing colonization, and perish, as they invariably do, by the
+contact. They tell us that the labor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6182" id="Page_6182">[Pg 6182]</a></span> of such men is neither constant
+nor steady; that the love of a wandering, independent life prevents
+their settling anywhere to work, except for a short time, when urged
+by want and encouraged by kind treatment. Meadows says that the
+Chinese call the barbarous races on their borders by a phrase which
+means "hither and thither," "not fixed." And any amount of evidence
+might be adduced, to show how deeply Bohemian habits of one kind or
+another were ingrained in the nature of the men who inhabited most
+parts of the earth, now overspread by the Anglo-Saxon and other
+civilized races. Luckily there is still room for adventure, and a man
+who feels the cravings of a roving, adventurous spirit to be too
+strong for resistance, may yet find a legitimate outlet for it in the
+colonies, in the army, or on board ship. But such a spirit is, on the
+whole, an heirloom that brings more impatient restlessness and beating
+of the wings against cage bars, than persons of more civilized
+characters can readily comprehend, and it is directly at war with the
+more modern portion of our moral natures. If a man be purely a nomad,
+he has only to be nomadic and his instinct is satisfied; but no
+Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purely nomadic. The most so
+among them have also inherited many civilized cravings that are
+necessarily starved when they become wanderers, in the same way as the
+wandering instincts are starved when they are settled at home.
+Consequently their nature has opposite wants, which can never be
+satisfied except by chance, through some very exceptional turn of
+circumstances. This is a serious calamity; and as the Bohemianism in
+the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes the
+happier for mankind. The social requirements of English life are
+steadily destroying it. No man who only works by fits and starts is
+able to obtain his living nowadays, for he has not a chance of
+thriving in competition with steady workmen. If his nature revolts
+against the monotony of daily labor, he is tempted to the
+public-house, to intemperance, and it may be to poaching, and to much
+more serious crime; otherwise he banishes himself from our shores. In
+the first case, he is unlikely to leave as many children as men of
+more domestic and marrying habits; and in the second case, his breed
+is wholly lost to England. By this steady riddance of the Bohemian
+spirit of our race, the artisan part of our population is slowly
+becoming bred to its duties, and the primary qualities of the typical
+modern British workman are already the very opposite of those of the
+nomad.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6183" id="Page_6183">[Pg 6183]</a></span> What they are now was well described by Mr. Chadwick as
+consisting of "great bodily strength, applied under the command of a
+steady, persevering will; mental self-contentedness; impassibility to
+external irrelevant impressions, which carries them through the
+continued repetition of toilsome labor, 'steady as time.'"</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to remark how unimportant to modern civilization has
+become the once famous and thoroughbred-looking Norman. The type of
+his features, which is probably in some degree correlated with his
+peculiar form of adventurous disposition, is no longer characteristic
+of our rulers, and is rarely found among celebrities of the present
+day; it is more often met with among the undistinguished members of
+highly born families, and especially among the less conspicuous
+officers of the army. Modern leading men in all paths of eminence, as
+may easily be seen in a collection of photographs, are of a coarser
+and more robust breed: less excitable and dashing, but endowed with
+far more ruggedness and real vigor. Such also is the case as regards
+the German portion of the Austrian nation....</p>
+
+<p>Much more alien to the genius of an enlightened civilization than the
+nomadic habit is the impulsive and uncontrolled nature of the savage.
+A civilized man must bear and forbear; he must keep before his mind
+the claims of the morrow as clearly as those of the passing minute; of
+the absent as well as of the present. This is the most trying of the
+new conditions imposed on man by civilization, and the one that makes
+it hopeless for any but exceptional natures among savages to live
+under them. The instinct of a savage is admirably consonant with the
+needs of savage life; every day he is in danger through transient
+causes; he lives from hand to mouth, in the hour and for the hour,
+without care for the past or forethought for the future: but such an
+instinct is utterly at fault in civilized life. The half-reclaimed
+savage, being unable to deal with more subjects of consideration than
+are directly before him, is continually doing acts through mere
+maladroitness and incapacity, at which he is afterwards deeply grieved
+and annoyed. The nearer inducements always seem to him, through his
+uncorrected sense of moral perspective, to be incomparably larger than
+others of the same actual size but more remote; consequently, when the
+temptation of the moment has been yielded to and passed away, and its
+bitter result comes in its turn before the man, he is amazed and
+remorseful at his past weakness. It seems incredible that he should
+have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6184" id="Page_6184">[Pg 6184]</a></span> done that yesterday which to-day seems so silly, so unjust, and
+so unkindly. The newly reclaimed barbarian, with the impulsive,
+unstable nature of the savage, when he also chances to be gifted with
+a peculiarly generous and affectionate disposition, is of all others
+the man most oppressed with the sense of sin.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it is a just assertion, and a common theme of moralists of many
+creeds, that man, such as we find him, is born with an imperfect
+nature. He has lofty aspirations, but there is a weakness in his
+disposition which incapacitates him from carrying his nobler purposes
+into effect. He sees that some particular course of action is his
+duty, and should be his delight; but his inclinations are fickle and
+base, and do not conform to his better judgment. The whole moral
+nature of man is tainted with sin, which prevents him from doing the
+things he knows to be right.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation I offer to this apparent anomaly seems perfectly
+satisfactory from a scientific point of view. It is neither more nor
+less than that the development of our nature, whether under Darwin's
+law of natural selection or through the effects of changed ancestral
+habits, has not yet overtaken the development of our moral
+civilization. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not
+to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already
+have become molded into accordance with his very recent advance. We,
+men of the present centuries, are like animals suddenly transplanted
+among new conditions of climate and of food: our instincts fail us
+under the altered circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old
+civilizations are far less sensible than recent converts from
+barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The
+conscience of a negro is aghast at his own wild, impulsive nature, and
+is easily stirred by a preacher; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle
+the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.</p>
+
+<p>The sense of original sin would show, according to my theory, not that
+man was fallen from high estate, but that he was rising in moral
+culture with more rapidity than the nature of his race could follow.
+My view is corroborated by the conclusion reached at the end of each
+of the many independent lines of ethnological research&mdash;that the human
+race were utter savages in the beginning; and that after myriads of
+years of barbarism, man has but very recently found his way into the
+paths of morality and civilization.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6185" id="Page_6185">[Pg 6185]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ARNE_GARBORG" id="ARNE_GARBORG"></a>ARNE GARBORG</h2>
+
+<h4>(1851-)</h4>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capa.png" width="90" height="90" alt="A" title="A" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">rne Garborg is one of the most potent forces in the new school of
+Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is
+more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly
+different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the
+result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the
+foundations of a literature essentially Norse.</p>
+
+<p>The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social
+conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates
+the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this
+social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he
+himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental
+idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the
+paths. Where Bj&ouml;rnson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life
+might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the
+outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a
+storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material
+way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had
+held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a
+consequence of his books.</p>
+
+<p>Arne Garborg was born at J&aelig;deren, in the southwestern part of Norway,
+January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of
+his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village
+schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom
+religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived,
+Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with
+conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction
+led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of
+his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he
+reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was
+extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only
+models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong
+tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a
+school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in
+1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student
+was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and
+indeed sometimes actual want.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6186" id="Page_6186">[Pg 6186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had previously, in Ris&ouml;r, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a
+small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school
+affairs; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the
+Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had
+qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with
+the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the
+Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really
+the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early
+enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional
+articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book,
+a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'</p>
+
+<p>The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national
+language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in
+Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary
+medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen
+appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon
+the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and
+ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief
+propagandist of the new speech.</p>
+
+<p>His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously
+in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the
+vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism
+and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but
+then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own
+environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story.
+The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was
+looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and
+thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just
+punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper,
+is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of
+unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find
+most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives,
+and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!</p>
+
+<p>Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883),
+deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no
+rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked;
+and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result
+from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to
+which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book,
+again, is to a degree autobiographical; for Garborg, as has been said,
+is himself peasant, and he has fought the fight and suffered the
+anguish of the new culture attained with incalculable sacrifice.
+'Peasant Students' is undoubtedly his greatest work. Nowhere else has
+he indicated more clearly his seriousness of purpose, or worked
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6187" id="Page_6187">[Pg 6187]</a></span>
+out his theme with more effectiveness. The hero, Daniel Braut, is the
+representative of the ideal student, a son of the people who shall
+strive for "poetry and the soul" and introduce the elements of culture
+among his class. Manual labor is his aversion; and at last, forced by
+the weakness of his nature and the necessity of his poverty, he goes
+over to the ranks of philistinism, marries a woman of property, and
+studies theology. Both books are stories of high ideals and
+humiliating compromises. The author's pessimism is in the ascendant,
+and in the end the lower nature conquers.</p>
+
+<p>In 'Mannfolk' (1886) he takes up a different theme, the relation of
+the sexes, a question which he treats with startling frankness.
+Garborg is a realist in so far that he prefers to depict life as it
+is, well knowing that fiction cannot approach truth in point of
+interest. He bears true testimony of what he sees and knows, but his
+realism is very far removed from the naturalism of the French school.</p>
+
+<p>Following 'Peasant Students' appeared in 1884 'Forteljinger og Sogar'
+(Narratives and Tales), a volume of stories dealing sometimes with
+subjects generally proscribed. Of his other works the most important
+are the narrative 'Hjaa ho Mor' (With Mama), 'Kolbotnbrev og andre
+Skildringar' (Kolbotn Letters and Other Sketches: 1890), the novels
+'Tr&aelig;tte M&aelig;nd' (Weary Souls: 1891), 'Fred' (Peace: 1893), and the drama
+'Uforsonlige' (The Irreconcilables: 1888).</p>
+
+<p>After being deprived of his government position upon the publication
+of 'Mannfolk,' Arne Garborg retired with his wife and child into the
+solitude of the mountains, where for two years he lived and wrote in
+his s&aelig;ter hut; but at last, overcome by the loneliness of this
+isolated life, he left Norway and settled in Germany.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_CONFLICT_OF_THE_CREEDS" id="THE_CONFLICT_OF_THE_CREEDS"></a>THE CONFLICT OF THE CREEDS</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'A Freethinker'</h4>
+
+
+<p>The noise of carriage wheels increased. The carriage drove up before
+the door, and all the people of the parsonage sprang up in joy. Ragna
+however reddened somewhat. A minute after, both Hans Vangen and
+Eystein Hauk stood in the room. Hans embraced his parents and his
+sister, and on the surface was happy; Hauk greeted them kindly and
+warmly like an acquaintance of the family, and bowed deep before
+Ragna.</p>
+
+<p>"A good evening to you, and a merry Christmas-time!" called out Hans.
+"Here is the great foreign traveler and wise man Eystein Hauk, and
+here"&mdash;he pointed to the chaplain&mdash;"is the strict man of God, Balle;
+chaplain now, pastor later on, finally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6188" id="Page_6188">[Pg 6188]</a></span> bishop; a well-founded
+theologian and a true support to the Church in these distracted times.
+It will be well with you if you do not fall into a quarrel about
+belief."</p>
+
+<p>There was talking and laughing; the pastor's wife poured out wine; the
+new-comers sat down; the table was quickly set, and then they went
+into the dining-room, where Christmas grits and Christmas fish stood
+smoking in a great dish and "awaited the help of the people." The
+pastor read a blessing, which was not listened to with any further
+devoutness. Ragna and Balle sat for the most part and looked at Hauk,
+but Hauk looked at Ragna, and the pastor's wife said of Hans how he
+had grown during the past year, and how his good looks and his
+affability had improved.</p>
+
+<p>The one who talked most at the table was Hans. Hauk was rather silent.
+The pastor asked him in a few words about his travels abroad; he
+answered promptly but shortly, and often in such a cleverly turned way
+of speaking that it was difficult to find out his real meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The chaplain, too, would have liked to hear about foreign lands. What
+was the state of the Christian religion in France?&mdash;Well, it was
+various. It was there as here: there were people of all sorts.&mdash;But
+was not the great majority unchristian?&mdash;Well, of enlightened and
+learned people it was, to be sure, the smallest part who strictly
+could be called Christians.&mdash;But with morals? Was there not a great
+deal of social viciousness and impropriety?&mdash;Well, if it were only
+considered under certain conditions, in certain cities, it was
+probably there as in other places.&mdash;Indeed!&mdash;Balle, rebuffed, looked
+away from Hauk, and did not talk with him afterward.</p>
+
+<p>When they left the table there was set out dessert, with wine, and
+pipes were also brought. The conversation went on as before, but it
+was none the less Hans who talked most. He was a fresh, happy fellow.
+His mother sat and found pleasure in looking at him. The pastor and
+Balle sat and smoked; glanced now and then at Hauk, who was a little
+way off at a smaller table, talking small-talk with Ragna. The pastor
+had become more silent, and Balle looked as if he little liked the
+state of things, although he tried to control himself. Hans understood
+this, and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not bother yourself about Hauk," said he. "He has been in Paris
+and has learned French manners, and consequently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6189" id="Page_6189">[Pg 6189]</a></span> he likes women's
+society best; but even if he is a little grand, he will quickly become
+Norse again, keep to his pipe and his glass, and let the women take
+care of themselves."</p>
+
+<p>Balle bit his lips; the pastor smiled a little. "Young people are more
+bashful here in Norway," said he. "That is true," he continued. "You
+have read the new novel 'Virginia,' that the people have waited so
+long for?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Virginia'?&mdash;pfh! that is a vile book," answered Hans, and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Vile?" said the chaplain questioningly.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a scandalous book! says Christiania. It has set the whole town
+on end. It works destruction upon marriage, they say; upon morals,
+upon society. I have never seen Christiania so moral as in these
+days."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!" said Balle; "Christiania is on the whole a moral town."</p>
+
+<p>"It is at this time! The young poets are happy for all the days of
+their life. The men forbid the women to read the book, and the women
+forbid their daughters&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And so they all read it together?" said the pastor.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly! The women read it and say, 'Paugh! the poets do not know
+life.' The daughters, the poor dear angels, they read it and say,
+'Dear me, is that anything? Have we not read worse books than that?'"</p>
+
+<p>"But tell us, then, what the book is about?" said the pastor.</p>
+
+<p>"It is about&mdash;that married people shall love each other," said Hans
+stoutly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oho! free love!" called out the chaplain.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly! Free love! 'All true love is free,' says the fool-hardy
+fellow of a poet."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you hear that, pastor?" said Balle.</p>
+
+<p>"If our own poets also take it up, let us have a care! Then he
+recognizes 'free thought'; and what then?" asked the chaplain.</p>
+
+<p>"That is true," replied Hans. "'All thoughts are free,' he says, 'and
+not merely duty free.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he does not believe in God?"</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt it; but even that is not the worst."</p>
+
+<p>"Not the&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, for there are many people in Christiania who do not believe in
+God. But these poets do not even believe in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6190" id="Page_6190">[Pg 6190]</a></span> Devil!" Hans laughed
+like a child at the face that the chaplain made; the pastor looked
+severely at Hans, who cast down his eyes and was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Worthless fruit," sighed the chaplain. "Our poets have hitherto kept
+themselves free from these godless thoughts, even if they have not
+always had the right opinion of Christianity, and particularly have
+taken up with the confusions of Grundtvigianism; but now, now it has
+taken another path. Do you see the spirit of revolt, pastor? Do you
+hear how they rise and tear asunder all its bonds; how opposition
+arises against all that is high and holy, and they storm even against
+the foundations of society?"</p>
+
+<p>"May God help us!" sighed the pastor. "It does not look right. Is
+there anything new in the newspapers?" he asked, as if to get away
+from a conversation that plainly oppressed him.</p>
+
+<p>Hans ran out, and came quickly in again with the newspapers. Such of
+these as were French he took for himself, the rest he gave to Balle.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see, father?" said Hans with the mien of a schoolmaster. "If
+you will have politics, you must turn to France. All other politics
+are merely an echo of theirs. France is Europe. France is the world!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you hear, pastor?" said Balle. "Do you hear how the French spirit
+spreads and increases in power? the French spirit, which has always
+been one and the same with rationalism and revolution?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here is an article that will do Balle good!" called out Hans. "It
+does not assume the good tone or prattle tediously like our Norse
+newspaper articles. There is fire and burning in it; you recognize
+something like a clenched fist back of the words, prepared for
+everything upon which it may hit. That is what I call politics!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you are a foolish fellow," said the pastor. "Come, out with it!"</p>
+
+<p>Hans read an article against the priestly party or clericals, and the
+piece was severely radical. It was particularly to the effect that the
+clergy and Christianity must be ousted from the public schools, if
+thinkers were to be really for a genuine and sound popular education.
+Christianity had already done what it could do; hereafter it lay
+merely in the way. "Freedom and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6191" id="Page_6191">[Pg 6191]</a></span> self-government" was the war-cry now,
+for this generation. They might be fair enough, many of the dreams
+which the new time compelled us to abandon; but light and life and
+truth were ten times fairer than all dreams.</p>
+
+<p>The chaplain sat and sulked, and looked into one of the Norse papers.
+"Here stands the same," said he. "No, but&mdash;? Yes, the same, and yet
+not the same. The Norse paper has cut out or changed all that treats
+directly of Christianity; the rest is the same."</p>
+
+<p>"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Hans.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they are as wise as serpents," sighed the chaplain. "Here may
+plainly be seen how the matter stands. It is hidden away in politics,
+but the spirit they cannot conceal; it is precisely the same French
+spirit of hell, the spirit of revolt, the spirit of the Devil, which
+lifts itself against even the living God. Do you see that, pastor? Do
+you see how wholly these 'freedom politics,' as they are called, are
+held up and impregnated with this godless spirit of revolt? In truth,
+it becomes more and more clear that it is the part of us, the watchmen
+of Zion,&mdash;more now than ever before,&mdash;to watch and pray."</p>
+
+<p>The pastor sat and meditated. He looked oppressed and sorrowful. It
+was too quiet for Hans: he moved away to Hauk and Ragna. The chaplain
+appeared to like this, and became more calm.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear pastor," said he after a while, "just as surely as there is
+truth in our work,&mdash;yes, this question presses itself more and more in
+upon me,&mdash;as surely as there is truth in our work: that we shall watch
+over God's house and people,&mdash;we <i>cannot</i> remain silent and be calm
+when we see a spirit like this coming bearing in upon us&mdash;a spirit
+which is directly founded upon heathenism, and so plainly shows its
+Satanic origin. Shall it be? Can we answer for that before our Lord
+and God?"</p>
+
+<p>The pastor was silent. He was in great doubt and uncertainty of mind.
+"I do not believe that it is right to bring politics into the house of
+God," said he at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Politics, no! But this is not politics; this is a spirit of the
+times, a view of life which takes the outward garb of politics, but at
+the bottom is merely a new outbreak of the same old heathenism that
+the Church at all times has had to contend with. I, for my part, do
+not believe that I can keep silent with a quiet conscience."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6192" id="Page_6192">[Pg 6192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The pastor held his peace and thought. "This is a hard question," he
+said finally. "May our Lord give us wisdom!"</p>
+
+<p>"Amen," said the chaplain....</p>
+
+<p>That night the old pastor did not sleep well. He walked up and down
+his chamber and thought. "When it comes to the point," said he to
+himself, "Balle is right; there <i>is</i> something bad and evil in the
+spirit of the time; there <i>is</i> something devilish. Merely look, now,
+at this Eystein Hauk, this clever fine fellow: he is not to be got at.
+He is frozen to ice and hardened to steel, slippery and smooth as a
+serpent. There came such an uncanny spirit from him that he made me
+downright sick: no respect, no veneration even for his own father; God
+knows how he can hold fast to his Christian faith. They call it
+freedom, humanity; but it is not that. It is hate, venom, bad blood.
+They will tear from them all bonds, as Balle says, raise a
+revolt&mdash;revolt against all that is beautiful and good, against God,
+against belief. H'm! Build the State, this whole earthly life, upon a
+heathen foundation! Sever connection with Christianity, cast the
+Church away from them like old trash. That is terrible! And free love,
+free thought&mdash;the Christian religion out of the schools&mdash;no! that is
+Satan himself who rages. Free thoughts in my time were not so: they
+were warm and beautiful; there was heart in them; they made us good
+and happy." He shook himself, as if to throw off a chill. Should one
+be silent at such things? Should one look quietly on while this evil
+spirit eats itself in among the people? or should one, like a disciple
+of God, lift up the sword of the Word and the Spirit against this
+poisonous basilisk?</p>
+
+<p>He read in the Bible and in Luther. Then he got up again and walked.
+The clock struck hour after hour, but the old man did not hear it. He
+thought only of the heavy responsibility. Was it not to profane the
+house of God and the holy office, to drag the struggle and strife of
+the day into it? Was he not set to watch over word and teaching, but
+not to be a judge in the world's disputes? But of his flock, the
+people of the Church, the Bride of Christ, whom he should watch, but
+who stood in the midst of a wicked world, and whose souls were harmed
+when such evil gusts blew? Would not every soul at the Judgment Day be
+demanded at his hands? And was he a good shepherd, who indeed kept
+watch against the wolf when the wolf came having on his right garb,
+but looked on and was silent when he came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6193" id="Page_6193">[Pg 6193]</a></span> clothed in sheep's garments
+and pretended to belong among the good? He read anew in Luther. At
+last he knelt down and prayed for a long time, and ended with a
+fervent and heartfelt "Our Father."</p>
+
+<p>Then he arose as if freed from doubt, looked meekly up to heaven, and
+said, "As thou wilt, O Lord!" He seated himself in his arm-chair,
+weary but happy, and fell asleep for a while. Presently, however, the
+day grew gray in the east and he awoke. He read the morning prayers to
+himself, chose his text, and thought about the sermon. When the bell
+began to ring he went to church. He was pale, but calm and kindly. The
+farmers looked at him and greeted him more warmly than usual. The
+pastor's wife and Ragna came shortly after; Hans and Eystein did not
+arrive at the church until the pastor stood in the pulpit.</p>
+
+<p>The Christmas sermon was fervid and good. He spoke about the angels'
+song, "Peace on earth." They had seldom heard the old man preach so
+well. But at the end came a turn in the thought that caused some
+astonishment. It was about politics.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Christians," he said, "how is it in our days with 'peace on
+earth'? Ah, my brothers, we know that all too well. Peace has gone
+from us. It has vanished like a beautiful evening cloud. Evil powers
+rise up in these hours. The Devil is abroad, and tempts anew mankind
+to eat of the tree of knowledge and to tear themselves loose from God.
+Take heed, take heed, dear brothers! Take heed of the false prophets,
+who proclaim a new gospel and promise you 'freedom' and
+'enlightenment,' and all that is good,&mdash;yes, promise you righteousness
+and power, if you will eat of the forbidden tree. They give themselves
+out for sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. They promise you
+freedom, but they give you thraldom, the thraldom of sin, which is the
+worst of all. They promise you blessings and joy, but they steal you
+away from Him who alone has blessings and freedom for our poor race.
+They promise you security and defense against all tyranny and
+oppression, but they give you gladly into his power who is the father
+of all tyranny and of all evil; he who is the destroyer of man from
+the beginning. Dear Christians, let us watch and pray! Let us prove
+the spirit, whether it is from God! Let us harden our ears and our
+hearts against false voices and magic songs that deceive, which come
+to us out of the dark chasms and abysses in this wicked world!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6194" id="Page_6194">[Pg 6194]</a></span> Let us
+be fearful of this wild and sinful thought of freedom, that from Adam
+down has been the deep and true source of all our woe! Let us pray for
+'peace on earth,' for only then can our Lord God have consideration
+for mankind." With this he ended his sermon.</p>
+
+<p class="transc">Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by William H.
+Carpenter</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6195" id="Page_6195">[Pg 6195]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HAMLIN_GARLAND" id="HAMLIN_GARLAND"></a>HAMLIN GARLAND</h2>
+
+<h4>(1860-)</h4>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/caph.png" width="90" height="90" alt="H" title="H" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">amlin Garland is a favorable example of a class of young writers
+which is coming to the fore in the Middle West of the United
+States,&mdash;fresh, original, full of faith and energy, with a robust and
+somewhat aggressive Americanism. In native endowment he is a strong
+man, and his personal character is manly, clean, and high. At times,
+carelessness of technique and lack of taste can be detected in his
+writings, but his strength and spirit make amends for these defects.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus369.jpg" width="270" height="400" alt="Hamlin Garland" title="Hamlin Garland" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Hamlin Garland</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Garland was born September 16th, 1860, in the La Crosse Valley,
+Wisconsin. His family is of Scotch descent,&mdash;sturdy farmer folk,
+remarkable for their physical powers. His maternal grandfather was an
+Adventist, with the touch of mysticism that word implies. Garland was
+reared in the picturesque coul&eacute; country (French <i>coul&eacute;e</i>, a dry
+gulch); living in various Western towns, one of them being the Quaker
+community of Hesper, Iowa. His early education was received from the
+local schools; the unconscious assimilation of the Western ways came
+while he rode horses, herded cattle, and led the wholesome, simple
+open-air life of the middle-class people. Some years were spent in a
+small seminary at Osage, Wisconsin, whence he was graduated at
+twenty-one years of age. His kin moved to Dakota, but Hamlin faced
+Eastward, eager to see the world. Two years of travel and teaching in
+Illinois found him in 1883 "holding down" a Dakota claim&mdash;the only
+result of the land boom being a rich field of literary ore. Then in
+1884 he went to Boston, made his headquarters at the Public Library,
+read diligently, taught literature and elocution in the School of
+Oratory, and became one of the literary workers there, remaining until
+1891. Since then he has lectured much throughout the country, and has
+settled in Chicago, his summer home being at West Salem, Wisconsin, in
+the beautiful coul&eacute; region of his boyhood.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Garland's main work is in fiction, but he has also tried his hand
+at verse and the essay. His volume 'Crumbling Idols,' published in
+1894, a series of audacious papers in which the doctrine of realism is
+cried up and the appeal to past literary canons made a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6196" id="Page_6196">[Pg 6196]</a></span>mock of,
+called out critical abuse and ridicule, and no doubt shows a lack of
+perspective. Yet the book is racy and stimulating in the extreme. The
+volume of poetry, 'Prairie Songs' (1893), has the merit of dealing
+picturesquely and at first hand with Western scenery and life, and
+contains many a stroke of imaginative beauty. Of the half-dozen books
+of tales and longer stories, 'Main-Traveled Roads,' Mr. Garland's
+first collection of short stories, including work as striking as
+anything he has done, gives vivid pastoral pictures of the Mississippi
+Valley life. 'A Little Norsk' (1893), along with its realism in
+sketching frontier scenes, possesses a fine romantic flavor. And 'Rose
+of Dutcher's Coolly' (1895), decidedly his strongest full-length
+fiction, is a delineation of Wisconsin rustic and urban life,
+including a study of Chicago, daringly unconventional, but strong,
+earnest, evidently drawn from the author's deepest experiences and
+convictions. Other books of fiction are 'Jason Edwards,' 'A Member of
+the Third House,' 'A Spoil of Office,' and 'Prairie Folks.'</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Garland's work in its increasing command of art, its understanding
+of and sincere sympathy with the life of the great toiling population
+of the Middle West, and its unmistakable qualities of independence,
+vigor, and ideality, is worthy of warm praise. A rich, large nature is
+felt beneath his fiction. His literary creed is "truth for truth's
+sake," and his conception of his art is broad enough to include love
+of country and belief in his fellow-man.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="A_SUMMER_MOOD" id="A_SUMMER_MOOD"></a>A SUMMER MOOD</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Prairie Songs.' Copyright 1893 by Hamlin Garland, and published
+by Stone &amp; Kimball</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, to be lost in the wind and the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To be one with the wind and the stream!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With never a care while the waters run,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With never a thought in my dream.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To be part of the robin's lilting call<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And part of the bobolink's rhyme.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lying close to the shy thrush singing alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And lapped in the cricket's chime!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, to live with these beautiful ones!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With the lust and the glory of man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lost in the circuit of springtime suns&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Submissive as earth and part of her plan;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lie as the snake lies, content in the grass!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To drift as the clouds drift, effortless, free,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glad of the power that drives them on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With never a question of wind or sea.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6197" id="Page_6197">[Pg 6197]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="A_STORM_ON_LAKE_MICHIGAN" id="A_STORM_ON_LAKE_MICHIGAN"></a>A STORM ON LAKE MICHIGAN</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Rose of Dutcher's Coolly.' Copyright 1895 by Hamlin Garland, and
+published by Stone &amp; Kimball</h4>
+
+
+<p>As the winter deepened, Rose narrowed the circle of conquest. She no
+longer thought of conquering the world; it came to be the question of
+winning the approbation of one human soul. That is, she wished to win
+the approbation of the world in order that Warren Mason might smile
+and say "Well done!"</p>
+
+<p>She did not reach this state of mind smoothly and easily. On the
+contrary, she had moments when she rebelled at the thought of any
+man's opinion being the greatest good in the world to her. She
+rebelled at the implied inferiority of her position in relation to
+him, and also at the physical bondage implied. In the morning, when
+she was strong, in the midst of some social success, when people
+swarmed about her and men bent deferentially, then she held herself
+like a soldier on a tower, defying capture.</p>
+
+<p>But at night, when the lights were all out, when she felt her
+essential loneliness and weakness and need, when the world seemed cold
+and cruel and selfish,&mdash;then it seemed as if the sweetest thing in the
+universe would be to have him open his arms and say "Come!"</p>
+
+<p>There would be rest there, and repose. His judgment, his keen wit, his
+penetrating, powerful influence, made him seem a giant to her; a giant
+who disdained effort and gave out an appearance of indifference and
+lassitude. She had known physical giants in her neighborhood, who
+spoke in soft drawl and slouched lazily in action, but who were
+invincible when aroused.</p>
+
+<p>She imagined she perceived in Mason a mental giant, who assumed
+irresolution and weakness for reasons of his own. He was always off
+duty when she saw him, and bent more upon rest than a display of
+power. Once or twice she saw him roused, and it thrilled her; that
+measured lazy roll of voice changed to a quick, stern snarl, the brows
+lowered, and the big plump face took on battle lines. It was like a
+seemingly shallow pool, suddenly disclosed to be of soundless depths
+by a wind of passion.</p>
+
+<p>The lake had been the refuge of the distracted and restless girl. She
+went to it often in the autumn days, for it rested her from the noise
+of grinding wheels, and screams, and yells.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6198" id="Page_6198">[Pg 6198]</a></span> Its smooth rise and fall,
+its sparkle of white-caps, its sailing gulls, filled her with
+delicious pleasure. It soothed her and it roused her also. It gave her
+time to think.</p>
+
+<p>The street disturbed her, left her purposeless and powerless; but out
+there where the ships floated like shadows, and shadows shifted like
+flame, and the wind was keen and sweet,&mdash;there she could get her
+mental breath again. She watched it change to wintry desolation, till
+it grew empty of vessels and was lonely as the Arctic Sea; and always
+it was grand and thought-inspiring.</p>
+
+<p>She went out one day in March, when the home longing was upon her and
+when it seemed that the city would be her death. She was tired of her
+food, tired of Mary, tired of her room. Her forehead was knotted
+tensely with pain of life and love&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>She cried out with sudden joy, for she had never seen the lake more
+beautiful. Near the shore a great mass of churned and heaving ice and
+snow lay like a robe of shaggy fur. Beyond this the deep water spread,
+a vivid pea-green broken by wide irregular strips of dark purple. In
+the open water by the wall a spatter of steel blue lay like the petals
+of some strange flower, scattered upon the green.</p>
+
+<p>Great splendid clouds developed, marvelously like the clouds of June,
+making the girl's heart swell with memories of summer. They were white
+as wool, these mountainous clouds, and bottomed in violet, and as they
+passed the snow-fields they sent down pink-purple misty shadows, which
+trailed away in splendor toward the green which flamed in bewildering
+beauty beyond. The girl sat like one in a dream, while the wind blew
+the green and purple of the outer sea into fantastic, flitting forms
+which dazzled her eyes like the stream of mingled banners.</p>
+
+<p>Each form seemed more beautiful than the preceding one; each
+combination had such unearthly radiance, her heart ached with
+exquisite sorrow to see it vanish. The girl felt that spring was
+coming on the wing of the southern wind, and the desire to utter her
+passion grew almost into pain.</p>
+
+<p>It had other moods, this mighty spread of water. It could be angry,
+dangerous. Sometimes it rolled sullenly, and convoluted in oily surges
+beneath its coverlid of snow, like a bed of monstrous serpents.
+Sometimes the leaden sky shut down over it, and from the desolate
+northeast a snow-storm rushed, hissing and howling. Sometimes it
+slumbered for days, quiet as a sleeping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6199" id="Page_6199">[Pg 6199]</a></span> boa, then awoke and was a
+presence and a voice in the night, fit to make the hardiest tremble.</p>
+
+<p>Rose saw it when it was roused, but she had yet to see it in a frenzy.
+The knowledge of its worst came to her early in May, just before her
+return to the Coul&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>The day broke with the wind in the northeast. Rose, lying in her bed,
+could hear the roar of the lake; never before had its voice penetrated
+so far. She sprang up and dressed, eager to see it in such a mood.
+Mary responded sleepily to her call, saying the lake would be there
+after breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Rose did not regret her eagerness, though it was piercingly cold and
+raw. The sea was already terrific. Its spread of tawny yellow showed
+how it had reached down and laid hold on the sand of its bed. There
+were oily splotches of plum color scattered over it where the wind
+blew it smooth, and it reached to the wild east sky, cold, desolate,
+destructive.</p>
+
+<p>It had a fierce, breathing snarl like a monster at meat. It leaped
+against the sea-wall like a rabid tiger, its sleek and spotted hide
+rolling. Every surge sent a triangular sheet of foam twenty-five feet
+above the wall, yellow and white and shadowed with dull blue; and the
+wind caught it as it rose, and its crest burst into great clouds of
+spray, which sailed across the streets and dashed along the walk like
+rain, making the roadway like a river; while the main body of each
+upleaping wave, falling back astride the wall, crashed like the fall
+of glass, and the next wave met it with a growl of thunderous rage,
+striking it with concave palm with a sound like a cannon's exploding
+roar.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the appalling obscurity to the north, frightened ships scudded
+at intervals, with bare masts bending like fire-trimmed pines. They
+hastened like the homing pigeons, which do not look behind. The
+helmsmen stood grimly at their wheels, with eyes on the harbor ahead.</p>
+
+<p>The girl felt it all as no one native to the sea can possibly do. It
+seemed as if the bounds of the flood had been overcome, and that it
+was about to hurl itself upon the land. The slender trees, standing
+deep in the swash of water, bowed like women in pain; the wall was
+half hidden, and the flood and the land seemed mingled in battle.</p>
+
+<p>Rose walked along the shore, too much excited to go back to her
+breakfast. At noon she ate lunch hurriedly and returned to the shore.
+There were hundreds of people coming and going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6200" id="Page_6200">[Pg 6200]</a></span> along the drive; young
+girls shrieking with glee, as the sailing clouds of spray fell upon
+them. Rose felt angry to think they could be so silly in face of such
+dreadful power.</p>
+
+<p>She came upon Mason, dressed in a thick mackintosh coat, taking notes
+rapidly in a little book. He did not look up, and she passed him,
+wishing to speak, yet afraid to speak. Near him a young man was
+sketching.</p>
+
+<p>Mason stood like a rock in his long, close-fitting rain coat, while
+she was blown nearly off her feet by the blast. She came back against
+the wind, feeling her soul's internal storm rising. It seemed quite
+like a proposal of marriage to go up and speak to him&mdash;yet she could
+not forego the pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>He did not see her until she came into his lee; then he smiled,
+extending his hand. She spoke first:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"May I take shelter here?"</p>
+
+<p>His eyes lightened with a sudden tender humor.</p>
+
+<p>"Free anchorage," he said, and drew her by the hand closer to his
+shoulder. It was a beautiful moment to her, and a dangerous one to
+him. He took refuge in outside matters.</p>
+
+<p>"How does that strike your inland eyes?" He pointed to the north.</p>
+
+<p>"It's awful. It's like the anger of God." She spoke into his bowed
+ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't think I'm reporting it," he explained. "I'm only making
+a few notes about it for an editorial on the need of harbors."</p>
+
+<p>Each moment the fury increased, the waves deepened. The commotion sank
+down amid the sands of the deeper inshore water, and it boiled like
+milk. Splendid colors grew into it near at hand; the winds tore at the
+tops of the waves, and wove them into tawny banners, which blurred the
+air like blown sand. On the horizon the waves leaped in savage ranks,
+clutching at the sky like insane sea monsters,&mdash;frantic, futile.</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen the Atlantic twice during a gale," shouted the artist to a
+companion, "but I never saw anything more awful than this. These waves
+are quicker and higher. I don't see how a vessel could live in it if
+caught broadside."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the worst I ever saw here."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going down to the south side: would you like to go?" Mason asked
+of Rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I would indeed," she replied.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6201" id="Page_6201">[Pg 6201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Back from the lake shore the wind was less powerful but more
+uncertain. It came in gusts which nearly upturned the street cars. Men
+and women scudded from shelter to shelter, like beleaguered citizens
+avoiding cannon shots.</p>
+
+<p>"What makes our lake so terrible," said Mason in the car, "is the fact
+that it has a smooth shore&mdash;no indentations, no harbors. There is only
+one harbor here at Chicago, behind the breakwater, and every vessel in
+mid-lake must come here. Those flying ships are seeking safety here
+like birds. The harbor will be full of disabled vessels."</p>
+
+<p>As they left the car, a roaring gust swept around a twenty-story
+building with such power [that] Rose would have been taken off her
+feet had not Mason put his arms about her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"You're at a disadvantage," he said, "with skirts." He knew she prided
+herself on her strength, and he took no credit to himself for standing
+where she fell.</p>
+
+<p>It was precisely as if they were alone together; the storm seemed to
+wall them in, and his manner was more intimate than ever before. It
+was in very truth the first time they had been out together, and also
+it was the only time he had assumed any physical care of her. He had
+never asserted his greater muscular power and mastery of material
+things, and she was amazed to see that his lethargy was only a mood.
+He could be alert and agile at need. It made his cynicism appear to be
+a mood also; at least, it made her heart wondrously light to think so.</p>
+
+<p>They came upon the lake shore again, near the Auditorium. The refuge
+behind the breakwater was full of boats, straining at anchor, rolling,
+pitching, crashing together. Close about the edge of the breakwater,
+ships were rounding hurriedly, and two broken vessels lay against the
+shore, threshing up and down in the awful grasp of the breakers. Far
+down toward the south the water dashed against the spiles, shooting
+fifty feet above the wall, sailing like smoke, deluging the street,
+and lashing against the row of buildings across the way.</p>
+
+<p>Mason's keen eye took in the situation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Every vessel that breaks anchor is doomed! Nothing can keep them from
+going on shore. Doubtless those two schooners lost anchor&mdash;that one
+there is dragging anchor." He said suddenly, "She is shifting
+position, and see that hulk&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Rose for a moment could not see it. She lay flat on her side, a
+two-master, her sails flapping and floating on the waves. Her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6202" id="Page_6202">[Pg 6202]</a></span> anchor
+still held, but she had listed her cargo, careened, and so lay
+helpless.</p>
+
+<p>"There are men on it!" cried some one. "Three men&mdash;don't you see them?
+The water goes over them every time!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure enough! I wonder if they are going to let them drown, here in
+the harbor!"</p>
+
+<p>Rose grew numb with horror. On the rounded side of the floating hulk
+three men were clinging, looking like pegs of tops. They could only be
+seen at intervals, for the water broke clear over their heads. It was
+only when one of them began to move to and fro that the mighty crowd
+became certainly aware of life still clinging to the hull. It was an
+awful thing to stand helplessly by and see those brave men battle, but
+no life-boat or tug could live out there. In the station, men wept and
+imprecated in their despair; twice they tried to go to the rescue of
+the beleaguered men, but could not reach them.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a flare of yellow spread out on the wave. A cry arose:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"She's breaking up!"</p>
+
+<p>Rose seized Mason's arm in a frenzy of horror.</p>
+
+<p>"O God! can't somebody help them?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're out of reach!" said Mason solemnly. And then the throng was
+silent.</p>
+
+<p>"They are building a raft!" shouted a man with a glass, speaking at
+intervals for the information of all. "One man is tying a rope to
+planks; ... he is helping the other men; ... he has his little raft
+nearly ready; ... they are crawling toward him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, see them!" exclaimed Rose. "Oh, the brave men! There! they are
+gone&mdash;the vessel has broken up."</p>
+
+<p>On the wave nothing now lived but a yellow spread of lumber; the glass
+revealed no living thing.</p>
+
+<p>Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.</p>
+
+<p>"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to
+Mason's thought.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of
+human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater
+of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with
+people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow
+approach of that tiny raft. Again and again<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6203" id="Page_6203">[Pg 6203]</a></span> the waves swept over it,
+and each time that indomitable man rose from the flood and was seen to
+pull his companions aboard.</p>
+
+<p>Other vessels drifted upon the rocks. Other steamers rolled heavily
+around the long breakwater, but nothing now distracted the gaze of the
+multitude from this appalling and amazing struggle against death.
+Nothing? No; once and only once did the onlookers shift their intent
+gaze, and that was when a vessel passed the breakwater and went
+sailing toward the south through the fleet of anchored, straining,
+agonized ships. At first no one paid much attention to this late-comer
+till Mason lifted his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"By Heaven, the man is <i>sailing</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>It was true; steady, swift, undeviating, the vessel headed through the
+fleet. She did not drift nor wander nor hesitate. She sailed as if the
+helmsman, with set teeth, were saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"By God! If I must die on the rocks, I'll go to my death the captain
+of my vessel!"</p>
+
+<p>And so with wheel in his hand and epic oaths in his mouth, he sailed
+directly into the long row of spiles, over which the waves ran like
+hell-hounds; where half a score of wrecks lay already churning into
+fragments in the awful tumult.</p>
+
+<p>The sailing vessel seemed not to waver, nor seek nor dodge&mdash;seemed
+rather to choose the most deadly battle-place of waves and wall.</p>
+
+<p>"God! but that's magnificent of him!" Mason said to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Rose held her breath, her face white and set with horror.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, must he die?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no hope for him. She will strike in a moment&mdash;she
+strikes!&mdash;she is gone!"</p>
+
+<p>The vessel entered the gray confusion of the breakers and struck the
+piles like a battering-ram; the waves buried her from sight; then the
+recoil flung her back; for the first time she swung broadside to the
+storm. The work of the helmsman was over. She reeled&mdash;resisted an
+instant, then submitted to her fate, crumbled against the pitiless
+wall like paper, and thereafter was lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>This dramatic and terrible scene had held the attention of the
+onlookers&mdash;once more they searched for the tiny raft. It was nearing
+the lake wall at another furious point of contact. An innumerable
+crowd spread like a black robe over the shore, waiting to see the tiny
+float strike.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6204" id="Page_6204">[Pg 6204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A hush fell over every voice. Each soul was solemn as if facing the
+Maker of the world. Out on the point, just where the doomed sailors
+seemed like to strike, there was a little commotion. A tiny figure was
+seen perched on one of the spiles. Each wave, as it towered above him,
+seemed ready to sweep him away, but each time he bowed his head and
+seemed to sweep through the gray wall. He was a negro, and he held a
+rope in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>As they comprehended his danger the crowd cheered him, but in the
+thunder of the surf no human voice could avail. The bold negro could
+not cry out, he could only motion; but the brave man on the raft saw
+his purpose&mdash;he was alone with the shipwrecked ones.</p>
+
+<p>In they came, lifted and hurled by a prodigious swell. They struck the
+wall just beneath the negro and disappeared beneath the waves.</p>
+
+<p>All seemed over, and some of the spectators fell weeping; others
+turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the indomitable commander of the raft rose, then his
+companions, and then it was perceived that he had bound them all to
+the raft.</p>
+
+<p>The negro flung his rope and one man caught at it, but it was swept
+out of reach on a backward-leaping billow. Again they came in, their
+white, strained, set faces and wild eyes turned to the intrepid
+rescuer. Again they struck, and this time the negro caught and held
+one of the sailors, held him while the foam fell away, and the
+succeeding wave swept him over the spiles to safety. Again the
+resolute man flung his noose and caught the second sailor, whose rope
+was cut by the leader, the captain, who was last to be saved.</p>
+
+<p>As the negro came back, dragging his third man over the wall, a mighty
+cry went up, a strange, faint, multitudinous cry, and the negro was
+swallowed up in the multitude.</p>
+
+<p>Mason turned to Rose and spoke: "Sometimes men seem to be worth
+while!"</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6205" id="Page_6205">[Pg 6205]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ELIZABETH_STEVENSON_GASKELL" id="ELIZABETH_STEVENSON_GASKELL"></a>ELIZABETH STEVENSON GASKELL</h2>
+
+<h4>(1810-1865)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capc.png" width="90" height="90" alt="C" title="C" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">ritics agree in placing the novels of Mrs. Gaskell on a level with
+the works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront&eacute;. It is more than
+probable that future generations will turn to her stories for correct
+pictures of simple every-day life that must fade in the swift
+succession of years. She has been compared to a naturalist who knows
+intimately the flora and fauna of his native heath.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus379.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="Elizabeth S. Gaskell" title="Elizabeth S. Gaskell" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Elizabeth S. Gaskell</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in Chelsea, England, September
+29th, 1810, the daughter of William Stevenson, a literary man,
+who was keeper of the records of the Treasury. She lived with her
+aunt at Knutsford in Cheshire, was sent to a private school in
+Stratford-on-Avon, and visited London and Edinburgh, where her beauty
+was much admired. In 1832 she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell,
+minister of a Unitarian chapel in Manchester. Mrs. Gaskell did not
+begin to write until she had reached middle age, and then chiefly to
+distract her thoughts after the death of their only son in 1844. Her
+first book, 'Mary Barton,' published anonymously in 1848, achieved
+extraordinary success. This was a "novel with a purpose," for Mrs.
+Gaskell believed that the hostility between employers and employed,
+which constantly disturbed the manufacturing beehive of Manchester,
+was caused by mutual ignorance. She therefore set herself the task of
+depicting faithfully the lives of the people around her. It must be
+remembered, too, that the social types chosen by her were at that
+moment peculiarly interesting to a public weary of the novel of
+fashionable high life. The story provoked much public discussion; and
+among other critics, the social economist Mr. W. R. Greg, in his
+'Essay on Mary Barton,' published in 1849, took the part of the
+manufacturer. 'Mary Barton' has been translated into French, German,
+and other languages, including Hungarian and Finnish. The story has
+for its central theme the gradual degeneration of John Barton, a
+workman who has a passionate hatred of the classes above him, and who,
+embittered by poverty and the death of his son and wife, joins the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6206" id="Page_6206">[Pg 6206]</a></span>
+law-breakers of the town, and finally murders Henry Corson, a master
+manufacturer. 'North and South,' published in 1855, was written from
+the point of view of the masters, an admirable contrast to Barton
+being found in Thornton, the hero of this novel.</p>
+
+<p>In 1850, when Dickens was about to establish Household Words, he
+invited Mrs. Gaskell to contribute. This magazine contained her story
+'Lizzie Leigh' and those immortal pictures of village life known as
+'Cranford.' Mrs. Gaskell's other novels are: 'Ruth,' the tragical
+story of a pretty young milliner's apprentice; 'Sylvia's Lovers,'
+whose scene is Monkhaven (Whitby), at the end of the last century;
+'Cousin Phillis,' a simple story of a farmer's daughter, which
+appeared first in the Cornhill Magazine in 1863-64; and 'Wives and
+Daughters,' also contributed to the Cornhill, and left unfinished by
+her death in Manchester, November 12th, 1865. By many persons the last
+novel is considered her best work, owing to its strength of
+characterization. Molly Gibson, the heroine; Cynthia, a heartless
+coquette; Squire Hamley and his sons Roger and Osborne, of Hamley
+Hall; and the Earl of Cumnor and his family at the Towers,&mdash;all are
+treated with impartial skill. Her famous 'Life of Charlotte Bront&eacute;'
+appeared in 1857. She became acquainted with Miss Bront&eacute; in 1850, and
+they were friends at once.</p>
+
+<p>A collected edition of Mrs. Gaskell's works, published in seven
+volumes in 1873, includes the short stories 'The Grey Woman,' 'Morton
+Hall,' 'Mr. Harrison's Confessions,' 'A Dark Night's Work,' 'The
+Moorland Cottage,' 'Round the Sofa,' 'The Old Nurse's Story,' 'The
+Well of Pen-Morfa,' 'The Sexton's Hero,' 'Lois the Witch,' and others.
+Cranford is identified as the town of Knutsford. Its population
+consists of widows and maiden ladies, in bonds to their ancient
+gentility. With deft touch Mrs. Gaskell brings out the humor and
+pathos of these quaint characters, her finest creation being Miss
+Matty Jenkyns.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="OUR_SOCIETY" id="OUR_SOCIETY"></a>OUR SOCIETY</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Cranford'</h4>
+
+
+<p>In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the
+holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married
+couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears;
+he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the
+Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his
+regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the
+great neighboring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty
+miles on a railroad.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6207" id="Page_6207">[Pg 6207]</a></span> In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen,
+they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The
+surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but
+every man cannot be a surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of
+choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away
+little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the
+railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture into
+the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of
+literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary
+reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of
+everybody's affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat
+maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial)
+to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they
+are in distress,&mdash;the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. "A
+man," as one of them observed to me once, "is <i>so</i> in the way in the
+house!" Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's
+proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's
+opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say
+eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal
+retaliation; but somehow, good-will reigns among them to a
+considerable degree.</p>
+
+<p>The Cranford ladies have only an occasional little quarrel, spurted
+out in a few peppery words and angry jerks of the heads; just enough
+to prevent the even tenor of their lives from becoming too flat. Their
+dress is very independent of fashion: as they observe, "What does it
+signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?" And
+if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent: "What does it
+signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?" The materials of
+their clothes are in general good and plain, and most of them are
+nearly as scrupulous as Miss Tyler of cleanly memory; but I will
+answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in
+wear in England, was seen in Cranford&mdash;and seen without a smile.</p>
+
+<p>I can testify to a magnificent family red-silk umbrella, under which a
+gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used
+to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red-silk umbrellas in
+London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in
+Cranford; and the little boys mobbed it, and called it "a stick in
+petticoats." It might have been the very red-silk one I have
+described, held by a strong father over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6208" id="Page_6208">[Pg 6208]</a></span> a troop of little ones; the
+poor little lady&mdash;the survivor of all&mdash;could scarcely carry it.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they
+were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town,
+with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a
+year on the Tinwald Mount.</p>
+
+<p>"Our friends have sent to inquire how you are after your journey
+to-night, my dear" (fifteen miles in a gentleman's carriage); "they
+will give you some rest to-morrow, but the next day, I have no doubt,
+they will call; so be at liberty after twelve&mdash;from twelve to three
+are our calling hours."</p>
+
+<p>Then, after they had called:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is the third day: I daresay your mamma has told you, my dear,
+never to let more than three days elapse between receiving a call and
+returning it; and also, that you are never to stay longer than a
+quarter of an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"But am I to look at my watch? How am I to find out when a quarter of
+an hour has passed?"</p>
+
+<p>"You must keep thinking about the time, my dear, and not allow
+yourself to forget it in conversation."</p>
+
+<p>As everybody had this rule in their minds, whether they received or
+paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We
+kept ourselves to short sentences of small-talk, and were punctual to
+our time.</p>
+
+<p>I imagine that a few of the gentlefolks of Cranford were poor, and had
+some difficulty in making both ends meet; but they were like the
+Spartans, and concealed their smart under a smiling face. We none of
+us spoke of money, because that subject savored of commerce and trade,
+and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The
+Cranfordians had that kindly <i>esprit de corps</i> which made them
+overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to
+conceal their poverty. When Mrs. Forrester, for instance, gave a party
+in her baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the
+ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out
+from underneath, every one took this novel proceeding as the most
+natural thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and
+ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular
+servants' hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of
+the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could
+never have been strong enough to carry the tray up-stairs if she had
+not been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6209" id="Page_6209">[Pg 6209]</a></span> assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state,
+pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and
+we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we
+knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and
+sponge-cakes.</p>
+
+<p>There were one or two consequences arising from this general but
+unacknowledged poverty and this very much acknowledged gentility,
+which were not amiss, and which might be introduced into many circles
+of society to their great improvement. For instance, the inhabitants
+of Cranford kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens
+under the guidance of a lantern-bearer about nine o'clock at night;
+and the whole town was abed and asleep by half-past ten. Moreover, it
+was considered "vulgar" (a tremendous word in Cranford) to give
+anything expensive in the way of eatable or drinkable, at the evening
+entertainments. Wafer bread and butter and sponge-biscuits were all
+that the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson gave; and she was sister-in-law to
+the late Earl of Glenmire, although she did practice such "elegant
+economy."</p>
+
+<p>"Elegant economy!" How naturally one falls back into the phraseology
+of Cranford! There, economy was always "elegant," and money-spending
+always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism which made
+us very peaceful and satisfied. I never shall forget the dismay felt
+when a certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford, and openly
+spoke about his being poor&mdash;not in a whisper to an intimate friend,
+the doors and windows being previously closed, but in the public
+street! in a loud military voice! alleging his poverty as a reason for
+not taking a particular house. The ladies of Cranford were already
+rather moaning over the invasion of their territories by a man and a
+gentleman. He was a half-pay captain, and had obtained some situation
+on a neighboring railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned
+against by the little town; and if in addition to his masculine gender
+and his connection with the obnoxious railroad, he was so brazen as to
+talk of being poor&mdash;why then indeed he must be sent to Coventry. Death
+was as true and as common as poverty; yet people never spoke about
+that, loud out in the streets. It was a word not to be mentioned to
+ears polite. We had tacitly agreed to ignore that any with whom we
+associated on terms of visiting equality could ever be prevented by
+poverty from doing anything that they wished. If we walked to or from
+a party, it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6210" id="Page_6210">[Pg 6210]</a></span> because the night was <i>so</i> fine, or the air <i>so</i>
+refreshing; not because sedan-chairs were expensive. If we wore prints
+instead of summer silks, it was because we preferred a washing
+material; and so on, till we blinded ourselves to the vulgar fact that
+we were all of us people of very moderate means. Of course, then, we
+did not know what to make of a man who could speak of poverty as if it
+was not a disgrace. Yet somehow Captain Brown made himself respected
+in Cranford, and was called upon, in spite of all resolutions to the
+contrary. I was surprised to hear his opinions quoted as authority at
+a visit which I paid to Cranford about a year after he had settled in
+the town. My own friends had been among the bitterest opponents of any
+proposal to visit the captain and his daughters only twelve months
+before; and now he was even admitted in the tabooed hours before
+twelve. True, it was to discover the cause of a smoking chimney,
+before the fire was lighted; but still Captain Brown walked up-stairs,
+nothing daunted, spoke in a voice too large for the room, and joked
+quite in the way of a tame man about the house. He had been blind to
+all the small slights, and omissions of trivial ceremonies, with which
+he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies
+had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good
+faith; and with his manly frankness had overpowered all the shrinking
+which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And at last his
+excellent masculine common-sense, and his facility in devising
+expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas, had gained him an
+extraordinary place as authority among the Cranford ladies. He himself
+went on in his course, as unaware of his popularity as he had been of
+the reverse....</p>
+
+<p>I wondered what the Cranford ladies did with Captain Brown at their
+parties. We had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no
+gentleman to be attended to and to find conversation for, at the card
+parties. We had congratulated ourselves upon the snugness of the
+evenings, and in our love for gentility and distaste of mankind we had
+almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be "vulgar"; so
+that when I found my friend and hostess Miss Jenkyns was going to have
+a party in my honor, and that Captain and the Miss Browns were
+invited, I wondered much what would be the course of the evening. Card
+tables, with green-baize tops, were set out by daylight, just as
+usual: it was the third week in November, so the evenings closed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6211" id="Page_6211">[Pg 6211]</a></span> in
+about four. Candles and clean packs of cards were arranged on each
+table. The fire was made up; the neat maid-servant had received her
+last directions: and there we stood, dressed in our best, each with a
+candle-lighter in our hands, ready to dart at the candles as soon as
+the first knock came. Parties in Cranford were solemn festivities,
+making the ladies feel gravely elated as they sat together in their
+best dresses. As soon as three had arrived, we sat down to Preference,
+I being the unlucky fourth. The next four comers were put down
+immediately to another table; and presently the tea-trays, which I had
+seen set out in the store-room as I passed in the morning, were placed
+each on the middle of a card table. The china was delicate egg-shell;
+the old-fashioned silver glittered with polishing; but the eatables
+were of the slightest description.</p>
+
+<p>While the trays were yet on the tables, Captain and the Miss Browns
+came in; and I could see that, somehow or other, the captain was a
+favorite with all the ladies present. Ruffled brows were smoothed,
+sharp voices lowered at his approach. Miss Brown looked ill, and
+depressed almost to gloom. Miss Jessie smiled as usual, and seemed
+nearly as popular as her father. He immediately and quietly assumed
+the man's place in the room; attended to every one's wants, lessened
+the pretty maid-servant's labor by waiting on empty cups and
+bread-and-butterless ladies; and yet did it all in so easy and
+dignified a manner, and so much as if it were a matter of course for
+the strong to attend to the weak, that he was a true man throughout.
+He played for threepenny points with as grave an interest as if they
+had been pounds; and yet in all his attention to strangers he had an
+eye on his suffering daughter&mdash;for suffering I was sure she was,
+though to many eyes she might only appear to be irritable. Miss Jessie
+could not play cards, but she talked to the sitters-out, who before
+her coming had been rather inclined to be cross. She sang, too, to an
+old cracked piano which I think had been a spinet in its youth. Miss
+Jessie sang 'Jock o' Hazeldean' a little out of tune; but we were none
+of us musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of
+appearing to be so.</p>
+
+<p>It was very good of Miss Jenkyns to do this; for I had seen that, a
+little before, she had been a good deal annoyed by Miss Jessie Brown's
+unguarded admission (&agrave;propos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle,
+her mother's brother, who was a shop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6212" id="Page_6212">[Pg 6212]</a></span>keeper in Edinburgh. Miss
+Jenkyns tried to drown this confession by a terrible cough&mdash;for the
+Honorable Mrs. Jamieson was sitting at the card table nearest Miss
+Jessie, and what would she say or think if she found out that she was
+in the same room with a shopkeeper's niece! But Miss Jessie Brown (who
+had no tact, as we all agreed the next morning) <i>would</i> repeat the
+information, and assure Miss Pole she could easily get her the
+identical Shetland wool required "through my uncle, who has the best
+assortment of Shetland goods of any one in Edinbro'." It was to take
+the taste of this out of our mouths, and the sound of this out of our
+ears, that Miss Jenkyns proposed music: so I say again, it was very
+good of her to beat time to the song.</p>
+
+<p>When the trays reappeared with biscuits and wine, punctually at a
+quarter to nine, there was conversation, comparing of cards, and
+talking over tricks; but by-and-by Captain Brown sported a bit of
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen any numbers of 'The Pickwick Papers'?" said he. (They
+were then publishing in parts.) "Capital thing!"</p>
+
+<p>Now, Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford, and
+on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons and a pretty good
+library of divinity considered herself literary, and looked upon any
+conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and
+said, "Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you think of them?" exclaimed Captain Brown. "Aren't they
+famously good?"</p>
+
+<p>So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.</p>
+
+<p>"I must say, I don't think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson.
+Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows
+what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model."</p>
+
+<p>This was evidently too much for Captain Brown to take placidly; and I
+saw the words on the tip of his tongue before Miss Jenkyns had
+finished her sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite a different sort of thing, my dear madam," he began.</p>
+
+<p>"I am quite aware of that," returned she; "and I make allowances,
+Captain Brown."</p>
+
+<p>"Just allow me to read you a scene out of this month's number,"
+pleaded he. "I had it only this morning, and I don't think the company
+can have read it yet."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6213" id="Page_6213">[Pg 6213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"As you please," said she, settling herself with an air of
+resignation. He read the account of the "swarry" which Sam Weller gave
+at Bath. Some of us laughed heartily. I did not dare, because I was
+staying in the house. Miss Jenkyns sat in patient gravity. When it was
+ended, she turned to me, and said, with mild dignity:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Fetch me 'Rasselas,' my dear, out of the book-room."</p>
+
+<p>When I brought it to her, she turned to Captain Brown:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Now allow <i>me</i> to read you a scene, and then the present company can
+judge between your favorite Mr. Boz and Dr. Johnson."</p>
+
+<p>She read one of the conversations between Rasselas and Imlac, in a
+high-pitched, majestic voice; and when she had ended she said, "I
+imagine I am now justified in my preference of Dr. Johnson as a writer
+of fiction." The captain screwed his lips up, and drummed on the
+table, but he did not speak. She thought she would give a finishing
+blow or two.</p>
+
+<p>"I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish
+in numbers."</p>
+
+<p>"How was The Rambler published, ma'am?" asked Captain Brown, in a low
+voice, which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have heard.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Johnson's style is a model for young beginners. My father
+recommended it to me when I began to write letters&mdash;I have formed my
+own style upon it; I recommend it to your favorite."</p>
+
+<p>"I should be very sorry for him to exchange his style for any such
+pompous writing," said Captain Brown.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Jenkyns felt this as a personal affront, in a way of which the
+captain had not dreamed. Epistolary writing she and her friends
+considered as her <i>forte</i>. Many a copy of many a letter have I seen
+written and corrected on the slate, before she "seized the half-hour
+just previous to post-time to assure her friends" of this or that; and
+Dr. Johnson was, as she said, her model in these compositions. She
+drew herself up with dignity, and only replied to Captain Brown's last
+remark by saying, with marked emphasis on every syllable, "I prefer
+Dr. Johnson to Mr. Boz."</p>
+
+<p>It is said&mdash;I won't vouch for the fact&mdash;that Captain Brown was heard
+to say, <i>sotto voce</i>, "D&mdash;&mdash;n Dr. Johnson!" If he did, he was penitent
+afterwards, as he showed by going to stand near Miss Jenkyns's
+arm-chair, and endeavoring to beguile her into conversation on some
+more pleasing subject. But she was inexorable.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6214" id="Page_6214">[Pg 6214]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="VISITING" id="VISITING"></a>VISITING</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'Cranford'</h4>
+
+
+<p>One morning, as Miss Matty and I sat at our work&mdash;it was before twelve
+o'clock, and Miss Matty had not changed the cap with yellow ribbons
+that had been Miss Jenkyns's best, and which Miss Matty was now
+wearing out in private, putting on the one made in imitation of Mrs.
+Jamieson's at all times when she expected to be seen&mdash;Martha came up,
+and asked if Miss Betty Barker might speak to her mistress. Miss Matty
+assented, and quickly disappeared to change the yellow ribbons while
+Miss Barker came up-stairs; but as she had forgotten her spectacles,
+and was rather flurried by the unusual time of the visit, I was not
+surprised to see her return with one cap on the top of the other. She
+was quite unconscious of it herself, and looked at us with bland
+satisfaction. Nor do I think Miss Barker perceived it; for putting
+aside the little circumstance that she was not so young as she had
+been, she was very much absorbed in her errand, which she delivered
+herself of with an oppressive modesty that found vent in endless
+apologies.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Betty Barker was the daughter of the old clerk at Cranford who
+had officiated in Mr. Jenkyns's time. She and her sister had had
+pretty good situations as ladies'-maids, and had saved money enough to
+set up a milliner's shop, which had been patronized by the ladies in
+the neighborhood. Lady Arley, for instance, would occasionally give
+Miss Barkers the pattern of an old cap of hers, which they immediately
+copied and circulated among the <i>&eacute;lite</i> of Cranford. I say the
+<i>&eacute;lite</i>, for Miss Barkers had caught the trick of the place, and
+piqued themselves upon their "aristocratic connection." They would not
+sell their caps and ribbons to any one without a pedigree. Many a
+farmer's wife or daughter turned away huffed from Miss Barkers' select
+millinery, and went rather to the universal shop, where the profits of
+brown soap and moist sugar enabled the proprietor to go straight to
+(Paris, he said, until he found his customers too patriotic and
+John-Bullish to wear what the Mounseers wore) London, where, as he
+often told his customers, Queen Adelaide had appeared only the very
+week before in a cap exactly like the one he showed them, trimmed with
+yellow and blue ribbons, and had been complimented by King William on
+the becoming nature of her head-dress.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6215" id="Page_6215">[Pg 6215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Miss Barkers, who confined themselves to truth and did not approve of
+miscellaneous customers, throve notwithstanding. They were
+self-denying, good people. Many a time have I seen the eldest of them
+(she that had been maid to Mrs. Jamieson) carrying out some delicate
+mess to a poor person. They only aped their betters in having "nothing
+to do" with the class immediately below theirs. And when Miss Barker
+died, their profits and income were found to be such that Miss Betty
+was justified in shutting up shop and retiring from business. She also
+(as I think I have before said) set up her cow,&mdash;a mark of
+respectability in Cranford almost as decided as setting up a gig is
+among some people. She dressed finer than any lady in Cranford, and we
+did not wonder at it; for it was understood that she was wearing out
+all the bonnets and caps and outrageous ribbons which had once formed
+her stock in trade. It was five or six years since she had given up
+shop, so in any other place than Cranford her dress might have been
+considered <i>pass&eacute;</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And now Miss Betty Barker had called to invite Miss Matty to tea at
+her house on the following Tuesday. She gave me also an impromptu
+invitation, as I happened to be a visitor&mdash;though I could see she had
+a little fear lest, since my father had gone to live in Drumble, he
+might have engaged in that "horrid cotton trade," and so dragged his
+family down out of "aristocratic society." She prefaced this
+invitation with so many apologies that she quite excited my curiosity.
+"Her presumption" was to be excused. What had she been doing? She
+seemed so overpowered by it, I could only think that she had been
+writing to Queen Adelaide to ask for a receipt for washing lace; but
+the act which she so characterized was only an invitation she had
+carried to her sister's former mistress, Mrs. Jamieson. "Her former
+occupation considered, could Miss Matty excuse the liberty?" Ah!
+thought I, she has found out that double cap, and is going to rectify
+Miss Matty's head-dress. No; it was simply to extend her invitation to
+Miss Matty and to me. Miss Matty bowed acceptance; and I wondered that
+in the graceful action she did not feel the unusual weight and
+extraordinary height of her head-dress. But I do not think she did,
+for she recovered her balance, and went on talking to Miss Betty in a
+kind, condescending manner, very different from the fidgety way she
+would have had if she had suspected how singular her appearance was.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6216" id="Page_6216">[Pg 6216]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Jamieson is coming, I think you said?" asked Miss Matty.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Mrs. Jamieson most kindly and condescendingly said she would be
+happy to come. One little stipulation she made, that she should bring
+Carlo. I told her that if I had a weakness, it was for dogs."</p>
+
+<p>"And Miss Pole?" questioned Miss Matty, who was thinking of her pool
+at Preference, in which Carlo would not be available as a partner.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to ask Miss Pole. Of course, I could not think of asking
+her until I had asked you, madam&mdash;the rector's daughter, madam.
+Believe me, I do not forget the situation my father held under yours."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Forrester, of course?"</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Forrester. I thought, in fact, of going to her before I went
+to Miss Pole. Although her circumstances are changed, madam, she was
+born a Tyrrell, and we can never forget her alliance to the Bigges of
+Bigelow Hall."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Matty cared much more for the little circumstance of her being a
+very good card-player. Miss Barker looked at me with sidelong dignity,
+as much as to say, although a retired milliner, she was no democrat,
+and understood the difference of ranks.</p>
+
+<p>"May I beg you to come as near half-past six to my little dwelling as
+possible, Miss Matilda? Mrs. Jamieson dines at five, but has kindly
+promised not to delay her visit beyond that time&mdash;half-past six." And
+with a swimming curtsy Miss Betty Barker took her leave....</p>
+
+<p>The spring evenings were getting bright and long, when three or four
+ladies in calashes met at Miss Barker's door. Do you know what a
+calash is? It is a covering worn over caps, not unlike the heads
+fastened on old-fashioned gigs; but sometimes it is not quite so
+large. This kind of head-gear always made an awful impression on the
+children in Cranford; and now two or three left off their play in the
+quiet sunny little street, and gathered in wondering silence round
+Miss Pole, Miss Matty, and myself. We were silent too, so that we
+could hear loud suppressed whispers inside Miss Barker's house: "Wait,
+Peggy! wait till I've run up-stairs and washed my hands. When I cough,
+open the door; I'll not be a minute."</p>
+
+<p>And true enough, it was not a minute before we heard a noise, between
+a sneeze and a crow; on which the door flew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6217" id="Page_6217">[Pg 6217]</a></span> open. Behind it stood a
+round-eyed maiden, all aghast at the honorable company of calashes,
+who marched in without a word. She recovered presence of mind enough
+to usher us into a small room, which had been a shop, but was now
+converted into a temporary dressing-room. There we unpinned and shook
+ourselves, and arranged our features before the glass into a sweet and
+gracious company face; and then, bowing backwards with "After you,
+ma'am," we allowed Mrs. Forrester to take precedence up the narrow
+staircase that led to Miss Barker's drawing-room. There she sat, as
+stately and composed as though we had never heard that odd-sounding
+cough, from which her throat must have been even then sore and rough.
+Kind, gentle, shabbily dressed Mrs. Forrester was immediately
+conducted to the second place of honor&mdash;a seat arranged something like
+Prince Albert's near the Queen's&mdash;good, but not so good. The place of
+pre-eminence was of course reserved for the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson,
+who presently came panting up the stairs&mdash;Carlo rushing round her on
+her progress, as if he meant to trip her up.</p>
+
+<p>And now Miss Betty Barker was a proud and happy woman! She stirred the
+fire, and shut the door, and sat as near to it as she could, quite on
+the edge of her chair. When Peggy came in, tottering under the weight
+of the tea-tray, I noticed that Miss Barker was sadly afraid lest
+Peggy should not keep her distance sufficiently. She and her mistress
+were on very familiar terms in their every-day intercourse, and Peggy
+wanted now to make several little confidences to her, which Miss
+Barker was on thorns to hear, but which she thought it her duty as a
+lady to repress. So she turned away from all Peggy's asides and signs;
+but she made one or two very malapropos answers to what was said; and
+at last, seized with a bright idea, she exclaimed, "Poor sweet Carlo!
+I'm forgetting him. Come down-stairs with me, poor little doggie, and
+it shall have its tea, it shall!"</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes she returned, bland and benignant as before; but I
+thought she had forgotten to give the "poor little doggie" anything to
+eat, judging by the avidity with which he swallowed down chance pieces
+of cake. The tea tray was abundantly laden&mdash;I was pleased to see it, I
+was so hungry; but I was afraid the ladies present might think it
+vulgarly heaped up. I know they would have done at their own houses;
+but somehow the heaps disappeared here. I saw Mrs. Jamieson eating
+seed-cake slowly and considerately, as she did everything; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6218" id="Page_6218">[Pg 6218]</a></span> I was
+rather surprised, for I knew she had told us on the occasion of her
+last party that she never had it in her house, it reminded her so much
+of scented soap. She always gave us Savoy biscuits. However, Mrs.
+Jamieson, kindly indulgent to Miss Barker's want of knowledge of the
+customs of high life, and to spare her feelings, ate three large
+pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of
+countenance, not unlike a cow's.</p>
+
+<p>After tea there was some little demur and difficulty. We were six in
+number; four could play at Preference, and for the other two there was
+Cribbage. But all except myself (I was rather afraid of the Cranford
+ladies at cards, for it was the most earnest and serious business they
+ever engaged in) were anxious to be of the "pool." Even Miss Barker,
+while declaring she did not know Spadille from Manille, was evidently
+hankering to take a hand. The dilemma was soon put an end to by a
+singular kind of noise. If a baron's daughter-in-law could ever be
+supposed to snore, I should have said Mrs. Jamieson did so then; for
+overcome by the heat of the room, and inclined to doze by nature, the
+temptation of that very comfortable arm-chair had been too much for
+her, and Mrs. Jamieson was nodding. Once or twice she opened her eyes
+with an effort, and calmly but unconsciously smiled upon us; but
+by-and-by even her benevolence was not equal to this exertion, and she
+was sound asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very gratifying to me," whispered Miss Barker at the card table
+to her three opponents, whom notwithstanding her ignorance of the game
+she was "basting" most unmercifully&mdash;"very gratifying indeed, to see
+how completely Mrs. Jamieson feels at home in my poor little dwelling;
+she could not have paid me a greater compliment."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Barker provided me with some literature, in the shape of three or
+four handsomely bound fashion-books ten or twelve years old;
+observing, as she put a little table and a candle for my special
+benefit, that she knew young people liked to look at pictures. Carlo
+lay and snorted and started at his mistress's feet. He too was quite
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>The card table was an animated scene to watch: four ladies' heads,
+with niddle-noddling caps, all nearly meeting over the middle of the
+table in their eagerness to whisper quick enough and loud enough; and
+every now and then came Miss Barker's "Hush, ladies! if you please,
+hush! Mrs. Jamieson is asleep."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6219" id="Page_6219">[Pg 6219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was very difficult to steer clear between Mrs. Forrester's deafness
+and Mrs. Jamieson's sleepiness. But Miss Barker managed her arduous
+task well. She repeated the whisper to Mrs. Forrester, distorting her
+face considerably in order to show by the motions of her lips what was
+said; and then she smiled kindly all round at us, and murmured to
+herself, "Very gratifying indeed; I wish my poor sister had been alive
+to see this day."</p>
+
+<p>Presently the door was thrown wide open; Carlo started to his feet
+with a loud snapping bark, and Mrs. Jamieson awoke; or perhaps she had
+not been asleep&mdash;as she said almost directly, the room had been so
+light she had been glad to keep her eyes shut, but had been listening
+with great interest to all our amusing and agreeable conversation.
+Peggy came in once more, red with importance. Another tray! "O
+gentility!" thought I, "can you endure this last shock?" For Miss
+Barker had ordered (nay, I doubt not prepared, although she did say,
+"Why! Peggy, what have you brought us?" and looked pleasantly
+surprised at the unexpected pleasure) all sorts of good things for
+supper&mdash;scalloped oysters, potted lobsters, jelly, a dish called
+"little Cupids" (which was in great favor with the Cranford ladies,
+although too expensive to be given except on solemn and state
+occasions&mdash;macaroons sopped in brandy, I should have called it, if I
+had not known its more refined and classical name). In short, we were
+evidently to be feasted with all that was sweetest and best; and we
+thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our
+gentility&mdash;which never ate suppers in general, but which, like most
+non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Barker in her former sphere had, I daresay, been made acquainted
+with the beverage they call cherry brandy. We none of us had ever seen
+such a thing, and rather shrank back when she proffered it us&mdash;"just a
+little, leetle glass, ladies; after the oysters and lobsters, you
+know. Shell-fish are sometimes thought not very wholesome." We all
+shook our heads like female mandarins; but at last Mrs. Jamieson
+suffered herself to be persuaded, and we followed her lead. It was not
+exactly unpalatable, though so hot and so strong that we thought
+ourselves bound to give evidence that we were not accustomed to such
+things by coughing terribly&mdash;almost as strangely as Miss Barker had
+done, before we were admitted by Peggy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6220" id="Page_6220">[Pg 6220]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It's very strong," said Miss Pole, as she put down her empty glass;
+"I do believe there's spirit in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Only a little drop&mdash;just necessary to make it keep," said Miss
+Barker. "You know we put brandy paper over preserves to make them
+keep. I often feel tipsy myself from eating damson tart."</p>
+
+<p>I question whether damson tart would have opened Mrs. Jamieson's heart
+as the cherry brandy did; but she told us of a coming event,
+respecting which she had been quite silent till that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"My sister-in-law, Lady Glenmire, is coming to stay with me." There
+was a chorus of "Indeed!" and then a pause. Each one rapidly reviewed
+her wardrobe, as to its fitness to appear in the presence of a baron's
+widow; for of course a series of small festivals were always held in
+Cranford on the arrival of a visitor at any of our friends' houses. We
+felt very pleasantly excited on the present occasion.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after this, the maids and the lanterns were announced. Mrs.
+Jamieson had the sedan-chair, which squeezed itself into Miss Barker's
+narrow lobby with some difficulty, and most literally "stopped the
+way." It required some skillful man&#339;uvring on the part of the old
+chairmen (shoemakers by day, but when summoned to carry the sedan,
+dressed up in a strange old livery&mdash;long greatcoats with small capes,
+coeval with the sedan and similar to the dress of the class in
+Hogarth's pictures) to edge, and back, and try at it again, and
+finally to succeed in carrying their burden out of Miss Barker's front
+door. Then we heard their pit-a-pat along the quiet little street, as
+we put on our calashes and pinned up our gowns; Miss Barker hovering
+about us with offers of help, which if she had not remembered her
+former occupation, and wished us to forget it, would have been much
+more pressing.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6221" id="Page_6221">[Pg 6221]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THEOPHILE_GAUTIER" id="THEOPHILE_GAUTIER"></a>TH&Eacute;OPHILE GAUTIER</h2>
+
+<h4>(1811-1872)</h4>
+
+<h4>BY ROBERT SANDERSON</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">h&eacute;ophile Gautier was born in Tarbes (Department of the
+Hautes-Pyr&eacute;n&eacute;es) in Southern France, August 31st, 1811. Like all
+French boys, he was sent to the lyc&eacute;e (academy), where he promised to
+be a brilliant scholar; but his father was really his tutor, and to
+him Gautier attributed his instruction. Young Th&eacute;ophile showed marked
+preference for the so-called authors of the Decadence&mdash;Claudianus,
+Martial, Petronius, and others; also for the old French writers,
+especially Villon and Rabelais, whom he says he knew by heart. This is
+significant, in view of the young man's strong tendencies, later on,
+towards the new romantic school. The artistic temperament was very
+strong in him; and while still carrying on his studies at college he
+entered the painter Rioult's studio. His introduction to Victor Hugo
+in 1830 may be considered the decisive point in Gautier's career: from
+that day he gave up painting and became a fanatic admirer of the
+romantic leader.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus395.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="Gautier" title="Gautier" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Th&eacute;ophile Gautier</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A short time afterwards, the first representation of 'Hernani' took
+place (February 25th, 1830), an important date in the life of Gautier.
+It was on this occasion that he put on for the only time that famous
+red waistcoat, which, with his long black mane streaming down his
+back, so horrified the staid Parisian bourgeois. This red waistcoat
+turns out, after all, not to have been a waistcoat at all, but a
+doublet; nor was it red, but pink. No truer is the legend, according
+to Gautier, that on this memorable occasion, armed with his two
+formidable fists, he felled right and left the terrified bourgeois. He
+says that he was at that time rather delicate, and had not yet
+developed that prodigious strength which later on enabled him to
+strike a 520-pound blow on a Turk's-head. In appearance Gautier was a
+large corpulent man with a leonine countenance, swarthy complexion,
+long black hair falling over his shoulders, black beard, and brilliant
+black eyes; an Oriental in looks as well as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6222" id="Page_6222">[Pg 6222]</a></span> in some of his tastes. He
+had a passion for cats. His house was overrun by them, and he seldom
+wrote without having one on his lap. The privations he underwent
+during the siege of Paris, doubly hard to a man of Gautier's
+Gargantuesque appetite, no doubt hastened his death. He died on
+October 23d, 1872, of hypertrophy of the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Gautier is one of those writers of whom one may say a vast deal of
+good and a vast deal of harm. His admirers think that justice has not
+been done him, that his fame will go on rising and his name will live
+as one of the great writers of France; others think that his name may
+perhaps not entirely disappear, but that if he is remembered at all it
+will be solely as the author of '&Eacute;maux et Cam&eacute;es' (Enamels and
+Cameos). He wrote in his youth a book that did him great harm in the
+eyes of the public; but he has written something else besides
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin,' and both in prose and poetry we shall find a
+good deal to admire in him. One thing is certain: he is a marvelous
+stylist. In his earliest poems Gautier already possesses that
+admirable artistic skill that prompts him to choose his words as a
+painter his colors, or a jeweler his gems and stones, so as to produce
+the most brilliant effects: these first compositions also have a
+grace, a charm, that we shall find lacking later on, for as he
+proceeds with his work he pays more and more attention to form and
+finish.</p>
+
+<p>'Albertus, or Soul and Sin,' the closing poem of Gautier's first
+collection, is a "semi-diabolic, semi-fashionable" legend. An old
+witch, Veronica, a second Meg Merrilies, transforms herself into a
+beautiful maiden and makes love to Albertus, a young artist&mdash;otherwise
+Gautier himself. He cares for nothing but his art, but falls a victim
+to the spell cast over him by the siren. At the stroke of midnight,
+Veronica, to the young man's horror, from a beautiful woman changes
+back to the old hag she was, and carries him off to a place where
+witches, sorcerers, hobgoblins, harpies, ghouls, and other frightful
+creatures are holding a monstrous saturnalia; at the end of which,
+Albertus is left for dead in a ditch of the Appian Way with broken
+back and twisted neck. What does it all mean? the reader may ask. That
+"the wages of sin is death" seems to be the moral contained in this
+poem, if indeed any moral is intended at all. Be that as it may,
+'Albertus' is a literary gem in its way; a work in which the poet has
+given free scope to his brilliant imagination, and showered by the
+handful the gems and jewels in his literary casket. Gautier may be
+said to have possessed the poetry of Death&mdash;some would say its
+horrors. This sentiment of horror at the repulsive manner of man's
+total destruction finds most vivid expression in 'The Comedy of
+Death,' a fantastic poem divided into two parts, 'Death in Life' and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6223" id="Page_6223">[Pg 6223]</a></span>
+'Life in Death.' The dialogue between the bride and the earth-worm is
+of a flesh-creeping nature.</p>
+
+<p>It is however as the poet of '&Eacute;maux et Cam&eacute;es' (Enamels and Cameos)
+that Th&eacute;ophile Gautier will be chiefly remembered. Every poem but one
+in this collection is written in short octosyllabic verse, and every
+one is what the title implies,&mdash;a precious stone, a chiseled gem.
+Gautier's wonderful and admirable talent for grouping together certain
+words that produce on one's eye and mind the effect of a beautiful
+picture, his intense love of art, of the outline, the plastic, appear
+throughout this work. You realize on reading '&Eacute;maux et Cam&eacute;es,' more
+perhaps than in any other work by this writer, that the poet is fully
+conscious of his powers and knows just how to use them. Any poem may
+be selected at random, and will be found a work of art.</p>
+
+<p>The same qualities that distinguish Gautier as a poet are to be found
+in his novels, narratives of travels, criticisms,&mdash;in short, in
+everything he wrote; intense love for the beautiful,&mdash;physically
+beautiful,&mdash;wonderful talent for describing it. Of his novels,
+properly speaking, there are four that stand out prominently, each
+very different in its subject,&mdash;a proof of Gautier's great
+versatility,&mdash;all perfect in their execution. The first is
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin'; it is an immoral book, but it is a beautiful
+book, not only because written with a rare elegance of style, but also
+because it makes you love beauty. Briefly, 'Mademoiselle de Maupin'
+may be called a p&aelig;an to beauty, sung by its high priest Th&eacute;ophile
+Gautier.</p>
+
+<p>The other remarkable novels by this writer are 'Le Capitaine Fracasse'
+(Captain Smash-All), 'Le Roman de la Momie' (The Romance of the
+Mummy), and 'Spirite.' 'Captain Fracasse,' although not published
+until 1863, had been announced long beforehand; and Gautier had worked
+at it, off and on, for twenty years. It belongs to that class of novel
+known as picaresque&mdash;romances of adventures and battles. 'Captain
+Fracasse' is certainly the most popular of Gautier's works.</p>
+
+<p>'The Romance of the Mummy' is a very remarkable book, in which science
+and fiction have been blended in the most artistic and clever manner;
+picturesque, like all of Gautier's writings, but the work of a savant
+as well as of a novelist. Here more than in any other book by this
+author,&mdash;with the exception perhaps of 'Arria Marcella,'&mdash;Gautier has
+revived in a most lifelike way an entire civilization, so long
+extinct. 'The Romance of the Mummy' abounds in beautiful descriptions.
+The description of the finding of the mummy, that of the royal tombs,
+of Thebes with its hundred gates, the triumphal entrance of Pharaoh
+into that city, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, are all
+marvelous pictures, that not only fill the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6224" id="Page_6224">[Pg 6224]</a></span> reader with the same
+admiration he would evince at the sight of a painting by one of the
+great masters, but give him the illusion of witnessing in the body the
+scenes so admirably described.</p>
+
+<p>'Spirite,' a fantastic story, is a source of surprise to readers
+familiar with Gautier's other works: they find it hard to conceive
+that so thorough a materialist as Gautier could ever have produced a
+work so spiritualistic in its nature. The clever handling of a mystic
+subject, the richness and coloring of the descriptions, together with
+a certain ideal and poetical vein that runs through the book, make of
+'Spirite' one of Gautier's most remarkable works.</p>
+
+<p>Th&eacute;ophile Gautier has also written a number of <i>nouvelles</i> or short
+novels, and tales, some of which are striking compositions. 'Arria
+Marcella' is one of these; a brilliant, masterly composition, in which
+Gautier gives us such a perfect illusion of the past. Under his magic
+pen we find ourselves walking the streets of Pompeii and living over
+the life of the Romans in the first century of our era; and 'Une Nuit
+de Cl&eacute;op&acirc;tre' (A Night with Cleopatra) is a vivid resurrection of the
+brilliant Egyptian court.</p>
+
+<p>Of his various journeys to Spain, Italy, and the Orient, Gautier has
+given us the most captivating relations. To many this is not the least
+interesting portion of Gautier's work. The same qualities that are so
+striking in his poems and novels&mdash;vividness of description, love of
+the picturesque, wonderful power of expression&mdash;are likewise apparent
+in his relations of travels.</p>
+
+<p>As a literary and especially as an art critic, Gautier ranks high.
+Bringing to this branch of literature the same qualities that
+distinguish him in others, he created a descriptive and picturesque
+method of criticism peculiarly his own. Of his innumerable articles on
+art and literature, some have been collected under the names of 'Les
+Grotesques,' a series of essays on a number of poets of the end of the
+sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, ridiculed by
+Boileau, but in whom Gautier finds some wheat among the chaff. The
+'History of Dramatic Art in France for the Last Twenty-five Years,'
+beginning with the year 1837, will be consulted with great profit by
+those who are curious to follow the dramatic movement in that country.
+Of his essays on art, one is as excellent as the other; all the great
+masters are treated with a loving and admiring hand.</p>
+
+<p>Among the miscellaneous works of this prolific writer should be
+mentioned 'M&eacute;nagerie Intime' (Home Menagerie), in which the author
+makes us acquainted in a most charming and familiar way with his home
+life, and the various pets, cats, dogs, white rats, parrots, etc.,
+that in turn shared his house with him; <i>la Nature chez elle</i> (Nature
+at home), that none but a close observer of nature could have
+written.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6225" id="Page_6225">[Pg 6225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The last book written by Gautier before his death was 'Tableaux de
+Si&egrave;ge' (Siege Pictures, 1871). The subjects are treated just in the
+way we might expect from such a writer, from a purely artistic point
+of view.</p>
+
+<p>Gautier has written for the stage only short plays and ballets; but if
+all he ever wrote were published, his works would fill nearly three
+hundred volumes. In spite of the quantity and quality of his books,
+the French Academy did not open her doors to him; but no more did it
+to Moli&egrave;re, Beaumarchais, Balzac, and many others. Opinions still vary
+greatly as to Th&eacute;ophile Gautier's literary merits; but his brilliant
+descriptive powers, his eminent qualities as a stylist, together with
+the influence he exercised over contemporary letters as the introducer
+of the plastic in literature, would seem sufficient to rank him among
+the great writers of France.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 570px;">
+<img src="images/sign399.png" width="570" height="100" alt="Robert Sanderson" title="Robert Sanderson" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_ENTRY_OF_PHARAOH_INTO_THEBES" id="THE_ENTRY_OF_PHARAOH_INTO_THEBES"></a>THE ENTRY OF PHARAOH INTO THEBES</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Romance of a Mummy'</h4>
+
+
+<p>At length their chariot reached the man&#339;uvring-ground, an immense
+inclosure, carefully leveled, used for splendid military displays.
+Terraces, one above the other, which must have employed for years the
+thirty nations led away into slavery, formed a frame <i>en relief</i> for
+the gigantic parallelogram; sloping walls built of crude bricks lined
+these terraces; their tops were covered, several rows deep, by
+hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, whose white or brightly colored
+costumes blazed in the sun with that perpetually restless movement
+which characterizes a multitude, even when it appears motionless;
+behind this line of spectators the cars, chariots, and litters, with
+their drivers, grooms, and slaves, looked like the encampment of an
+emigrating nation, such was their immense number; for Thebes, the
+marvel of the ancient world, counted more inhabitants than did some
+kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>The fine, even sand of the vast arena, bordered with a million heads,
+gleamed like mica dust beneath the light, falling from a sky as blue
+as the enamel on the statuettes of Osiris. On the south side of the
+field the terraces were broken, making way for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6226" id="Page_6226">[Pg 6226]</a></span> a road which stretched
+towards Upper Ethiopia, the whole length of the Libyan chain. In the
+corresponding corner, the opening in the massive brick walls prolonged
+the roads to the Rhamses-Ma&iuml;amoun palace....</p>
+
+<p>A frightful uproar, rumbling, deep, and mighty as that of an
+approaching sea, arose in the distance and drowned the thousand
+murmurs of the crowd, like the roar of the lion which hushes the
+barking of the jackals. Soon the noise of instruments of music could
+be distinguished amidst this terrestrial thunder, produced by the
+chariot wheels and the rhythmic pace of the foot-soldiers. A sort of
+reddish cloud, like that raised by the desert blasts, filled the sky
+in that direction, yet the wind had gone down; there was not a breath
+of air, and the smallest branches of the palm-trees hung motionless,
+as if they had been carved on a granite capital; not a hair moved on
+the women's moist foreheads, and the fluted streamers of their
+head-dresses hung loosely down their backs. This powdery fog was
+caused by the marching army, and hung over it like a fallow cloud.</p>
+
+<p>The tumult increases; the whirlwinds of dust opened, and the first
+files of musicians entered the immense arena, to the great
+satisfaction of the multitude, who in spite of its respect for his
+Majesty were beginning to tire of waiting beneath a sun which would
+have melted any other skulls than those of the Egyptians.</p>
+
+<p>The advance guard of musicians halted for several instants; colleges
+of priests, deputations of the principal inhabitants of Thebes,
+crossed the man&#339;uvring-ground to meet the Pharaoh, and arranged
+themselves in a row in postures of the most profound respect, in such
+manner as to give free passage to the procession.</p>
+
+<p>The band, which alone was a small army, consisted of drums, tabors,
+trumpets, and sistras.</p>
+
+<p>The first squad passed, blowing a deafening blast upon their short
+clarions of polished brass, which shone like gold. Each of these
+trumpeters carried a second horn under his arm, as if the instrument
+might grow weary sooner than the man. The costume of these men
+consisted of a short tunic, fastened by a sash with ends falling in
+front; a small band, in which were stuck two ostrich feathers hanging
+over on either side, bound their thick hair. These plumes, so worn,
+recalled to mind the antennae of scarab&aelig;i, and gave the wearers an odd
+look of being insects.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6227" id="Page_6227">[Pg 6227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The drummers, clothed in a simple gathered skirt, and naked to the
+waist, beat the onagra-skin heads of their rounded drums with
+sycamore-wood drumsticks, their instruments suspended by leathern
+shoulder-belts, and observed the time which a drum-major marked for
+them by repeatedly turning towards them and clapping his hands.</p>
+
+<p>After the drummers came the sistra-players, who shook their
+instruments by a quick, abrupt motion, and made at measured intervals
+the metal links ring on the four bronze bars.</p>
+
+<p>The tabor-players carried their oblong instruments crosswise, held up
+by a scarf passed around the neck, and struck the lightly stretched
+parchment with both hands.</p>
+
+<p>Each company of musicians numbered at least two hundred men; but the
+hurricane of noise produced by trumpets, drums, tabors, and sistras,
+and which would have drawn blood from the ears inside a palace, was
+none too loud or too unbearable beneath the vast cupola of heaven, in
+the midst of this immense open space, amongst this buzzing crowd, at
+the head of this army which would baffle nomenclators, and which was
+now advancing with a roar as of great waters.</p>
+
+<p>And was it too much to have eight hundred musicians preceding a
+Pharaoh who was the best loved of Ammon-Ra, represented by colossal
+statues of basalt and granite sixty cubits high, whose name was
+written in cartouches on imperishable monuments, and his history
+painted and sculptured and painted on the walls of the hypostyle
+chambers, on the sides of pylons, in interminable <i>bas-reliefs</i>, in
+frescoes without end? Was it indeed too much for a king who could
+raise a hundred conquered races by the hair of their heads, and from
+his high throne corrected the nations with his whip; for a living sun
+burning their dazzled eyes; for a god, almost eternal?</p>
+
+<p>After the musicians came the barbarian captives, strangely formed,
+with brutish faces, black skins, woolly hair, resembling apes as much
+as men, and dressed in the costume of their country, a short skirt
+above the hips, held by a single brace, embroidered in different
+colors.</p>
+
+<p>An ingenious and whimsical cruelty had suggested the way in which the
+prisoners were chained. Some were bound with their elbows drawn behind
+their backs; others with their hands lifted above their heads, in a
+still more painful position; one had his wrists fastened in wooden
+cangs (instruments of torture, still used<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6228" id="Page_6228">[Pg 6228]</a></span> in China); another was half
+strangled in a sort of pillory; or a chain of them were linked
+together by the same rope, each victim having a knot round his neck.
+It seemed as if those who had bound these unfortunates had found a
+pleasure in forcing them into unnatural positions; and they advanced
+before their conqueror with awkward and tottering gait, rolling their
+large eyes and contorted with pain.</p>
+
+<p>Guards walked beside them, regulating their step by beating them with
+staves.</p>
+
+<p>Tawny women, with long flowing hair, carrying their children in ragged
+strips of cloth bound about their foreheads, came behind them; bent,
+covered with shame, exhibiting their naked squalor and deformity: a
+wretched company, devoted to the most degrading uses.</p>
+
+<p>Others, young and beautiful, with lighter skin, their arms encircled
+by broad ivory bracelets, their ears pulled down by large metal discs,
+were enveloped in long tunics with wide sleeves, an embroidered hem
+around the neck, and falling in small flat folds to their ankles, upon
+which anklets rattled. Poor girls, torn from country, family, perhaps
+lovers, smiling through their tears! For the power of beauty is
+boundless; strangeness gives rise to caprice; and perhaps the royal
+favor awaited one of these barbarian captives in the depths of the
+gyn&aelig;ceum.</p>
+
+<p>They were accompanied by soldiers who kept away the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>The standard-bearers came next, lifting high the gilded staves of
+their flags, representing mystic baris, sacred hawks, heads of Hathor
+crowned with ostrich plumes, winged ibexes, inscriptions embellished
+with the King's name, crocodiles, and other religious or warlike
+emblems. Long white streamers, spotted with black, were tied to these
+standards, and floated gracefully with every motion. At sight of the
+standards announcing the appearance of Pharaoh, the deputations of
+priests and notables raised towards him their supplicating hands, or
+let them hang, palm outwards, against their knees. Some even
+prostrated themselves, with elbows pressed to their sides, their faces
+in the dust, in attitudes of absolute submission and profound
+adoration. The spectators waved their large palm-leaves in every
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>A herald, or reader, holding in one hand a roll covered with
+hieroglyphics, came forward quite alone between the standard-bearers
+and the incense-bearers who preceded the King's litter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6229" id="Page_6229">[Pg 6229]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He proclaimed in a loud voice, resounding as a brass trumpet, the
+victories of the Pharaoh; he recounted the results of the different
+battles, the number of captives and war chariots taken from the enemy,
+the amount of plunder, the measures of gold dust, and the elephant's
+tusks, the ostrich feathers, the masses of fragrant gum, the giraffes,
+lions, panthers, and other rare animals; he mentioned the names of the
+barbarian chiefs killed by the javelins or the arrows of his Majesty,
+Aro&euml;ris, the all-powerful, the loved of the gods.</p>
+
+<p>At each announcement the people sent up an immense cry, and from the
+top of the slopes strewed the conqueror's path with long green
+palm-branches they held in their hands.</p>
+
+<p>At last the Pharaoh appeared!</p>
+
+<p>Priests, turning towards him at regular intervals, stretched out their
+amschiras to him, first throwing incense on the coals blazing in the
+little bronze cup, holding them by a handle formed like a sceptre,
+with the head of some sacred animal at the other end; they walked
+backwards respectfully, while the fragrant blue smoke ascended to the
+nostrils of the triumpher, apparently as indifferent to these honors
+as a divinity of bronze or basalt.</p>
+
+<p>Twelve o&euml;ris, or military chiefs, their heads covered by a light
+helmet surrounded by ostrich feathers, naked to the waist, their loins
+enveloped in a narrow skirt with stiff folds, their targes suspended
+from the front of their belts, supported a sort of huge shield, on
+which rested the Pharaoh's throne. It was a chair, with arms and legs
+in the form of a lion, high-backed, with large full cushion, adorned
+on the sides with a kind of trellis-work of pink and blue flowers; the
+arms, legs, moldings of the seat were gilded, and the parts which were
+not, flamed with bright colors.</p>
+
+<p>On either side of the litter, four fan-bearers waved enormous
+semicircular fans, fixed to gilded staves; two priests held aloft a
+large richly decorated horn of plenty, from which fell bunches of
+enormous lotus blooms. The Pharaoh wore a mitre-like helmet, cut out
+to make room for the ear, and brought down over the back of the neck
+to protect it. On the blue ground of the helmet scintillated a
+quantity of dots like the eyes of birds, made of three circles, black,
+white, and red; a scarlet and yellow border ran along the edge, and
+the symbolic viper, twisting its golden coils at the back, stood erect
+above the royal forehead; two long curled feathers, purple in color,
+floated over his shoulders, and completed his majestically elegant
+head-dress.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6230" id="Page_6230">[Pg 6230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A wide gorget, with seven rows of enamels, precious stones, and golden
+beads, fell over the Pharaoh's chest and gleamed brightly in the
+sunlight. His upper garment was a sort of loose shirt, with pink and
+black squares; the ends, lengthening into narrow slips, were wound
+several times about his bust and bound it closely; the sleeves, cut
+short near the shoulder, and bordered with intersecting lines of gold,
+red, and blue, exposed his round, strong arms, the left furnished with
+a large metal wristband, meant to lessen the vibration of the string
+when he discharged an arrow from his triangular bow; and the right,
+ornamented by a bracelet in the form of a serpent in several coils,
+held a long gold sceptre with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his
+body was wrapped in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited,
+bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold
+plates. Between the band and the belt his torso appeared, shining and
+polished like pink granite shaped by a cunning workman. Sandals with
+returned toes, like skates, shod his long narrow feet, placed together
+like those of the gods on the temple walls.</p>
+
+<p>His smooth beardless face, with large clearly cut features, which it
+seemed beyond any human power to disturb, and which the blood of
+common life did not color, with its death-like pallor, sealed lips,
+enormous eyes enlarged with black lines, the lids no more lowered than
+those of the sacred hawk, inspired by its very immobility a feeling of
+respectful fear. One might have thought that these fixed eyes were
+searching for eternity and the Infinite; they never seemed to rest on
+surrounding objects. The satiety of pleasures, the surfeit of wishes
+satisfied as soon as expressed, the isolation of a demigod who has no
+equal among mortals, the disgust for perpetual adoration, and as it
+were the weariness of continual triumph, had forever frozen this face,
+implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls
+could not have had a more majestic and calm expression.</p>
+
+<p>A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws
+like a sphinx on its pedestal, and blinked its yellow eyes.</p>
+
+<p>A rope, attached to the litter, bound the war chariots of the
+vanquished chiefs to the Pharaoh. He dragged them behind him like
+animals in leash. These men, with fierce despairing faces, their
+elbows drawn together by a strap and forming an ungraceful angle,
+tottered awkwardly at every motion of the chariots, driven by
+Egyptians.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6231" id="Page_6231">[Pg 6231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Next came the chariots of the young princes royal, drawn by
+thoroughbred horses, elegantly and nobly formed, with slender legs,
+sinewy houghs, their manes cut short like a brush, harnessed by twos,
+tossing their red-plumed heads, with metal-bossed headstalls and
+frontlets. A curved pole, upheld on their withers, covered with
+scarlet panels, two collars surmounted by balls of polished brass,
+bound together by a light yoke bent like a bow with upturned ends; a
+bellyband and breastband elaborately stitched and embroidered, and
+rich housings with red or blue stripes and fringed with tassels,
+completed this strong, graceful, and light harness.</p>
+
+<p>The body of the chariot, painted red and white, ornamented with bronze
+plaques and half-spheres, something like the umbo of the shields, was
+flanked with two large quivers placed diagonally opposite each other,
+one filled with arrows and the other with javelins. On the front of
+each, a carved, gilded lion, with set paws, and muzzle wrinkled into a
+frightful grin, seemed ready to spring with a roar upon the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>The young princes had their hair bound with a narrow band, in which
+the royal viper was twisted; their only garment was a tunic gaudily
+embroidered at the neck and sleeves, and held in at the waist by a
+belt of black leather, clasped with a metal plate engraved with
+hieroglyphics. In this belt was a long dagger, with triangular brass
+blade, the handle channeled crosswise, terminated by a hawk's head.</p>
+
+<p>In the chariot, by the side of each prince, stood the charioteer, who
+drove it in battle, and the groom, whose business it was to ward off
+with the shield the blows aimed at the combatant, while the latter
+discharged the arrows or threw the javelins which he took from the
+quivers on either side of the car.</p>
+
+<p>In the wake of the princes followed the chariots, the Egyptian
+cavalry, twenty thousand in number, each drawn by two horses and
+holding three men. They advanced ten in a line, the axletrees
+perilously near together, but never coming in contact with each other,
+so great was the address of the drivers.</p>
+
+<p>Several lighter chariots, used for skirmishing and reconnoitring,
+marched at the head and carried one warrior only, who in order to
+leave his hands free for fighting wound the reins around his body: by
+bending to the right or the left, or backwards, he guided or stopped
+his horses; and it was really wonderful to see the noble animals,
+apparently left to themselves, but governed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6232" id="Page_6232">[Pg 6232]</a></span> by imperceptible
+movements, keep up an undisturbedly regular pace....</p>
+
+<p>The stamping of the horses, held in with difficulty, the thundering of
+the bronze-covered wheels, the metallic clash of weapons, gave to this
+line something formidable and imposing enough to raise terror in the
+most intrepid bosoms. The helmets, plumes, and breastplates dotted
+with red, green, and yellow, the gilded bows and brass swords,
+glittered and blazed terribly in the light of the sun, open in the
+sky, above the Libyan chain, like a great Osirian eye; and it was felt
+that the onslaught of such an army must sweep away the nations like a
+whirlwind which drives a light straw before it.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath these innumerable wheels the earth resounded and trembled, as
+if it had been moved by some convulsion of nature.</p>
+
+<p>To the chariots succeeded the battalions of infantry, marching in
+order, their shields on the left arm; in the right hand the lance,
+curved club, bow, sling, or axe, according as they were armed; the
+heads of these soldiers were covered with helmets, adorned with two
+horsehair tails, their bodies girded with a cuirass belt of crocodile
+skin. Their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their
+movements, their reddish copper complexions, deepened by a recent
+expedition to the burning regions of Upper Ethiopia, their clothing
+powdered with the desert sand, they awoke admiration by their
+discipline and courage. With soldiers like these, Egypt could conquer
+the world. After them came the allied troops, recognizable from the
+outlandish form of their head-pieces, which looked like truncated
+mitres, or were surmounted by crescents spitted on sharp points. Their
+wide-bladed swords and jagged axes must have produced wounds which
+could not be healed.</p>
+
+<p>Slaves carried on their shoulders or on barrows the spoils enumerated
+by the herald, and wild-beast tamers dragged behind them leashed
+panthers, cheetahs, crouching down as if trying to hide themselves,
+ostriches fluttering their wings, giraffes which overtopped the crowd
+by the entire length of their necks, and even brown bears,&mdash;taken,
+they said, in the Mountains of the Moon.</p>
+
+<p>The procession was still passing, long after the King had entered his
+palace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6233" id="Page_6233">[Pg 6233]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="FROM_THE_MARSH" id="FROM_THE_MARSH"></a>FROM 'THE MARSH'</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is a pond, whose sleepy water<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lies stagnant, covered with a mantle<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of lily pads and rushes. . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the creeping duck-weed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wild ducks dip<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their sapphire necks glazed with gold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At dawn the teal is seen bathing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when twilight reigns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It settles between two rushes and sleeps.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="FROM_THE_DRAGON-FLY" id="FROM_THE_DRAGON-FLY"></a>FROM 'THE DRAGON-FLY'</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the heather sprinkled<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">With morning dew;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Upon the wild-rose bush;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the shady trees;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Upon the hedges<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Growing along the path;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the modest and dainty<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Daisy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That droops its dreamy brow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the rye, like a green billow<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Unrolled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the winged caprice of the wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dragon-fly gently rocks.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_DOVES" id="THE_DOVES"></a>THE DOVES</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On the hill-side, yonder where are the graves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fine palm-tree, like a green plume,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stands with head erect; in the evening the doves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come to nestle under its cover.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But in the morning they leave the branches;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a spreading necklace, they may be seen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scattering in the blue air, perfectly white,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And settling farther upon some roof.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My soul is the tree where every eve, as they,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">White swarms of mad visions<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fall from heaven, with fluttering wings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fly away with the first rays.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6234" id="Page_6234">[Pg 6234]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_POT_OF_FLOWERS" id="THE_POT_OF_FLOWERS"></a>THE POT OF FLOWERS</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sometimes a child finds a small seed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And at once, delighted with its bright colors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To plant it he takes a porcelain jar<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adorned with blue dragons and strange flowers.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He goes away. The root, snake-like, stretches,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breaks through the earth, blooms, becomes a shrub;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each day, farther down, it sinks its fibrous foot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Until it bursts the sides of the vessel.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The child returns: surprised, he sees the rich plant<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the vase's d&eacute;bris brandishing its green spikes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He wants to pull it out, but the stem is stubborn.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The child persists, and tears his fingers with the pointed arrows.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thus grew love in my simple heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I believed I sowed but a spring flower;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis a large aloe, whose root breaks<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The porcelain vase with the brilliant figures.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PRAYER" id="PRAYER"></a>PRAYER</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As a guardian angel, take me under your wing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deign to stoop and put out, smiling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your maternal hand to my little hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To support my steps and keep me from falling!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For Jesus the sweet Master, with celestial love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suffered little children to come to him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As an indulgent parent, he submitted to their caresses<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And played with them without showing weariness.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O you who resemble those church pictures<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where one sees, on a gold background, august Charity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Preserving from hunger, preserving from cold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fair and smiling group sheltered in her folds;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Like the nursling of the Divine mother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For pity's sake, lift me to your lap;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Protect me, poor young girl, alone, an orphan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose only hope is in God, whose only hope is in you!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6235" id="Page_6235">[Pg 6235]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_POET_AND_THE_CROWD" id="THE_POET_AND_THE_CROWD"></a>THE POET AND THE CROWD</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One day the plain said to the idle mountain:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing ever grows upon thy wind-beaten brow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the poet, bending thoughtful over his lyre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The crowd also said:&mdash;Dreamer, of what use art thou?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Full of wrath, the mountain answered the plain:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is I who make the harvests grow upon thy soil;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I temper the breath of the noon sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I stop in the skies the clouds as they fly by.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With my fingers I knead the snow into avalanches,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In my crucible I dissolve the crystals of glaciers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I pour out, from the tip of my white breasts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In long silver threads, the nourishing streams.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The poet, in his turn, answered the crowd:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Allow my pale brow to rest upon my hand.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have I not from my side, from which runs out my soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made a spring gush to slake men's thirst?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_FIRST_SMILE_OF_SPRING" id="THE_FIRST_SMILE_OF_SPRING"></a>THE FIRST SMILE OF SPRING</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While to their perverse work<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Men run panting,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">March that laughs, in spite of showers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quietly gets Spring ready.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the little daisies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Slyly, when all sleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He irons little collars<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And chisels gold studs.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Through the orchard and the vineyard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He goes, cunning hair-dresser,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a swan-puff,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And powders snow-white the almond-tree.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nature rests in her bed;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He goes down to the garden<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And laces the rosebuds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In their green velvet corsets.<br /></span>
+</div><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6236" id="Page_6236">[Pg 6236]</a></span><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While composing solfeggios<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he sings in a low tone to the blackbirds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He strews the meadows with snowdrops<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the woods with violets.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">By the side of the cress in the brook<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where drinks the stag, with listening ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With his concealed hand he scatters<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The silver bells of the lilies of the valley.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then, when his work is done<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And his reign about to end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the threshold of April, turning his head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He says, Spring, you may come!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_VETERANS" id="THE_VETERANS"></a>THE VETERANS</h3>
+
+<h4>From 'The Old Guard'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The thing is worth considering;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three ghosts of old veterans<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the uniform of the Old Guard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With two shadows of hussars!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Since the supreme battle<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One has grown thin, the other stout;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The coat once made to fit them<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is either too loose or too tight.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Don't laugh, comrade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But rather bow low<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To these Achilles of an Iliad<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Homer would not have invented.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Their faces with the swarthy skin<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Speak of Egypt with the burning sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the snows of Russia<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still powder their white hair.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If their joints are stiff, it is because on the battle-field<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flags were their only blankets:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if their sleeves don't fit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is because a cannon-ball took off their arm.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6237" id="Page_6237">[Pg 6237]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JOHN_GAY" id="JOHN_GAY"></a>JOHN GAY</h2>
+
+<h4>(1685-1732)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capi.png" width="90" height="90" alt="I" title="I" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">n the great society of the wits," said Thackeray, "John Gay deserves
+to be a favorite, and to have a good place." The wits loved him. Prior
+was his faithful ally; Pope wrote him frequent letters of affectionate
+good advice; Swift grew genial in his merry company; and when the
+jester lapsed into gloom, as jesters will, all his friends hurried to
+coddle and comfort him. His verse is not of the first order, but the
+list of "English classics" contains far poorer; it is entertaining
+enough to be a pleasure even to bright children of this generation,
+and each succeeding one reads it with an inherited fondness not by any
+means without help from its own merits. And the man who invented comic
+opera, one of the most enduring molds in which English humor has been
+cast, deserves the credit of all important literary pioneers.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus411.jpg" width="270" height="330" alt="John Gay" title="John Gay" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">John Gay</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Kind, lazy, clever John Gay came of a good, impoverished Devonshire
+family, which seems to have done its best for the bright lad of twelve
+when it apprenticed him to a London silk mercer. The boy hated this
+employment, grew ill under its fret and confinement, went back to the
+country, studied, possibly wrote poor verses, and presently drifted
+back to London. The cleverest men of the time frequented the crowded
+taverns and coffee-houses, and the talk that he heard at Will's and
+Button's may have determined his profession. Thither came Pope and
+Addison, Swift and Steele, Congreve, St. John, Prior, Arbuthnot,
+Cibber, Hogarth, Walpole, and many a powerful patron who loved good
+company.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps through some kind acquaintance made in this informal circle,
+Gay obtained a private secretaryship, and began the flirtation with
+the Muse which became serious only after some years of coldness on
+that humorous lady's part. His first poem, 'Wine,' published when he
+was twenty-three, is not included in his collected works: perhaps
+because it is written in blank verse; perhaps because his maturer
+taste condemned it. Three years later, in 1711, when the success of
+the Spectator was yet new, and Pope had just completed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6238" id="Page_6238">[Pg 6238]</a></span> his brilliant
+'Art of Criticism,' and Swift was editing the Examiner and working on
+that defense of a French peace, 'The Conduct of the Allies,' which was
+to make him the talk of London,&mdash;Gay sent forth his second venture; a
+curious, unimportant pamphlet, 'The Present State of Wit.' Late in
+1713 he is contributing to Dicky Steele's Guardian, and sending
+elegies to his 'Poetical Miscellanies'; and a little later, having
+become a favorite with the powerful Mr. Pope, he is made to bring up
+new reinforcements to the battle of that irascible gentleman with his
+ancient enemy Ambrose Phillips. This he does in 'The Shepherd's Week,'
+a sham pastoral, which is full of wit and easy versification, and
+shows very considerable talents as a parodist. This skit the luckless
+satirist dedicated to Bolingbroke, whose brilliant star was just
+passing into eclipse. Swift thought this harmless courtesy the real
+cause of the indifference of the Brunswick princes to the merits of
+the poet; and in an age when every spark of literary genius was so
+carefully nursed and utilized to sustain the weak dynasty, most likely
+he was right.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason or another, indifferent they were; and in a time when
+court favor counted enormously, poor indolent luxury-loving Gay had to
+earn his loaf by hard work, or go without it. He produced a
+tragi-comi-pastoral farce called 'What D'ye Call It?' which was the
+lineal ancestor of 'Pinafore' and the 'Pirates of Penzance' in its
+method of treating farcical incidents in a grave manner. But the town
+did not see the fun of this expedient, and the play failed, though it
+contained, among other famous songs, ''Twas When the Seas Were
+Roaring.' In 1716 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of
+London,' put some money into the poet's empty pocket, thanks to Pope's
+good offices. A year later a second comedy of his, 'Three Hours after
+Marriage,' met with well-deserved failure. And now, as always, when
+his spirits sank, his good friends showered kindnesses upon him. Mr.
+Secretary Pulteney carried him off to Aix. Lord Bathurst and Lord
+Burlington were his to command. Many fine gentlemen, and particularly
+many fine ladies, pressed him to make indefinite country visits. In
+1720 his friends managed the publication of his poems in two quarto
+volumes, subscribing for ten, twenty, and even fifty copies apiece,
+some of them, and securing to the poet, it is said, &pound;1,000. The
+younger Craggs, the bookseller, gave him some South-Sea stock which
+rose rapidly, and at one time the improvident little gentleman found
+himself in possession of &pound;20,000. All his friends besought him to
+sell, but Alnaschar Gay had visions of a splendid ease and opulence.
+The bubble burst, and poor Alnaschar had not wherewithal to pay his
+broker.</p>
+
+<p>The Duchess of Queensborough (Prior's "Kitty, beautiful and young")
+had already annexed the charmer, and now carried him off
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6239" id="Page_6239">[Pg 6239]</a></span>
+to Petersham. "I wish you had a little villakin in Mr. Pope's
+neighborhood," scolds Swift to him; "but you are yet too volatile, and
+any lady with a coach and six horses might carry you to Japan;" and
+again:&mdash;"I know your arts of patching up a journey between
+stagecoaches and friend's coaches&mdash;for you are as arrant a cockney as
+any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into
+yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme which may take
+up seven years to finish, besides two or three under ones that may add
+another thousand pounds to your stock; and then I shall be in less
+pain about you. I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny
+coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole
+thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day." Gay went to Bath
+with the Queensberrys, and to Oxford. Swift complained to Pope:&mdash;"I
+suppose Mr. Gay will return from Bath with twenty pounds more flesh,
+and two hundred pounds less money. Providence never designed him to be
+above two-and-twenty, by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has
+as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as
+a girl of fifteen." And his dear Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,
+took him affectionately to task:&mdash;"Your head is your best friend: it
+would clothe, lodge, and feed you; but you neglect it, and follow that
+false friend your heart, which is such a foolish, tender thing that it
+makes others despise your head, that have not half so good a one on
+their own shoulders. In short, John, you may be a snail, or a
+silkworm; but by my consent you shall never be a hare again."</p>
+
+<p>He lived under other great roofs, if not contentedly, at least
+gracefully and agreeably. If his dependent state irked him, his hosts
+did not perceive it. To Swift he wrote, indeed, "They wonder at each
+other for not providing for me, and <i>I</i> wonder at them all." Yet, for
+the nine years from 1722 to 1731 he had a small official salary, on
+which a thriftier or more industrious mortal would have managed to
+live respectably even in that expensive age; and for at least a part
+of the time he had official lodgings at Whitehall.</p>
+
+<p>In 1725 was published the first edition of his famous 'Fables,' which
+had been written for the moral behoof of Prince William, afterward
+Duke of Cumberland, of unblessed memory. The book did not make his
+fortune with the court, as he had hoped, and in 1728 he produced his
+best known work, 'The Beggar's Opera.' Nobody had much faith in this
+"Newgate Pastoral," least of all Swift, who had first suggested it.
+But it took the town by storm, running for sixty-three consecutive
+nights. As the heroine, Polly Peachum, the lovely Lavinia Fenton
+captured a duchess's coronet. The songs were heard alike in West End
+drawing-rooms and East End slums. Swift praised it for its morality,
+and the Archbishop of Canterbury scored<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6240" id="Page_6240">[Pg 6240]</a></span> it for its condonation of
+vice. The breath of praise and blame filled equally its prosperous
+sails, blew it all over the kingdom wherever a theatre could be found,
+and finally wafted it to Minorca. So well did the opera pay him that
+Gay wrote a sequel called 'Polly,' which, being prohibited through
+some notion of Walpole's, sold enormously by subscription and earned
+Gay &pound;1,200.</p>
+
+<p>After this the hospitable Queensberrys seem to have adopted him. He
+produced a musical drama, 'Acis and Galatea,' written long before and
+set to Handel's music; a few more 'Fables'; a thin opera called
+'Achilles'; and then his work was done. He died in London of a swift
+fever, in December 1732, before his kind Kitty and her husband could
+reach him, or his other great friend, the Countess of Suffolk.
+Arbuthnot watched over him; Pope was with him to the last; Swift
+indorsed on the letter that brought him the tidings, "On my dear
+friend Mr. Gay's death; received on December 15th, but not read till
+the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." So faithfully did
+the "giants," as Thackeray calls them, cherish this gentle, friendly,
+affectionate, humorous comrade. He seems indeed to have been almost
+the only companion with whom Swift did not at some time fall out, and
+of his steadfastness the gloomy great man in his 'Verses on my Own
+Death' could write:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A week, and Arbuthnot a day."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The 'Trivia' and the 'Shepherd's Week,' the 'Acis and Galatea' and
+even the 'Beggar's Opera,' gradually faded into the realm of "old,
+forgotten, far-off things"; while the 'Fables' passed through many
+editions, found their place in school reading-books, were committed to
+memory by three generations of admiring pupils, and included in the
+most orthodox libraries. Yet criticism now reverts to the earlier
+standard; approves the songs, and the minute observation, the nice
+phrasing, and the humorous swing of the pastorals and operas, and
+finds the fables dull, commonplace, and monotonous. Pope said in his
+affectionate epitaph that the poet had been laid in Westminster Abbey,
+not for ambition, but&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That the worthy and the good shall say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Striking their pensive bosoms, '<i>Here</i> lies Gay.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If to-day the worthy and the good do not know even where he lies, not
+the less is he to be gratefully remembered whom the best and greatest
+of his own time so much admired, and of whom Pope and Johnson and
+Thackeray and Dobson have written with the warmth of friendship.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6241" id="Page_6241">[Pg 6241]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_HARE_AND_MANY_FRIENDS" id="THE_HARE_AND_MANY_FRIENDS"></a>THE HARE AND MANY FRIENDS</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Fables'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Friendship, like love, is but a name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unless to one you stint the flame.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The child whom many fathers share<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath seldom known a father's care.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis thus in friendships: who depend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On many, rarely find a friend.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A Hare, who in a civil way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Complied with everything, like Gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was known by all the bestial train<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who haunt the wood or graze the plain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her care was, never to offend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ev'ry creature was her friend.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As forth she went at early dawn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To taste the dew-besprinkled lawn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Behind she hears the hunters' cries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And from the deep-mouthed thunder flies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She starts, she stops, she pants for breath;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She hears the near advance of death;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She doubles to mislead the hound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And measures back her mazy round;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till fainting in the public way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Half dead with fear, she gasping lay.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What transport in her bosom grew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When first the horse appeared in view!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Let me," says she, "your back ascend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And owe my safety to a friend.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You know my feet betray my flight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To friendship every burden's light."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Horse replied:&mdash;"Poor honest Puss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It grieves my heart to see thee thus:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be comforted, relief is near;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For all your friends are in the rear."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She next the stately Bull implored;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thus replied the mighty lord:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Since every beast alive can tell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I sincerely wish you well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I may, without offense, pretend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To take the freedom of a friend.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6242" id="Page_6242">[Pg 6242]</a></span><span class="i0">Love calls me hence; a favorite cow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Expects me near yon barley-mow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when a lady's in the case,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You know all other things give place.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To leave you thus might seem unkind;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But see, the Goat is just behind."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Goat remarked her pulse was high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her languid head, her heavy eye;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"My back," says he, "may do you harm:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Sheep's at hand, and wool is warm."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Sheep was feeble, and complained<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His sides a load of wool sustained:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Said he was slow, confessed his fears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For hounds eat Sheep, as well as Hares!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She now the trotting Calf addressed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To save from death a friend distressed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Shall I," says he, "of tender age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In this important care engage?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Older and abler passed you by;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How strong are those! how weak am I!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should I presume to bear you hence,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those friends of mine may take offense.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Excuse me then. You know my heart:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But dearest friends, alas! must part.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How shall we all lament! Adieu!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For see, the hounds are just in view."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_SICK_MAN_AND_THE_ANGEL" id="THE_SICK_MAN_AND_THE_ANGEL"></a>THE SICK MAN AND THE ANGEL</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Fables'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Is there no hope? the Sick Man said.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The silent doctor shook his head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And took his leave with signs of sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Despairing of his fee to-morrow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When thus the Man with gasping breath:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I feel the chilling wound of death;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since I must bid the world adieu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let me my former life review.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I grant, my bargains well were made,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But all men overreach in trade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis self-defense in each profession;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sure, self-defense is no transgression.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6243" id="Page_6243">[Pg 6243]</a></span><span class="i0">The little portion in my hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By good security on lands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is well increased. If unawares,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My justice to myself and heirs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath let my debtor rot in jail,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For want of good sufficient bail;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I by writ, or bond, or deed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reduced a family to need,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My will hath made the world amends;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My hope on charity depends.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I am numbered with the dead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all my pious gifts are read,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By heaven and earth 'twill then be known,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My charities were amply shown.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">An Angel came. Ah, friend! he cried,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No more in flattering hope confide.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can thy good deeds in former times<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Outweigh the balance of thy crimes?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What widow or what orphan prays<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To crown thy life with length of days?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pious action's in thy power;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Embrace with joy the happy hour.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now, while you draw the vital air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prove your intention is sincere:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This instant give a hundred pound;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your neighbors want, and you abound.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But why such haste? the Sick Man whines:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who knows as yet what Heaven designs?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps I may recover still;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That sum and more are in my will.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fool, says the Vision, now 'tis plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your life, your soul, your heaven was gain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From every side, with all your might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You scraped, and scraped beyond your right;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And after death would fain atone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By giving what is not your own.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where there is life there's hope, he cried;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then why such haste?&mdash;so groaned and died.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 1024px;">
+<a name="PJuggler" id="PJuggler"></a>
+<span class="caption"><big><i>THE JUGGLER.</i></big><br />
+Photogravure from a Painting by L. Knaus.</span>
+<img src="images/juggler.jpg" width="1024" height="664" alt="THE JUGGLER" title="THE JUGGLER" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6244" id="Page_6244">[Pg 6244]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_JUGGLER" id="THE_JUGGLER"></a>THE JUGGLER</h3>
+
+<h4>From the 'Fables'</h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A juggler long through all the town<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had raised his fortune and renown;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You'd think (so far his art transcends)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Devil at his fingers' ends.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Vice heard his fame; she read his bill;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Convinced of his inferior skill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She sought his booth, and from the crowd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Defied the man of art aloud.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is this, then, he so famed for sleight?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can this slow bungler cheat your sight?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dares he with me dispute the prize?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I leave it to impartial eyes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Provoked, the Juggler cried, 'Tis done.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In science I submit to none.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thus said, the cups and balls he played;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By turns, this here, that there, conveyed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cards, obedient to his words,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are by a fillip turned to birds.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His little boxes change the grain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trick after trick deludes the train.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He shakes his bag, he shows all fair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His fingers spreads,&mdash;and nothing there;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then bids it rain with showers of gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now his ivory eggs are told.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But when from thence the hen he draws,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amazed spectators hum applause.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Vice now stept forth, and took the place<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With all the forms of his grimace.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This magic looking-glass, she cries<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(There, hand it round), will charm your eyes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each eager eye the sight desired,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ev'ry man himself admired.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Next to a senator addressing:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">See this bank-note; observe the blessing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breathe on the bill. Heigh, pass! 'Tis gone;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon his lips a padlock shone.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A second puff the magic broke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The padlock vanished, and he spoke.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Twelve bottles ranged upon the board,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All full, with heady liquor stored,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6245" id="Page_6245">[Pg 6245]</a></span><span class="i0">By clean conveyance disappear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now two bloody swords are there.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A purse she to a thief exposed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At once his ready fingers closed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He opes his fist, the treasure's fled:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He sees a halter in its stead.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She bids ambition hold a wand;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He grasps a hatchet in his hand.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A box of charity she shows:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blow here; and a churchwarden blows.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis vanished with conveyance neat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on the table smokes a treat.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She shakes the dice, the board she knocks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And from her pockets fills her box.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">A counter in a miser's hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grew twenty guineas at command.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She bids his heir the sum retain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And 'tis a counter now again.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A guinea with her touch you see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take ev'ry shape but Charity;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And not one thing you saw, or drew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But changed from what was first in view.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The Juggler now, in grief of heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With this submission owned her art.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can I such matchless sleight withstand?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How practice hath improved your hand!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But now and then I cheat the throng;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You every day, and all day long.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SWEET_WILLIAMS_FAREWELL_TO_BLACK-EYED_SUSAN" id="SWEET_WILLIAMS_FAREWELL_TO_BLACK-EYED_SUSAN"></a>SWEET WILLIAM'S FAREWELL TO BLACK-EYED SUSAN</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">A Ballad</span></h4>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">All in the Downs the fleet was moored,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The streamers waving in the wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When black-eyed Susan came aboard:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, where shall I my true love find!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If my sweet William sails among the crew.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">William, who high upon the yard<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rocked with the billow to and fro,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6246" id="Page_6246">[Pg 6246]</a></span><span class="i1">Soon as her well-known voice he heard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He sighed and cast his eyes below;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And quick as lightning on the deck he stands.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">So the sweet lark, high poised in air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shuts close his pinions to his breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(If, chance, his mate's shrill call he hear),<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And drops at once into her nest.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The noblest captain in the British fleet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might envy William's lip those kisses sweet.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">O Susan, Susan, lovely dear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My vows shall ever true remain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let me kiss off that falling tear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We only part to meet again.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Change, as ye list, ye winds; my heart shall be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The faithful compass that still points to thee.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Believe not what the landmen say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who tempt with doubts thy constant mind:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They'll tell thee, sailors when away<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In every port a mistress find.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yes, yes, believe them when they tell thee so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For thou art present wheresoe'er I go.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">If to far India's coast we sail,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy skin is ivory so white.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus every beauteous object that I view,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Though battle call me from thy arms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Let not my pretty Susan mourn;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though cannons roar, yet safe from harms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">William shall to his dear return.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love turns aside the balls that round me fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lest precious tears should drop from Susan's eye.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">The boatswain gave the dreadful word;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The sails their swelling bosom spread;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No longer must she stay aboard:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They kissed, she sighed, he hung his head:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her lessening boat unwilling rows to land:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adieu! she cries; and waved her lily hand.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6247" id="Page_6247">[Pg 6247]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="FROM_WHAT_DYE_CALL_IT" id="FROM_WHAT_DYE_CALL_IT"></a>FROM 'WHAT D'YE CALL IT?'</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">A Ballad</span></h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">T'was when the seas were roaring<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With hollow blasts of wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A damsel lay deploring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All on a rock reclined.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wide o'er the foaming billows<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She cast a wistful look;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her head was crowned with willows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That tremble o'er the brook.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Twelve months are gone and over,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And nine long tedious days;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why didst thou, venturous lover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why didst thou trust the seas?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cease, cease, thou cruel ocean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And let my lover rest:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah! what's thy troubled motion<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To that within my breast?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The merchant robbed of pleasure<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sees tempests in despair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But what's the loss of treasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To losing of my dear?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should you some coast be laid on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where gold and diamonds grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You'll find a richer maiden,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But none that loves you so.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How can they say that nature<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Has nothing made in vain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why then, beneath the water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Should hideous rocks remain?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No eyes the rocks discover<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That lurk beneath the deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To wreck the wandering lover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And leave the maid to weep."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All melancholy lying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thus wailed she for her dear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Repaid each blast with sighing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each billow with a tear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When o'er the white wave stooping,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His floating corpse she spied,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then, like a lily drooping,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She bowed her head and died.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6248" id="Page_6248">[Pg 6248]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EMANUEL_VON_GEIBEL" id="EMANUEL_VON_GEIBEL"></a>EMANUEL VON GEIBEL</h2>
+
+<h4>(1815-1884)</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 90px;">
+<img src="images/capt.png" width="90" height="90" alt="T" title="T" />
+</div><p class="dropcap">he chief note in Geibel's nature was reverence. A spirit of reverent
+piety, using the phrase in its widest as well as in its strictly
+religious sense, characterizes all his poetical utterances. He
+intended to devote himself to theology, but the humanistic tendencies
+of the age, combined with his own peculiar endowments, led him to
+abandon the Church for pure literature. The reverent attitude of mind,
+however, remained, and has left its impress even upon his most
+impassioned love lyrics. It appears too in his first literary venture,
+a volume of 'Classical Studies' undertaken in collaboration with his
+friend Ernst Curtius, in which is displayed his loving reverence for
+the great monuments of Greek antiquity. He felt himself an exile from
+Greece, and like Goethe's Iphigenia, his soul was seeking ever for the
+land of Hellas. And through the influence of Bettina von Arnim this
+longing was satisfied; he secured the post of tutor in the household
+of the Russian ambassador to Athens.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 270px;">
+<img src="images/illus424.jpg" width="270" height="324" alt="Emanuel von Geibel" title="Emanuel von Geibel" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Emanuel von Geibel</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Geibel was only twenty-three years of age when this good fortune fell
+to his lot. He was born at L&uuml;beck on October 18th, 1815. His poetic
+gifts, early manifested, secured him a welcome in the literary circles
+of Berlin. During the two years that he spent in Greece he was enabled
+to travel over a large part of the Grecian Archipelago in the
+inspiring company of Curtius; and it was upon their return to Germany
+in 1840 that the 'Classical Studies' appeared, and were dedicated to
+the Queen of Greece. Then Geibel eagerly took up the study of French
+and Spanish, with the result that many valuable volumes were published
+in collaboration with Paul Heyse, Count von Schack, and Leuthold,
+which introduced to the German public a vast treasury of song from the
+literatures of France, Spain, and Portugal. The first collection of
+Geibel's own poems in 1843 secured for the poet a modest pension from
+the King of Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>Geibel also made several essays at dramatic composition. He wrote for
+Mendelssohn the text of a 'Lorelei,' but the composer died before
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6249" id="Page_6249">[Pg 6249]</a></span>
+the music was completed. A comedy called 'Master Andrew' was successful in
+a number of cities; and of his more ambitious tragedies, 'Brunhild'
+and 'Sophonisba,' the latter won the famous Schiller prize in 1869.</p>
+
+<p>In 1852 Geibel received an appointment as royal reader to Maximilian
+II., and was made professor at the University of Munich. It was also
+from the King of Bavaria that he procured his patent of nobility. In
+the same year that he took up his residence in Munich he married; but
+the death of his wife terminated his happy family relations three
+years later, and the death of the King severed his connection with the
+Bavarian court. Moreover, his sympathy with the revolutionary poets,
+such as his intimate friend Freiligrath, his own enthusiasm for the
+popular movement, and the faith which he placed in the King of
+Prussia, led to bitter attacks upon him in the Bavarian press, and
+eventually to his resignation from the faculty of the university. He
+returned to his native city of L&uuml;beck. The Prussian King trebled his
+annual income, and the poet was raised above pecuniary cares. The last
+years of his life were saddened, without being embittered, by feeble
+health. He died on April 6th, 1884.</p>
+
+<p>There was sometimes a touch of effeminate sentimentality in Geibel's
+work, but he did not lack force and virility, as his famous 'Twelve
+Sonnets' and his political poems, entitled 'Zeitgedichte,' show. He
+could speak strong words for right and justice, and in all his poems
+there is a musical beauty of language and a perfection of form that
+render his songs contributions of permanent value to the lyric
+treasury of German literature.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SEEST_THOU_THE_SEA" id="SEEST_THOU_THE_SEA"></a>SEE'ST THOU THE SEA?</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">See'st thou the sea? The sun gleams on its wave<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With splendor bright;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But where the pearl lies buried in its cave<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Is deepest night.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sea am I. My soul, in billows bold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Rolls fierce and strong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And over all, like to the sunlight's gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">There streams my song.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It throbs with love and pain as though possessed<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Of magic art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet in silence bleeds, within my breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">My gloomy heart.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6250" id="Page_6250">[Pg 6250]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="AS_IT_WILL_HAPPEN" id="AS_IT_WILL_HAPPEN"></a>AS IT WILL HAPPEN</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He loves thee not! He trifles but with thee!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They said to her, and then she bowed her head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And pearly tears, like roses' dew, wept she.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, that she ever trusted what they said!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For when he came and found his bride in doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Then, from sheer spite, he would not show his sorrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He played and laughed and drank, day in, day out,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To weep from night until the morrow!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Tis true, an angel whispered in her heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">"He's faithful still; oh lay thy hand in his!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And he too felt, 'midst grief and bitter smart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">"She loves thee! After all, thy love she is;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let but a gentle word pass on each side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The spell that parts you now will then be broken!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They came&mdash;each looked on each&mdash;oh, evil pride!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That single word remained unspoken!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They parted then. As in a church one oft<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Extinguished sees the altar lamps' red fires,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their light grows dim, then once more flares aloft<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In radiance bright,&mdash;and thereupon expires,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So died their love; at first lamented o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Then yearned for ardently, and then&mdash;forgotten,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Until the thought that they had loved before<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of mere delusion seemed begotten!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But sometimes when the moon shone out at night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each started from his couch! Ah, was it not<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bedewed with tears? And tears, too, dimmed their sight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Because these two had dreamed&mdash;I know not what!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then the dear old times woke in their heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Their foolish doubts, their parting, that had driven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their souls so far, so very far apart,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh God! let both now be forgiven!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6251" id="Page_6251">[Pg 6251]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="GONDOLIERA" id="GONDOLIERA"></a>GONDOLIERA</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, come to me when through the night<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The starry legions ride!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our gondola will glide.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The air is soft as a lover's jest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And gently gleams the light;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The zither sounds, and thy soul is blest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To join in this delight.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, come to me when through the night<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The starry legions ride!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our gondola will glide.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This is the hour for lovers true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Darling, like thee and me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Serenely smile the heavens blue<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And calmly sleeps the sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as it sleeps, a glance will say<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What speech in vain has tried;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lips then do not shrink away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor is a kiss denied.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, come to me when through the night<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The starry legions ride!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our gondola will glide.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="THE_WOODLAND" id="THE_WOODLAND"></a>THE WOODLAND</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The wood grows denser at each stride;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">No path more, no trail!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Only murm'ring waters glide<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through tangled ferns and woodland flowers pale.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ah, and under the great oaks teeming<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How soft the moss, the grass, how high!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the heavenly depth of cloudless sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How blue through the leaves it seems to me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Here I'll sit, resting and dreaming,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Dreaming of thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Charles Harvey Genung.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6252" id="Page_6252">[Pg 6252]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="ONWARD" id="ONWARD"></a>ONWARD</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Cease thy dreaming! Cease thy quailing!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wander on untiringly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though thy strength may all seem failing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Onward! must thy watchword be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Durst not tarry, though life's roses<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Round about thy footsteps throng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though the ocean's depth discloses<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sirens with their witching song.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Onward! onward! ever calling<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On thy Muse, in life's stern fray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till thy fevered brow feels, falling<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From above, a golden ray.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Till the verdant wreath victorious<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Crown with soothing shade thy brow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till the spirit's flames rise glorious<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Over thee, with sacred glow.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Onward then, through hostile fire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Onward through death's agony!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who to heaven would aspire<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Must a valiant warrior be.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="AT_LAST_THE_DAYLIGHT_FADETH" id="AT_LAST_THE_DAYLIGHT_FADETH"></a>AT LAST THE DAYLIGHT FADETH</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At last the daylight fadeth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With all its noise and glare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Refreshing peace pervadeth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The darkness everywhere.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On the fields deep silence hovers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The woods now wake alone;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What daylight ne'er discovers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Their songs to the night make known.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And what when the sun is shining<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I ne'er can tell to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To whisper it now I am pining,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, come and hearken to me!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="trans">Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best
+Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,18758 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best Literature,
+Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: June 29, 2010 [EBook #33027]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE, VOL 15 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    [Illustration: _HOW KRIEMHILD IS LED TO ETZEL._
+
+    From the Hundeshagen Nibelungen manuscripts of the 10th
+    century, in the Royal Library at Berlin.
+
+        "Let the messenger ride and thus we make
+        Known to you how the queen rode the country."
+
+    Kriemhild is the legendary heroine of the "Nibelungenlied,"
+    and the rival of Brunhild. She was the wife of Siegfried
+    who was slain by her brothers. Later, as the wife of Etzel
+    (Attila) King of the Huns, she avenged the murder of
+    Siegfried by compassing the death of her brothers, but was
+    herself slain.]
+
+
+
+
+                            LIBRARY OF THE
+                       WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE
+                          ANCIENT AND MODERN
+
+
+                        CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
+
+                                EDITOR
+
+
+            HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE    LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE
+                         GEORGE HENRY WARNER
+
+                          ASSOCIATE EDITORS
+
+
+                         Connoisseur Edition
+
+                               VOL. XV.
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+                      THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+                         Connoisseur Edition
+
+            LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA
+
+                         _No_.    ..........
+
+
+                         Copyright, 1896, by
+                      R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL
+                        _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+                         THE ADVISORY COUNCIL
+
+
+  CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Professor of Hebrew,        HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.
+
+  THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D.,
+    Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of
+                                   YALE UNIVERSITY, New Haven, Conn.
+
+  WILLIAM M. SLOANE, PH. D., L. H. D.,
+    Professor of History and Political Science,
+                              PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Princeton, N. J.
+
+  BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B.,
+    Professor of Literature,     COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.
+
+  JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D.,
+    President of the        UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, Mich.
+
+  WILLARD FISKE, A. M., PH. D.,
+    Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages
+    and Literatures,               CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Ithaca, N. Y.
+
+  EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer,
+                            UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, Cal.
+
+  ALCEE FORTIER, LIT. D.,
+    Professor of the Romance Languages,
+                                 TULANE UNIVERSITY, New Orleans, La.
+
+  WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A.,
+    Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of
+    English and History,     UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, Sewanee, Tenn.
+
+  PAUL SHOREY, PH. D.,
+    Professor of Greek and Latin Literature,
+                                UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Ill.
+
+  WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D.,
+    United States Commissioner of Education,
+                              BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D. C.
+
+  MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D.,
+    Professor of Literature in the
+                   CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Washington, D. C.
+
+
+
+
+                          TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+                               VOL. XV
+
+
+                                                    LIVED       PAGE
+  FOLK-SONG                                                     5853
+                           BY F. B. GUMMERE
+
+  SAMUEL FOOTE                                    1720-1777     5878
+    How to be a Lawyer ('The Lame Lover')
+    A Misfortune in Orthography (same)
+    From the 'Memoirs': A Cure for Bad Poetry; The Retort
+      Courteous; On Garrick's Stature; Cape Wine; The Graces; The
+      Debtor; Affectation; Arithmetical Criticism; The Dear Wife;
+      Garrick and the Guinea; Dr. Paul Hifferman; Foote and
+      Macklin; Baron Newman; Mrs. Abington; Garlic-Eaters; Mode of
+      Burying Attorneys in London; Dining Badly; Dibble Davis; An
+      Extraordinary Case; Mutability of the World; An Appropriate
+      Motto; Real Friendship; Anecdote of an Author; Dr. Blair;
+      Advice to a Dramatic Writer; The Grafton Ministry
+
+  JOHN FORD                                       1586-?        5889
+    From 'Perkin Warbeck'
+    Penthea's Dying Song ('The Broken Heart')
+    From 'The Lover's Melancholy': Amethus and Menaphon
+
+  FRIEDRICH, BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUE             1777-1843     5895
+    The Marriage of Undine ('Undine')
+    The Last Appearance of Undine (same)
+    Song from 'Minstrel Lore'
+
+  ANATOLE FRANCE                                  1844-         5909
+    In the Gardens ('The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard')
+    Child-Life ('The Book of my Friend')
+    From the 'Garden of Epicurus'
+
+  ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI                            1182-1226     5919
+                       BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+    Order
+    The Canticle of the Sun
+
+  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN                               1706-1790     5925
+                           BY JOHN BIGELOW
+    Of Franklin's Family and Early Life ('Autobiography')
+    Franklin's Journey to Philadelphia: His Arrival There (same)
+    Franklin as a Printer (same)
+    Rules of Health ('Poor Richard's Almanack')
+    The Way to Wealth (same)
+    Speech in the Federal Convention, in Favor of Opening
+      Its Sessions with Prayer
+    On War
+    Revenge: Letter to Madame Helvetius
+    The Ephemera: an Emblem of Human Life
+    A Prophecy (Letter to Lord Kames)
+    Early Marriages (Letter to John Alleyne)
+    The Art of Virtue ('Autobiography')
+
+  LOUIS HONORE FRECHETTE                          1839-         5964
+                       BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+    Our History ('Le Legende d'un Peuple')
+    Caughnawaga
+    Louisiana ('Les Feuilles Volantes')
+    The Dream of Life (same)
+
+  HAROLD FREDERIC                                 1856-         5971
+    The Last Rite ('The Damnation of Theron Ware')
+
+  EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN                         1823-1892     5977
+                        BY JOHN BACH McMASTER
+    The Altered Aspects of Rome ('Historical Essays')
+    The Continuity of English History (same)
+    Race and Language (same)
+    The Norman Council and the Assembly of Lillebonne
+      ('The History of the Norman Conquest of England')
+
+  FERDINAND FREILIGRATH                           1810-1876     6002
+    The Emigrants
+    The Lion's Ride
+    Rest in the Beloved
+    Oh, Love so Long as Love Thou Canst
+
+  GUSTAV FREYTAG                                  1816-1895     6011
+    The German Professor ('The Lost Manuscript')
+
+  FRIEDRICH FROEBEL                               1782-1852     6022
+                       BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH
+    The Right of the Child ('Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel')
+    Evolution ('The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother Play')
+    The Laws of the Mind ('The Letters of Froebel')
+    For the Children (same)
+    Motives ('The Education of Man')
+    Aphorisms
+
+  FROISSART                                       1337-1410?    6035
+                       BY GEORGE McLEAN HARPER
+    From the 'Chronicles':
+    The Invasion of France by King Edward III., and the
+      Battle of Crecy
+    How the King of England Rode through Normandy
+    Of the Great Assembly that the French King Made to
+      Resist the King of England
+    Of the Battle of Caen, and How the Englishmen Took the Town
+    How the French King Followed the King of England
+      in Beauvoisinois
+    Of the Battle of Blanche-Taque
+    Of the Order of the Englishmen at Cressy
+    The Order of the Frenchmen at Cressy, and How They Beheld
+      the Demeanor of the Englishmen
+    Of the Battle of Cressy, August 26th, 1346
+
+  JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE                            1818-1894     6059
+                     BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON
+    The Growth of England's Navy ('English Seamen in the
+      Sixteenth Century')
+    The Death of Colonel Goring ('Two Chiefs of Dunboy')
+    Scientific Method Applied to History ('Short Studies on
+      Great Subjects')
+    The Death of Thomas Becket (same)
+    Character of Henry VIII. ('History of England')
+    On a Siding at a Railway Station ('Short Studies on
+      Great Subjects')
+
+  HENRY B. FULLER                                 1859-         6101
+    At the Head of the March ('With the Procession')
+
+  SARAH MARGARET FULLER (Marchioness Ossoli)      1810-1850     6119
+    George Sand ('Memoirs')
+    Americans Abroad in Europe ('At Home and Abroad')
+    A Character Sketch of Carlyle ('Memoirs')
+
+  THOMAS FULLER                                   1608-1661     6129
+    The King's Children ('The Worthies of England')
+    A Learned Lady (same)
+    Henry de Essex, Standard-Bearer to Henry II. (same)
+    The Good Schoolmaster ('The Holy and Profane State')
+    On Books (same)
+    London ('The Worthies of England')
+    Miscellaneous Sayings
+
+  EMILE GABORIAU                                  1835-1873     6137
+    The Impostor and the Banker's Wife: The Robbery ('File No. 113')
+    M. Lecoq's System (same)
+
+  BENITO PEREZ GALDOS                             1845-         6153
+                       BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP
+    The First Night of a Famous Play ('The Court of Charles IV.')
+    Dona Perfecta's Daughter ('Dona Perfecta')
+    Above Stairs in a Royal Palace ('La de Bringas')
+
+  FRANCIS GALTON                                  1822-         6174
+    The Comparative Worth of Different Races ('Hereditary Genius')
+
+  ARNE GARBORG                                    1851-         6185
+    The Conflict of the Creeds ('A Freethinker')
+
+  HAMLIN GARLAND                                  1860-         6195
+    A Summer Mood ('Prairie Songs')
+    A Storm on Lake Michigan ('Rose of Butcher's Coolly')
+
+  ELIZABETH STEVENSON GASKELL                     1810-1865     6205
+    Our Society ('Cranford')
+    Visiting (same)
+
+  THEOPHILE GAUTIER                               1811-1872     6221
+                         BY ROBERT SANDERSON
+    The Entry of Pharaoh into Thebes ('The Romance of a Mummy')
+    From 'The Marsh'
+    From 'The Dragon-Fly'
+    The Doves
+    The Pot of Flowers
+    Prayer
+    The Poet and the Crowd
+    The First Smile of Spring
+    The Veterans ('The Old Guard')
+
+  JOHN GAY                                        1685-1732     6237
+    The Hare and Many Friends ('Fables')
+    The Sick Man and the Angel (same)
+    The Juggler (same)
+    Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan
+    From 'What D'ye Call It?'
+
+  EMANUEL VON GEIBEL                              1815-1884     6248
+    See'st Thou the Sea?
+    As it will Happen
+    Gondoliera
+    The Woodland
+    Onward
+    At Last the Daylight Fadeth
+
+
+
+
+                       FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                              VOLUME XV
+
+
+                                                                PAGE
+  "How Kreimhild is Led to Etzel" (Colored Plate)       Frontispiece
+  Russian Writing (Fac-simile)                                  5876
+  Franklin (Portrait)                                           5925
+  "Music, Science, and Art" (Photogravure)                      5964
+  Freytag (Portrait)                                            6011
+  "The Menagerie" (Photogravure)                                6034
+  "The Wedding Dress" (Photogravure)                            6166
+  "The Juggler" (Photogravure)                                  6244
+
+
+                          VIGNETTE PORTRAITS
+
+
+          Foque                              Froude
+          France                             Fuller (Margaret)
+          Frederic                           Fuller (Thomas)
+          Freeman                            Garland
+          Freiligrath                        Gaskell
+          Froebel                            Gautier
+          Froissart                          Gay
+                              Von Giebel
+
+
+
+
+FOLK-SONG
+
+BY F. B. GUMMERE
+
+
+As in the case of ballads, or narrative songs, it was important to
+sunder not only the popular from the artistic, but also the ballad of
+the people from the ballad for the people; precisely so in the article
+of communal lyric one must distinguish songs of the folk--songs made
+by the folk--from those verses of the street or the music hall which
+are often caught up and sung by the crowd until they pass as genuine
+folk-song. For true folk-song, as for the genuine ballad, the tests
+are simplicity, sincerity, mainly oral tradition, and origin in a
+homogeneous community. The style of such a poem is not only simple,
+but free from individual stamp; the metaphors, employed sparingly at
+the best, are like the phrases which constantly occur in narrative
+ballads, and belong to tradition. The metre is not so uniform as in
+ballads, but must betray its origin in song. An unsung folk-song is
+more than a contradiction,--it is an impossibility. Moreover, it is to
+be assumed that primitive folk-songs were an outcome of the dance, for
+which originally there was no music save the singing of the dancers. A
+German critic declares outright that for early times there was "no
+dance without singing, _and no song without a dance_; songs for the
+dance were the earliest of all songs, and melodies for the dance the
+oldest music of every race." Add to this the undoubted fact that
+dancing by pairs is a comparatively modern invention, and that
+primitive dances involved the whole able-bodied primitive community
+(Jeanroy's assertion that in the early Middle Ages only women danced,
+is a libel on human nature), and one begins to see what is meant by
+folk-song; primarily it was made by the singing and dancing throng, at
+a time when no distinction of lettered and unlettered classes divided
+the community. Few, if any, of these primitive folk-songs have come
+down to us; but they exist in survival, with more or less trace of
+individual and artistic influences. As we cannot apply directly the
+test of such a communal origin, we must cast about for other and more
+modern conditions.
+
+When Mr. George Saintsbury deplores "the lack, notorious to this day,
+of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty,"
+he leaves his readers to their own devices by way of defining this
+species of poetry. Probably, however, he means the communal lyric
+in survival, not the ballad, not what Germans would include under
+_volkslied_ and Frenchmen under _chanson populaire_. This distinction,
+so often forgotten by our critics, was laid down for English usage a
+century ago by no less a person than Joseph Ritson. "With us," he
+said, "songs of sentiment, expression, or even description, are
+properly called Songs, in contradistinction to mere narrative
+compositions, which now denominate Ballads."
+
+Notwithstanding this lucid statement, we have failed to clear the
+field of all possible causes for error. The song of the folk is
+differentiated from the song of the individual poet; popular lyric is
+set over against the artistic, personal lyric. But lyric is commonly
+assumed to be the expression of individual emotion, and seems in its
+very essence to exclude all that is not single, personal, and
+conscious emotion. Professor Barrett Wendell, however, is fain to
+abandon this time-honored notion of lyric as the subjective element in
+poetry, the expression of individual emotion, and proposes a
+definition based upon the essentially musical character of these
+songs. If we adhere strictly to the older idea, communal lyric, or
+folk-song, is a contradiction in terms; but as a musical expression,
+direct and unreflective, of communal emotion, and as offspring of the
+enthusiasm felt by a festal, dancing multitude, the term is to be
+allowed. It means the lyric of a throng. Unless one feels this
+objective note in a lyric, it is certainly no folk-song, but merely an
+anonymous product of the schools. The artistic and individual lyric,
+however sincere it may be, is fairly sure to be blended with
+reflection; but such a subjective tone is foreign to communal
+verse--whether narrative or purely lyrical. In other words, to study
+the lyric of the people, one must banish that notion of individuality,
+of reflection and sentiment, which one is accustomed to associate with
+all lyrics. To illustrate the matter, it is evident that Shelley's 'O
+World, O Life, O Time,' and Wordsworth's 'My Heart Leaps Up,' however
+widely sundered may be the points of view, however varied the
+character of the emotion, are of the same individual and reflective
+class. Contrast now with these a third lyric, an English song of the
+thirteenth century, preserved by some happy chance from the oblivion
+which claimed most of its fellows; the casual reader would
+unhesitatingly put it into the same class with Wordsworth's verses as
+a lyric of "nature," of "joy," or what not,--an outburst of simple and
+natural emotion. But if this 'Cuckoo Song' be regarded critically, it
+will be seen that precisely those qualities of the individual and the
+subjective are wanting. The music of it is fairly clamorous; the
+refrain counts for as much as the verses; while the emotion seems to
+spring from the crowd and to represent a community. Written down--no
+one can say when it was actually composed--not later than the middle
+of the thirteenth century, along with the music and a Latin hymn
+interlined in red ink, this song is justly regarded by critics as
+communal rather than artistic in its character; and while it is set
+to music in what Chappell calls "the earliest secular composition, in
+parts, known to exist in any country," yet even this elaborate music
+was probably "a national song and tune, selected according to the
+custom of the times as a basis for harmony," and was "not entirely a
+scholastic composition." It runs in the original:--
+
+  Sumer is icumen in.
+    Lhude sing cuccu.
+      Groweth sed
+      And bloweth med
+  And springth the wde nu.
+        Sing cuccu.
+
+  Awe bleteth after lomb,
+    Lhouth after calve cu;
+      Bulluc sterteth,
+      Bucke verteth,
+      Murie sing cuccu.
+      Cuccu, cuccu.
+
+  Wel singes thu cuccu,
+  Ne swik thu naver nu.
+
+BURDEN
+
+  Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
+  Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu.[1]
+
+    [1] For facsimile of the MS., music, and valuable remarks,
+    see Chappell, 'Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the
+    Olden Time,' Vol. i., frontispiece, and pages 21 ff.
+    For pronunciation, see A. J. Ellis, 'Early English
+    Pronunciation,' ii., 419 ff. The translation given by Mr.
+    Ellis is:--
+
+    "Summer has come in; loudly sing, cuckoo! Grows seed and
+    blossoms mead and springs the wood now. Sing, cuckoo! Ewe
+    bleats after lamb, lows after (its) calf the cow; bullock
+    leaps, buck verts (seeks the green); merrily sing, cuckoo!
+    Cuckoo, cuckoo! Well singest thou, cuckoo; cease thou not
+    never now. _Burden_.--Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo! Sing,
+    cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now."--_Lhude_, _wde_ (=_wude_), _awe_,
+    _calve_, _bucke_, are dissyllabic. Mr. Ellis's translation of
+    _verteth_ is very doubtful.
+
+The monk, whose passion for music led him to rescue this charming
+song, probably regretted the rustic quality of the words, and did
+his best to hide the origin of the air; but behind the complicated
+music is a tune of the country-side, and if the refrain is here a
+burden, to be sung throughout the piece by certain voices while
+others sing the words of the song, we have every right to think of
+an earlier refrain which almost absorbed the poem and was sung by
+a dancing multitude. This is a most important consideration. In all
+parts of Europe, songs for the dance still abound in the shape of a
+welcome to spring; and a lyrical outburst in praise of the jocund
+season often occurs by way of prelude to the narrative ballad: witness
+the beautiful opening of 'Robin Hood and the Monk.' The
+troubadour of Provence, like the minnesinger of Germany, imitated
+these invocations to spring. A charming _balada_ of Provence probably
+takes us beyond the troubadour to the domain of actual folk-song.[2]
+"At the entrance of the bright season," it runs, "in order to
+begin joy and to tease the jealous, the queen will show that she is
+fain to love. As far as to the sea, no maid nor youth but must join
+the lusty dance which she devises. On the other hand comes the
+king to break up the dancing, fearful lest some one will rob him of
+his April queen. Little, however, cares she for the graybeard; a gay
+young 'bachelor' is there to pleasure her. Whoso might see her as
+she dances, swaying her fair body, he could say in sooth that nothing
+in all the world peers the joyous queen!" Then, as after each
+stanza, for conclusion the wild refrain--like a _procul este,
+profani!_--"Away, ye jealous ones, away! Let us dance together,
+together let us dance!" The interjectional refrain, "eya," a mere cry
+of joy, is common in French and German songs for the dance, and gives
+a very echo of the lusty singers. Repetition, refrain, the infectious
+pace and merriment of this old song, stamp it as a genuine product of
+the people.[3] The brief but emphatic praise of spring with which it
+opens is doubtless a survival of those older pagan hymns and songs
+which greeted the return of summer and were sung by the community in
+chorus to the dance, now as a religious rite, now merely as the
+expression of communal rejoicing. What the people once sang in chorus
+was repeated by the individual poet. Neidhart the German is famous on
+account of his rustic songs for the dance, which often begin with this
+lusty welcome to spring: while the dactyls of Walther von der
+Vogelweide not only echo the cadence of dancing feet, but so nearly
+exclude the reflective and artistic element that the "I" of the singer
+counts for little. "Winter," he sings,--
+
+  Winter has left us no pleasure at all;
+  Leafage and heather have fled with the fall,
+  Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall;
+  If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball,
+  I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds' call![4]
+
+    [2] The first stanza in the original will show the structure
+    of this true "ballad" in the primitive sense of a dance-song.
+    There are five of these stanzas, carrying the same rhymes
+    throughout:--
+
+      A l'entrada del temps clar,--eya,--
+      Per joja recomencar,--eya,--
+      E per jelos irritar,--eya,--
+      Vol la regina mostrar
+      Qu' el' est si amoroza.
+
+    REFRAIN
+
+        Alavi', alavia, jelos,
+        laissaz nos, laissaz nos
+        ballar entre nos, entre nos!
+
+    [3] Games and songs of children are still to be found which
+    preserve many of the features of these old dance-songs. The
+    dramatic traits met with in the games point back now to the
+    choral poetry of pagan times, when perhaps a bit of myth was
+    enacted, now to the communal dance where the stealing of a
+    bride may have been imitated.
+
+    [4] Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the
+    writer.
+
+That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the village
+dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance, but was
+often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit with the
+fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved for us by
+song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those intellectual
+tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a merry song of
+May and then turned it more or less freely into their barbarous but
+not unattractive Latin. For example:--
+
+  Now is time for holiday!
+  Let our singing greet the May:
+  Flowers in the breezes play,
+  Every holt and heath is gay.
+
+  Let us dance and let us spring
+    With merry song and crying!
+  Joy befits the lusty May:
+    Set the ball a-flying!
+  If I woo my lady-love,
+    Will she be denying?[5]
+
+    [5] From 'Carmina Burana,' a collection of these songs in
+    Latin and German preserved in a MS. of the thirteenth
+    century; edited by J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1883. This song
+    is page 181 ff., in German, 'Nu Suln Wir Alle Froeude Han.'
+
+The steps of the dance are not remote; and the same echo haunts
+another song of the sort:--
+
+  Dance we now the measure,
+    Dance, lady mine!
+  May, the month of pleasure,
+    Comes with sweet sunshine.
+
+  Winter vexed the meadow
+    Many weary hours:
+  Fled his chill and shadow,--
+  Lo, the fields are laughing
+    Red with flowers.[6]
+
+    [6] Ibid., page 178: 'Springe wir den Reigen.'
+
+Or the song at the dance may set forth some of the preliminaries, as
+when a girl is supposed to sing:--
+
+  Care and sorrow, fly away!
+  On the green field let us play,
+  Playmates gentle, playmates mine,
+  Where we see the bright flowers shine,
+    I say to thee, I say to thee,
+    Playmate mine, O come with me!
+
+  Gracious Love, to me incline,
+  Make for me a garland fine,--
+  Garland for the man to wear
+  Who can please a maiden fair.
+    I say to thee, I say to thee,
+    Playmate mine, O come with me![7]
+
+    [7] Ibid., page 213: 'Ich wil Truren Varen lan.'
+
+The greeting from youth to maiden, from maiden to youth, was doubtless
+a favorite bit of folk-song, whether at the dance or as independent
+lyric. Readers of the 'Library' will find such a greeting incorporated
+in 'Child Maurice'[8]; only there it is from the son to his mother,
+and with a somewhat eccentric list of comparisons by way of detail,
+instead of the terse form known to German tradition:--
+
+  Soar, Lady Nightingale, soar above!
+  A hundred thousand times greet my love!
+
+    [8] Article in 'Ballads,' Vol. iii., page 1340.
+
+The variations are endless; one of the earliest is found in a charming
+Latin tale of the eleventh century, 'Rudlieb,' "the oldest known
+romance in European literature." A few German words are mixed with the
+Latin; while after the good old ballad way the greeting is first given
+to the messenger, and repeated when the messenger performs his
+task:--"I wish thee as much joy as there are leaves on the trees,--and
+as much delight as birds have, so much love (_minna_),--and as much
+honor I wish thee as there are flowers and grass!" Competent critics
+regard this as a current folk-song of greeting inserted in the
+romance, and therefore as the oldest example of _minnesang_ in German
+literature. Of the less known variations of this theme, one may be
+given from the German of an old song where male singers are supposed
+to compete for a garland presented by the maidens; the rivals not only
+sing for the prize but even answer riddles. It is a combination of
+game and dance, and is evidently of communal origin. The honorable
+authorities of Freiburg, about 1556, put this practice of "dancing of
+evenings in the streets, and singing for a garland, and dancing in a
+throng" under strictest ban. The following is a stanza of greeting in
+such a song:--
+
+  Maiden, thee I fain would greet,
+  From thy head unto thy feet.
+  As many times I greet thee even
+  As there are stars in yonder heaven,
+  As there shall blossom flowers gay,
+  From Easter to St. Michael's day![9]
+
+    [9] Uhland, 'Volkslieder,' i. 12.
+
+These competitive verses for the dance and the garland were, as we
+shall presently see, spontaneous: composed in the throng by lad or
+lassie, they are certainly entitled to the name of communal lyric.
+Naturally, the greeting could ban as well as bless; and little Kirstin
+(Christina) in the Danish ballad sends a greeting of double charge:--
+
+  To Denmark's King wish as oft good-night
+  As stars are shining in heaven bright;
+  To Denmark's Queen as oft bad year
+  As the linden hath leaves or the hind hath hair![10]
+
+    [10] Grundtvig, 'Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser,' iii. 161.
+
+Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus. The
+invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is doubtless
+a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of summer and
+flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin 'Pervigilium
+Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of spring and
+love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic rhythm to some
+song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter Pater is not far
+from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the whole poem was
+suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of the young men,
+singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa,"
+during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines. This
+haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the festal throng,
+is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's
+translation:--
+
+  Let those love now who never loved before;
+  Let those who always loved now love the more!
+
+Contrast the original!--
+
+  _Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet!_
+
+This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the
+near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech
+from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a
+few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Caesar,
+have come down to us.[11]
+
+    [11] We cannot widen our borders so as to include that
+    solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the
+    'Song of the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of
+    Rhodes as they went about asking gifts from house to house at
+    the coming of the earliest swallow. The metre is interesting
+    in comparison with the rhythm of later European folk-songs,
+    and there is evident dramatic action. Nor can we include the
+    fragments of communal drama found in the favorite Debates
+    Between Summer and Winter,--from the actual contest, to such
+    lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's
+    Labor's Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen
+    of this class in 'Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient
+    Songs and Ballads,' Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the
+    refrain:--
+
+      Nay, Ivy, nay,
+        Hyt shal not be, I wys;
+      Let Holy hafe the maystry,
+        As the maner ys.
+
+The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical poets
+like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these
+refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung
+in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry, even,
+the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folk-song, sung
+by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a refrain. Towards
+the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up the refrain,
+experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those highly
+artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade. The
+refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if
+not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or
+sorrow, like the _eya_ noted above, mere emotional utterances or
+imitations of various sounds, then growing in distinctness and
+compass, until the separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the
+increasing importance of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely
+ancillary function, and finally did away with it altogether. Many
+refrains are still used for the dance which are mere exclamations,
+with just enough coherence of words added to make them pass as poetry.
+Frequently, as in the French, these have a peculiar beauty. Victor
+Hugo has imitated them with success; but to render them into English
+is impossible.
+
+The refrain, moreover, is closely allied to those couplets or
+quatrains composed spontaneously at the dance or other merry-making of
+the people. In many parts of Germany, the dances of harvest were until
+recent days enlivened by the so-called _schnaderhuepfl_, a quatrain
+sung to a simple air, composed on the spot, and often inclining to the
+personal and the satiric. In earlier days this power to make a
+quatrain off-hand seems to have been universal among the peasants of
+Europe. In Scandinavia such quatrains are known as _stev_. They are
+related, so far as their spontaneity, their universal character, and
+their origin are concerned, to the _coplas_ of Spain, the _stornelli_
+of Italy, and the distichs of modern Greece. Of course, the specimens
+of this poetry which can be found now are rude enough; for the life
+has gone out of it, and to find it at its best one must go back to
+conditions which brought the undivided genius of the community into
+play. What one finds nowadays is such motley as this,--a so-called
+_runda_ from Vogtland, answering to the Bavarian _schnaderhuepfl_:--
+
+  I and my Hans,
+  We go to the dance;
+  And if no one will dance,
+  Dance I and my Hans!
+
+A _schnaderhuepfl_ taken down at Appenzell in 1754, and one of the
+oldest known, was sung by some lively girl as she danced at the
+reapers' festival:--
+
+  Mine, mine, mine,--O my love is fine,
+    And my favor shall he plainly see;
+  Till the clock strike eight, till the clock strike nine,
+    My door, my door shall open be.
+
+It is evident that the great mass of this poetry died with the
+occasion that brought it forth, or lingered in oral tradition, exposed
+to a thousand chances of oblivion. The Church made war upon these
+songs, partly because of their erotic character, but mainly, one may
+assume, because of the chain of tradition from heathen times which
+linked them with feasts in honor of abhorred gods, and with rustic
+dances at the old pagan harvest-home. A study of all this, however,
+with material at a minimum, and conjecture or philological combination
+as the only possible method of investigation, must be relegated to the
+treatise and the monograph;[12] for present purposes we must confine
+our exposition and search to songs that shall attract readers as well
+as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into our pages
+of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to the touch
+of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal and
+popular.
+
+    [12] Folk-lore, mythology, sociology even, must share in this
+    work. The reader may consult for indirect but valuable
+    material such books as Frazer's 'Golden Bough,' or that
+    admirable treatise, Tylor's 'Primitive Culture.'
+
+Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to ask
+what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting at once
+rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering clerk,
+have come down to us from the later Middle Ages. Having answered this
+question, it will remain to deal with the difficult material
+accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads are far easier to
+preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and this story in them
+has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral transmission. A
+good story travels far, and the path which it wanders from people to
+people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile contents of the
+popular lyric--we are not speaking of its tune, which is carried in
+every direction--are easily lost.[13] Such a lyric lives chiefly by
+its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We can however get
+some notion of this communal song by process of inference, for the
+earliest lays of the Provencal troubadour, and probably of the German
+minnesinger, were based upon the older song of the country-side.
+Again, in England there was little distinction made between the singer
+who entertained court and castle and the gleeman who sang in the
+villages and at rural festivals; the latter doubtless taking from the
+common stock more than he contributed from his own. A certain proof of
+more aristocratic and distinctly artistic, that is to say, individual
+origin, and a conclusive reason for refusing the name of folk-song to
+any one of these lyrics of love, is the fact that it happens to
+address a married woman. Every one knows that the troubadour and the
+minnesinger thus addressed their lays; and only the style and general
+character of their earliest poetry can be considered as borrowed from
+the popular muse. In other words, however vivacious, objective,
+vigorous, may be the early lays of the troubadour, however one is
+tempted to call them mere modifications of an older folk-song, they
+are excluded by this characteristic from the popular lyric and belong
+to poetry of the schools. Marriage, says Jeanroy, is always respected
+in the true folk-song. Moreover, this is only a negative test. In
+Portugal, many songs which must be referred to the individual and
+courtly poet are written in praise of the unmarried girl; while in
+England, whether it be set down to austere morals or to the practical
+turn of the native mind, one finds little or nothing to match this
+troubadour and minnesinger poetry in honor of the stately but
+capricious dame.[14] The folk-song that we seek found few to record
+it; it sounded at the dance, it was heard in the harvest-field; what
+seemed to be everywhere, growing spontaneously like violets in spring,
+called upon no one to preserve it and to give it that protection
+demanded by exotic poetry of the schools. What is preserved is due
+mainly to the clerks and gleemen of older times, or else to the
+curiosity of modern antiquarians, rescuing here and there a belated
+survival of the species. Where the clerk or the gleeman is in
+question, he is sure to add a personal element, and thus to remove the
+song from its true communal setting. Contrast the wonderful little
+song, admired by Alceste in Moliere's 'Misanthrope,' and as
+impersonal, even in its first-personal guise as any communal lyric
+ever made,--with a reckless bit of verse sung by some minstrel about
+the famous Eleanor of Poitou, wife of Henry II. of England. The song
+so highly commended by Alceste[15] runs, in desperately inadequate
+translation:--
+
+  If the King had made it mine,
+    Paris, his city gay,
+  And I must the love resign
+    Of my bonnie may,[16]--
+
+  To King Henry I would say:
+  Take your Paris back, I pray;
+  Better far I love my may,--
+                      O joy!--
+    Love my bonnie may!
+
+Let us hear the reckless "clerk":--
+
+  If the whole wide world were mine,
+  From the ocean to the Rhine,
+    All I'd be denying
+  If the Queen of England once
+    In my arms were lying![17]
+
+    [13] For early times translation from language to language is
+    out of the question, certainly in the case of lyrics. It is
+    very important to remember that primitive man regarded song
+    as a momentary and spontaneous thing.
+
+    [14] Yet even rough Scandinavia took up this brilliant but
+    doubtful love poetry. To one of the Norse kings is attributed
+    a song in which the royal singer informs his "lady" by way of
+    credentials for his wooing,--"I have struck a blow in the
+    Saracen's land; _let thy husband do the same!_"
+
+    [15] 'Le Misanthrope,' i. 2; he calls it a _vielle chanson_.
+    M. Tiersot concedes it to the popular muse, but thinks it is
+    of the city, not of the country.
+
+    [16] _May_, a favorite ballad word for "maid," "sweetheart."
+
+    [17] 'Carm. Bur.,' page 185: "Waer diu werlt alliu min."
+
+The tone is not directly communal, but it smacks more of the village
+dance than of the troubadour's harp; for even Bernart of Ventadour did
+not dare to address Eleanor save in the conventional tone of despair.
+The clerks and gleemen, however, and even English peasants of modern
+times,[18] took another view of the matter. The "clerk," that
+delightful vagabond who made so nice a balance between church and
+tavern, between breviary and love songs, has probably done more for
+the preservation of folk-song than all other agents known to us. In
+the above verses he protests a trifle or so too much about himself;
+let us hear him again as mere reporter for the communal lyric, in
+verses that he may have brought from the dance to turn into his
+inevitable Latin:--
+
+  Come, my darling, come to me,
+  I am waiting long for thee,--
+  I am waiting long for thee,
+  Come, my darling, come to me!
+
+  Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain,
+  Come and make me well again;--
+  Come and make me well again,
+  Rose-red mouth, so sweet and fain.[19]
+
+    [18] See Child's Ballads, vi. 257, and Grandfer Cantle's
+    ballad in Mr. Hardy's 'Return of the Native.' See next page.
+
+    [19] 'Carm. Bur.,' page 208: "Kume, Kume, geselle min."
+
+More graceful yet are the anonymous verses quoted in certain Latin
+love-letters of a manuscript at Munich; and while a few critics rebel
+at the notion of a folk-song, the pretty lines surely hint more of
+field and dance than of the study.
+
+      Thou art mine,
+      I am thine,
+  Of that may'st certain be;
+      Locked thou art
+      Within my heart,
+  And I have lost the key:
+  There must thou ever be!
+
+Now it happens that this notion of heart and key recurs in later
+German folk-song. A highly popular song of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries has these stanzas:[20]
+
+  For thy dear sake I'm hither come,
+    Sweetheart, O hear me woo!
+  My hope rests evermore on thee,
+    I love thee well and true.
+  Let me but be thy servant,
+    Thy dear love let me win;
+  Come, ope thy heart, my darling,
+    And lock me fast within!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Where my love's head is lying,
+    There rests a golden shrine;
+  And in it lies, locked hard and fast,
+    This fresh young heart of mine:
+  Oh would to God I had the key,--
+    I'd throw it in the Rhine;
+  What place on earth were more to me,
+    Than with my sweeting fine?
+
+  Where my love's feet are lying,
+    A fountain gushes cold,
+  And whoso tastes the fountain
+    Grows young and never old:
+  Full often at the fountain
+    I knelt and quenched my drouth,--
+  Yet tenfold rather would I kiss
+    My darling's rosy mouth!
+
+  And in my darling's garden[21]
+    Is many a precious flower;
+  Oh, in this budding season,
+    Would God 'twere now the hour
+  To go and pluck the roses
+    And nevermore to part:
+  I think full sure to win her
+    Who lies within my heart!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Now who this merry roundel
+    Hath sung with such renown?
+  That have two lusty woodsmen
+    At Freiberg in the town,--
+  Have sung it fresh and fairly,
+    And drunk the cool red wine:
+  And who hath sat and listened?--
+    Landlady's daughter fine!
+
+    [20] Translated from Boehme 'Altdeutsches Liederbuch,'
+    Leipzig, 1877, page 233. Lovers of folk-song will find this
+    book invaluable on account of the carefully edited musical
+    accompaniments. With it and Chappell, the musician has ample
+    material for English and German songs; for French, see
+    Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire en France.'
+
+    [21] The garden in these later songs is constantly a symbol
+    of love. To pluck the roses, etc., is conventional for making
+    love.
+
+What with the more modern tone, and the lusty woodsmen, one has
+deserted the actual dance, the actual communal origin of song; but one
+is still amid communal influences. Another little song about the heart
+and the key, this time from France, recalls one to the dance itself,
+and to the simpler tone:--
+
+  Shut fast within a rose
+  I ween my heart must be;
+  No locksmith lives in France
+  Who can set it free,--
+  Only my lover Pierre,
+  Who took away the key![22]
+
+    [22] Quoted by Tiersot, page 88, from 'Chansons a Danser en
+    Rond,' gathered before 1704.
+
+Coming back to England, and the search for her folk-song, it is in
+order to begin with the refrain. A "clerk," in a somewhat artificial
+lay to his sweetheart, has preserved as refrain what seems to be a bit
+of communal verse:--
+
+  Ever and aye for my love I am in sorrow sore;
+  I think of her I see so seldom any more,[23]--
+
+rather a helpless moan, it must be confessed.
+
+    [23] Boeddeker's 'Old Poems from the Harleian MS. 2253,' with
+    notes, etc., in German; Berlin, 1878, page 179.
+
+Better by far is the song of another _clericus_, with a lusty little
+refrain as fresh as the wind it invokes, as certainly folk-song as
+anything left to us:--
+
+      Blow, northern wind,
+  Send thou me my sweeting!
+      Blow, northern wind,
+        Blow, blow, blow!
+
+The actual song, though overloaded with alliteration, has a good
+movement. A stanza may be quoted:--
+
+  I know a maid in bower so bright
+  That handsome is for any sight,
+  Noble, gracious maid of might,
+      Precious to discover.
+
+  In all this wealth of women fair,
+  Maid of beauty to compare
+  With my sweeting found I ne'er
+      All the country over!
+
+Old too is the lullaby used as a burden or refrain for a religious
+poem printed by Thomas Wright in his 'Songs and Carols':--
+
+  Lullay, myn lykyng, my dere sone, myn swetyng,
+  Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derlyng.[24]
+
+    [24] See also Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,' 3rd Ed.,
+    pages xlviii., 202 ff. The Percy folio MS. preserved a cradle
+    song, 'Balow, my Babe, ly Still and Sleepe,' which was
+    published as a broadside, and finally came to be known as
+    'Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament.' These "balow" lullabies are
+    said by Mr. Ebbsworth to be imitations of a pretty poem first
+    published in 1593, and now printed by Mr. Bullen in his
+    'Songs from Elizabethan Romances,' page 92.
+
+The same English manuscript which has kept the refrain 'Blow, Northern
+Wind,' offers another song which may be given in modern translation
+and entire. All these songs were written down about the year 1310, and
+probably in Herefordshire. As with the _carmina burana_, the lays of
+German "clerks," so these English lays represent something between
+actual communal verse and the poetry of the individual artist; they
+owe more to folk-song than to the traditions of literature and art.
+Some of the expressions in this song are taken, if we may trust the
+critical insight of Ten Brink, directly from the poetry of the people.
+
+  A maid as white as ivory bone,
+  A pearl in gold that golden shone,
+  A turtle-dove, a love whereon
+        My heart must cling:
+  Her blitheness nevermore be gone
+        While I can sing!
+
+  When she is gay,
+  In all the world no more I pray
+  Than this: alone with her to stay
+        Withouten strife.
+  Could she but know the ills that slay
+        Her lover's life!
+
+  Was never woman nobler wrought;
+  And when she blithe to sleep is brought,
+  Well for him who guessed her thought,
+        Proud maid! Yet O,
+  Full well I know she will me nought.
+        My heart is woe.
+
+  And how shall I then sweetly sing
+  That thus am marred with mourning?
+  To death, alas, she will me bring
+        Long ere my day.
+  _Greet her well, the sweete thing,
+        With eyen gray!_
+
+  Her eyes have wounded me, i-wis.
+  Her arching brows that bring the bliss;
+  Her comely mouth whoso might kiss,
+        In mirth he were;
+  And I would change all mine for his
+        That is her fere.[25]
+
+  Her fere, so worthy might I be,
+  Her fere, so noble, stout and free,
+  For this one thing I would give three,
+        Nor haggle aught.
+  From hell to heaven, if one could see,
+        So fine is naught,
+        [Nor half so free;[26]
+  All lovers true, now listen unto me.]
+
+  Now hearken to me while I tell,
+  In such a fume I boil and well;
+  There is no fire so hot in hell
+        As his, I trow,
+  Who loves unknown and dares not tell
+        His hidden woe.
+
+  _I will her well, she wills me woe;
+  I am her friend, and she my foe;_
+  Methinks my heart will break in two
+        For sorrow's might;
+  _In God's own greeting may she go,
+        That maiden white!_
+
+  _I would I were a throstlecock,
+  A bunting, or a laverock,[27]
+        Sweet maid!
+  Between her kirtle and her smock
+        I'd then be hid!_
+
+    [25] _Fere_, companion, lover. "I would give all I have to
+    be her lover."
+
+    [26] Superfluous verses; but the MS. makes no distinction.
+    _Free_ means noble, gracious. "If one could see everything
+    between hell and heaven, one would find nothing so fair and
+    noble."
+
+    [27] Lark. The poem is translated from Boeddeker, page 161
+    ff.
+
+The reader will easily note the struggle between our poet's
+conventional and quite literary despair and the fresh communal tone in
+such passages as we have ventured, despite Leigh Hunt's direful
+example, to put in italics. This poet was a clerk, or perhaps not even
+that,--a gleeman; and he dwells, after the manner of his kind, upon a
+despair which springs from difference of station. But it is England,
+not France; it is a maiden, not countess or queen, whom he loves; and
+the tone of his verse is sound and communal at heart. True, the metre,
+afterwards a favorite with Burns, is one used by the oldest known
+troubadour of Provence, Count William, as well as by the poets of
+miracle plays and of such romances as the English 'Octavian'; but like
+Count William himself, who built on a popular basis, our clerk or
+gleeman is nearer to the people than to the schools. Indeed, Uhland
+reminds us that Breton _kloer_ ("clerks") to this day play a leading
+part as lovers and singers of love in folk-song; and the English
+clerks in question were not regular priests, consecrated and in
+responsible positions, but students or unattached followers of
+theology. They sang with the people; they felt and suffered with the
+people--as in the case of a far nobler member of the guild, William
+Langland; and hence sundry political poems which deal with wrongs and
+suffering endured by the commons of that day. In the struggle of
+barons and people against Henry III., indignation made verses; and
+these, too, we owe to the clerks. Such a burst of indignation is the
+song against Richard of Cornwall, with a turbulent refrain which
+sounds like a direct loan from the people. One stanza, with this
+refrain, will suffice. It opens with the traditional "lithe and
+listen" of the ballad-singer:--
+
+  Sit all now still and list to me:
+  The German King, by my loyalty!
+  Thirty thousand pound asked he
+  To make a peace in this country,--
+            And so he did and more!
+
+REFRAIN
+
+  Richard, though thou be ever trichard,[28]
+  Trichen[29] shalt thou nevermore!
+
+This, however, like many a scrap of battle-song, ribaldry exchanged
+between two armies, and the like, has interest rather for the
+antiquarian than for the reader. We shall leave such fragments, and
+turn in conclusion to the folk-song of later times.
+
+    [28] Traitor.
+
+    [29] Betray.
+
+The England of Elizabeth was devoted to lyric poetry, and folk-song
+must have flourished along with its rival of the schools. Few of these
+songs, however, have been preserved; and indeed there is no final test
+for the communal quality in such survivals. Certainly some of the
+songs in the drama of that time are of popular origin; but the
+majority, as a glance at Mr. Bullen's several collections will prove,
+are artistic and individual, like the music to which they were sung.
+Occasionally we get a tantalizing glimpse of another lyrical England,
+the folk dancing and singing their own lays; but no Autolycus brings
+these to us in his basket. Even the miracle plays had not despised
+folk-song; unfortunately the writers are content to mention the songs,
+like our Acts of Congress, only by title. In the "comedy" called 'The
+Longer Thou Livest the More Foole Thou Art,' there are snatches of
+such songs; and a famous list, known to all scholars, is given by
+Laneham in a letter from Kenilworth in 1575, where he tells of certain
+songs, "all ancient," owned by one Captain Cox. Again, nobody ever
+praised songs of the people more sincerely than Shakespeare has
+praised them; and we may be certain that he used them for the stage.
+Such is the 'Willow Song' that Desdemona sings,--an "old thing," she
+calls it; and such perhaps the song in 'As You Like It,'--'It Was a
+Lover and His Lass.' Nash is credited with the use of folk-songs in
+his 'Summer's Last Will and Testament'; but while the pretty verses
+about spring and the tripping lines, 'A-Maying,' have such a note,
+nothing could be further from the quality of folk-song than the solemn
+and beautiful 'Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss.' In Beaumont and
+Fletcher's 'Knight of the Burning Pestle,' however, Merrythought sings
+some undoubted snatches of popular lyric, just as he sings stanzas
+from the traditional ballad; for example, his--
+
+  Go from my window, love, go;
+    Go from my window, my dear;
+  The wind and the rain
+  Will drive you back again,
+    You cannot be lodged here,--
+
+is quoted with variations in other plays, and was a favorite of the
+time,[30] and like many a ballad appears in religious parody. A modern
+variant, due to tradition, comes from Norwich; the third and fourth
+lines ran:--
+
+  For the wind is in the west,
+  And the cuckoo's in his nest.
+
+    [30] The music in Chappell, page 141.
+
+From the time of Henry VIII. a pretty song is preserved of this same
+class:--
+
+  Westron wynde, when wyll thou blow!
+    The smalle rain downe doth rayne;
+  Oh if my love were in my armys,
+    Or I in my bed agayne!
+
+This sort of song between the lovers, one without and one within,
+occurs in French and German at a very early date, and is probably much
+older than any records of it; as serenade, it found great favor with
+poets of the city and the court, and is represented in English by
+Sidney's beautiful lines, admirable for purposes of comparison with
+the folk-song:--
+
+    "Who is it that this dark night
+  Underneath my window plaineth?"
+    "It is one who, from thy sight
+  Being, ah, exiled! disdaineth
+    Every other vulgar light."
+
+The zeal of modern collectors has brought together a mass of material
+which passes for folk-song. None of it is absolutely communal, for
+the conditions of primitive lyric have long since been swept away;
+nevertheless, where isolated communities have retained something of
+the old homogeneous and simple character, the spirit of folk-song
+lingers in survival. From Great Britain, from France, and particularly
+from Germany, where circumstances have favored this survival, a few
+folk-songs may now be given in inadequate translation. To go further
+afield, to collect specimens of Italian, Russian, Servian, modern
+Greek, and so on, would need a book. The songs which follow are
+sufficiently representative for the purpose.
+
+A pretty little song, popular in Germany to this day, needs no pompous
+support of literary allusion to explain its simple pathos; still, it
+is possible that one meets here a distant echo of the tragedy of
+obstacles told in romance of Hero and Leander. When one hears this
+song, one understands where Heine found the charm of his best
+lyrics:--
+
+  Over a waste of water
+    The bonnie lover crossed,
+  A-wooing the King's daughter:
+    But all his love was lost.
+
+  Ah, Elsie, darling Elsie,
+    Fain were I now with thee;
+  But waters twain are flowing,
+    Dear love, twixt thee and me![31]
+
+    [31] Boehme, with music, page 94.
+
+Even more of a favorite is the song which represents two girls in the
+harvest-field, one happy in her love, the other deserted; the noise of
+the sickle makes a sort of chorus. Uhland placed with the two stanzas
+of the song a third stanza which really belongs to another tune; the
+latter, however, may serve to introduce the situation:--
+
+  I heard a sickle rustling,
+    Ay, rustling through the corn:
+  I heard a maiden sobbing
+    Because her love was lorn.
+
+  "Oh let the sickle rustle!
+    I care not how it go;
+  For I have found a lover,
+                   A lover,
+    Where clover and violets blow."
+
+  "And hast thou found a lover
+    Where clover and violets blow?
+  I stand here, ah, so lonely,
+                    So lonely,
+    And all my heart is woe!"
+
+Two songs may follow, one from France, one from Scotland, bewailing
+the death of lover or husband. 'The Lowlands of Holland' was published
+by Herd in his 'Scottish Songs.'[32] A clumsy attempt was made to fix
+the authorship upon a certain young widow; but the song belies any
+such origin. It has the marks of tradition:--
+
+  My love has built a bonny ship, and set her on the sea,
+  With sevenscore good mariners to bear her company;
+  There's threescore is sunk, and threescore dead at sea,
+  And the Lowlands of Holland has twin'd[33] my love and me.
+
+  My love he built another ship, and set her on the main,
+  And nane but twenty mariners for to bring her hame,
+  But the weary wind began to rise, and the sea began to rout;
+  My love then and his bonny ship turned withershins[34] about.
+
+  There shall neither coif come on my head nor comb come in my hair;
+  There shall neither coal nor candle-light come in my bower mair;
+  Nor will I love another one until the day I die,
+  For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.
+
+  "O haud your tongue, my daughter dear, be still and be content;
+  There are mair lads in Galloway, ye neen nae sair lament."
+  O there is none in Gallow, there's none at a' for me;
+  For I never loved a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea.
+
+    [32] Quoted by Child, 'Ballads,' iv. 318.
+
+    [33] Separated, divided.
+
+    [34] An equivalent to upside down, "in the wrong direction."
+
+The French song[35] has a more tender note:--
+
+  Low, low he lies who holds my heart,
+    The sea is rolling fair above;
+  Go, little bird, and tell him this,--
+    Go, little bird, and fear no harm,--
+  Say I am still his faithful love,
+    Say that to him I stretch my arms.
+
+    [35] See Tiersot, 'La Chanson Populaire,' p. 103, with the
+    music. The final verses, simple as they are, are not rendered
+    even remotely well. They run:--
+
+      Que je suis sa fidele amie,
+      Et que vers lui je tends les bras.
+
+Another song, widely scattered in varying versions throughout France,
+is of the forsaken and too trustful maid,--'En revenant des Noces.'
+The narrative in this, as in the Scottish song, makes it approach the
+ballad.
+
+  Back from the wedding-feast,
+  All weary by the way,
+
+  I rested by a fount
+  And watched the waters' play;
+
+  And at the fount I bathed,
+  So clear the waters' play;
+
+  And with a leaf of oak
+  I wiped the drops away.
+
+  Upon the highest branch
+  Loud sang the nightingale.
+
+  Sing, nightingale, oh sing,
+  Thou hast a heart so gay!
+
+  Not gay, this heart of mine:
+  My love has gone away,
+
+  Because I gave my rose
+  Too soon, too soon away.
+
+  Ah, would to God that rose
+  Yet on the rosebush lay,--
+
+  Would that the rosebush, even,
+  Unplanted yet might stay,--
+
+  Would that my lover Pierre
+  My favor had to pray![36]
+
+    [36] Tiersot, p. 90. In many versions there is further
+    complication with king and queen and the lover. This song
+    is extremely popular in Canada.
+
+The corresponding Scottish song, beautiful enough for any land or age,
+is the well-known 'Waly, Waly':--
+
+  Oh waly, waly, up the bank,
+    And waly, waly, down the brae,
+  And waly, waly, yon burn-side,
+    Where I and my love wont to gae.
+
+  I lean'd my back unto an aik,
+    I thought it was a trusty tree;
+  But first it bowed and syne it brak,
+    Sae my true-love did lightly[37] me.
+
+  Oh waly, waly, but love be bonny
+    A little time, while it is new;
+  But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld,
+    And fades away like morning dew.
+
+  Oh wherefore should I busk my head?
+    Or wherefore should I kame my hair?
+  For my true-love has me forsook,
+    And says he'll never love me mair.
+
+  Now Arthur's Seat shall be my bed,
+    The sheets shall ne'er be fyled by me;
+  Saint Anton's well shall be my drink,
+    Since my true-love has forsaken me.
+
+  Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw
+    And shake the green leaves off the tree?
+  O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?
+    For of my life I am weary.
+
+  'Tis not the frost that freezes fell,
+    Nor blawing snaw's inclemency;
+  'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,
+    But my love's heart grown cauld to me.
+
+  When we came in by Glasgow town,
+    We were a comely sight to see;
+  My love was clad in the black velvet,
+    And I myself in cramasie.
+
+  But had I wist, before I kissed,
+    That love had been sae ill to win,
+  I'd locked my heart in a case of gold.
+    And pinned it with a silver pin.
+
+  Oh, oh, if my young babe were born,
+    And set upon the nurse's knee,
+  And I myself were dead and gone,
+    [And the green grass growing over me!]
+
+    [37] Lightly (a verb) is to treat with contempt, to
+    undervalue. Compare the burden quoted by Chappell, p. 458,
+    and very old:--
+
+      The bonny broome, the well-favored broome,
+        The broome blooms faire on hill;
+      What ailed my love to lightly me,
+        And I working her will?
+
+The same ballad touch overweighs even the lyric quality of the
+verses about Yarrow:--
+
+  "Willy's rare, and Willy's fair,
+    And Willy's wondrous bonny,
+  And Willy heght[38] to marry me
+    Gin e'er he married ony.
+
+  "Oh came you by yon water-side?
+    Pu'd you the rose or lily?
+  Or came you by yon meadow green?
+    Or saw you my sweet Willy?"
+
+  She sought him east, she sought him west,
+    She sought him brade and narrow;
+  Syne, in the clifting of a craig,
+    She found him drowned in Yarrow.[39]
+
+    [38] Promised.
+
+    [39] Child's _Ballads_, vii. 179.
+
+Returning to Germany and to pure lyric, we have a pretty bit which is
+attached to many different songs.
+
+  High up on yonder mountain
+    A mill-wheel clatters round,
+  And, night or day, naught else but love
+    Within the mill is ground.
+
+  The mill has gone to ruin,
+    And love has had its day;
+  God bless thee now, my bonnie lass,
+    I wander far away.[40]
+
+    [40] Boehme, p. 271.
+
+But there is a more cheerful vein in this sort of song; and the
+mountain offers pleasanter views:--
+
+  Oh yonder on the mountain,
+    There stands a lofty house,
+  Where morning after morning,
+                      Yes, morning,
+    Three maids go in and out.[41]
+
+  The first she is my sister,
+    The second well is known,
+  The third, I will not name her,
+                      No, name her,
+    And she shall be my own!
+
+    [41] The rhyme in German leaves even more to be desired.
+
+Finally, that pearl of German folk-song, 'Innsprueck.' The wanderer
+must leave the town and his sweetheart; but he swears to be true, and
+prays that his love be kept safe till his return:--
+
+  Innsprueck, I must forsake thee,
+  My weary way betake me
+    Unto a foreign shore,
+  And all my joy hath vanished,
+  And ne'er while I am banished
+    Shall I behold it more.
+
+  I bear a load of sorrow,
+  And comfort can I borrow,
+    Dear love, from thee alone.
+  Ah, let thy pity hover
+  About thy weary lover
+    When he is far from home.
+
+  My one true love! Forever
+  Thine will I bide, and never
+    Shall our dear vow be vain.
+  Now must our Lord God ward thee,
+  In peace and honor guard thee,
+    Until I come again.
+
+In leaving the subject of folk-song, it is necessary for the reader
+not only to consider anew the loose and unscientific way in which this
+term has been employed, but also to bear in mind that few of the above
+specimens can lay claim to the title in any rigid classification. Long
+ago, a German critic reminded zealous collectors of his day that when
+one has dipped a pailful of water from the brook, one has captured no
+brook; and that when one has written down a folk-song, it has ceased
+to be that eternally changing, momentary, spontaneous, dance-begotten
+thing which once flourished everywhere as communal poetry. Always in
+flux, if it stopped it ceased to be itself. Modern lyric is
+deliberately composed by some one, mainly to be sung by some one else;
+the old communal lyric was sung by the throng and was made in the
+singing. When festal excitement at some great communal rejoicing in
+the life of clan or tribe "fought its battles o'er again," the result
+was narrative communal song. A disguised and baffled survival of this
+most ancient narrative is the popular ballad. Still more disguised,
+still more baffled, is the purely lyrical survival of that old
+communal and festal song; and the best one can do is to present those
+few specimens found under conditions which preserve certain qualities
+of a vanished world of poetry.
+
+    [Illustration: _RUSSIAN CURSIVE WRITING._
+    A public document of Kamtschatka, written on birch bark.]
+
+It may be asked why the contemporary songs found among Indian tribes
+of our continent, or among remote islanders in low stages of culture,
+should not reproduce for us the old type of communal verse. The answer
+is simple. Tribes which have remained in low stages of culture do not
+necessarily retain all the characteristics of primitive life among
+races which had the germs of rapidly developing culture. That communal
+poetry which gave life to the later epic of Hellenic or of Germanic
+song must have differed materially, no matter in what stage of
+development, from the uninteresting and monotonous chants of the
+savage. Moreover, the specimens of savage verse which we know
+retain the characteristics of communal verse, while they lack its
+nobler and vital quality. The dance, the spontaneous production,
+repetition,--these are all marked characteristics of savage verse.
+But savage verse cannot serve as model for our ideas of primitive
+folk-song.
+
+                                        [Signature: F. B. Gummere]
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL FOOTE
+
+(1720-1777)
+
+
+The name of Samuel Foote suggests a whimsical, plump little man, with
+a round face, twinkling eyes, and one of the readiest wits of the
+eighteenth century. This contemporary of the elder Colman, Cumberland,
+Mrs. Cowley, and the great Garrick, knew many famous men and women,
+and they admired as well as feared his talents.
+
+Samuel Foote was born at Truro in 1720. He was a young boy when he
+first exhibited his powers of mimicry at his father's dinner-table. At
+that time he did not expect to earn his living by them, for he came of
+well-to-do people, and his mother, who was of aristocratic birth,
+inherited a comfortable fortune.
+
+Throughout his school days at Worcester and his college days at
+Worcester College, Oxford, where he did not remain long enough to take
+a degree, and the idle days when he was supposed to be studying law at
+the Temple and was in reality frequenting coffee-houses and
+drawing-rooms as a young man of fashion, he was establishing a
+reputation for repartee, _bons mots_, and satiric imitation. So, when
+the wasteful youth had squandered all his money, he naturally turned
+to the stage as offering him the best opportunity. Like many another
+amateur addicted to a mistaken ambition, Foote first tried tragedy,
+and made his debut as Othello. But in this and in other tragedies he
+was a failure; so he soon took to writing comic plays with parts
+especially adapted to himself. 'The Diversions of the Morning' was the
+first of a long series, of which 'The Mayor of Garratt,' 'The Lame
+Lover,' 'The Nabob,' and 'The Minor,' are among the best known. As
+these were written from the actor's rather than from the dramatist's
+point of view, they often seem faulty in construction and crude in
+literary quality. They are farces rather than true comedies. But they
+abound in witty dialogue, and in a satire which illuminates
+contemporary vices and follies.
+
+Foote seems to have been curiously lacking in conscience. He lived his
+life with a gayety which no poverty, misfortune, or physical suffering
+could long dampen. When he had money he spent it lavishly, and when
+the supply ran short he racked his clever brains to make a new hit. To
+accomplish this he was utterly unscrupulous, and never spared his
+friends or those to whom he was indebted, if he saw good material in
+their foibles. His victims smarted, but his ready tongue and personal
+geniality usually extricated him from consequent unpleasantness.
+Garrick, who aided him repeatedly, and who dreaded ridicule above all
+things, was his favorite butt, yet remained his friend. The irate
+members of the East India Company, who called upon him armed with
+stout cudgels to administer a castigation for an offensive libel in
+'The Nabob,' were so speedily mollified that they laid their cudgels
+aside with their hats, and accepted his invitation to dinner.
+
+To us, much of his charm has evaporated, for it lay in these very
+personalities which held well-known people up to ridicule with a
+precision which made it impossible for the originals to escape
+recognition. Even irascible Dr. Johnson, who wished to disapprove of
+him, admitted that there was no one like "that fellow Foote." So this
+"Aristophanes of the English stage" was mourned when he died at the
+age of fifty-seven, and a company of his friends and fellow-actors
+buried him one evening by the dim light of torches in a cloister of
+Westminster Abbey.
+
+There is often a boisterous unreserve in the plays of Foote, as in
+other eighteenth-century drama, which revolts modern taste. As they
+consist of character study rather than incident, mere extracts are apt
+to appear incomplete and meaningless. Therefore it seems fairer to
+represent the famous wit not alone by formal citation, but also by
+some of his _bons mots_ extracted from the collection of William Cooke
+in his 'Memoirs of Samuel Foote' (2 vols. 1806).
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO BE A LAWYER
+
+From 'The Lame Lover'
+
+
+    _Enter_ Jack
+
+_Serjeant_--So, Jack, anybody at chambers to-day?
+
+_Jack_--Fieri Facias from Fetter Lane, about the bill to be filed by
+Kit Crape against Will Vizard this term.
+
+_Serjeant_--Praying for an equal partition of plunder?
+
+_Jack_--Yes, sir.
+
+_Serjeant_--Strange world we live in, that even highwaymen can't be
+true to each other! [_Half aside to himself._] But we shall make
+Vizard refund; we'll show him what long hands the law has.
+
+_Jack_--Facias says that in all the books he can't hit a precedent.
+
+_Serjeant_--Then I'll make one myself; _Aut inveniam, aut faciam_, has
+been always my motto. The charge must be made for partnership profit,
+by bartering lead and gunpowder against money, watches, and rings, on
+Epping Forest, Hounslow Heath, and other parts of the kingdom.
+
+_Jack_--He says if the court should get scent of the scheme, the
+parties would all stand committed.
+
+_Serjeant_--Cowardly rascal! but however, the caution mayn't prove
+amiss. [_Aside._] I'll not put my own name to the bill.
+
+_Jack_--The declaration, too, is delivered in the cause of Roger
+Rapp'em against Sir Solomon Simple.
+
+_Serjeant_--What, the affair of the note?
+
+_Jack_--Yes.
+
+_Serjeant_--Why, he is clear that his client never gave such a note.
+
+_Jack_--Defendant never saw plaintiff since the hour he was born; but
+notwithstanding, they have three witnesses to prove a consideration
+and signing the note.
+
+_Serjeant_--They have!
+
+_Jack_--He is puzzled what plea to put in.
+
+_Serjeant_--_Three_ witnesses ready, you say?
+
+_Jack_--Yes.
+
+_Serjeant_--Tell him Simple must acknowledge the note [_Jack starts_];
+and bid him against the trial comes on, to procure _four_ persons at
+least to prove the payment at the Crown and Anchor, the 10th of
+December.
+
+_Jack_--But then how comes the note to remain in plaintiff's
+possession?
+
+_Serjeant_--Well put, Jack: but we have a _salvo_ for that; plaintiff
+happened not to have the note in his pocket, but promised to deliver
+it up when called thereunto by defendant.
+
+_Jack_--That will do rarely.
+
+_Serjeant_--Let the defense be a secret; for I see we have able people
+to deal with. But come, child, not to lose time, have you carefully
+conned those instructions I gave you?
+
+_Jack_--Yes, sir.
+
+_Serjeant_--Well, that we shall see. How many points are the great
+object of practice?
+
+_Jack_--Two.
+
+_Serjeant_--Which are they?
+
+_Jack_--The first is to put a man into possession of what is his
+right.
+
+_Serjeant_--The second?
+
+_Jack_--Either to deprive a man of what is _really_ his right, or to
+keep him as long as possible _out_ of possession.
+
+_Serjeant_--Good boy! To gain the last end, what are the best means to
+be used?
+
+_Jack_--Various and many are the legal modes of delay.
+
+_Serjeant_--Name them.
+
+_Jack_--Injunctions, demurrers, sham pleas, writs of error,
+rejoinders, sur-rejoinders, rebutters, sur-rebutters, re-plications,
+exceptions, essoigns, and imparlance.
+
+_Serjeant_ [_to himself_]--Fine instruments in the hands of a man who
+knows how to use them. But now, Jack, we come to the point: if an able
+advocate has his choice in a cause, which if he is in reputation he
+may readily have, which side should he choose, the right or the wrong?
+
+_Jack_--A great lawyer's business is always to make choice of the
+wrong.
+
+_Serjeant_--And prithee, why so?
+
+_Jack_--Because a good cause can speak for itself, whilst a bad one
+demands an able counselor to give it a color.
+
+_Serjeant_--Very well. But in what respects will this answer to the
+lawyer himself?
+
+_Jack_--In a twofold way. Firstly, his fees will be large in
+proportion to the dirty work he is to do.
+
+_Serjeant_--Secondly?
+
+_Jack_--His reputation will rise, by obtaining the victory in a
+desperate cause.
+
+_Serjeant_--Right, boy. Are you ready in the case of the cow?
+
+_Jack_--Pretty well, I believe.
+
+_Serjeant_--Give it, then.
+
+_Jack_--First of April, anno seventeen hundred and blank, John a-Nokes
+was indicted by blank, before blank, in the county of blank, for
+stealing a cow, _contra pacem_, etc., and against the statute in that
+case provided and made, to prevent stealing of cattle.
+
+_Serjeant_--Go on.
+
+_Jack_--Said Nokes was convicted upon the said statute.
+
+_Serjeant_--What followed upon?
+
+_Jack_--Motion in arrest of judgment, made by Counselor Puzzle. First,
+because the field from whence the cow was conveyed is laid in the
+indictment _as round_, but turned out upon proof to be _square_.
+
+_Serjeant_--That's well. A valid objection.
+
+_Jack_--Secondly, because in said indictment the color of the cow is
+called red; there being no such things _in rerum natura_ as red cows,
+no more than black lions, spread eagles, flying griffins, or blue
+boars.
+
+_Serjeant_--Well put.
+
+_Jack_--Thirdly, said Nokes has not offended against form of the
+statute; because stealing of _cattle_ is there provided against:
+whereas we are only convicted of stealing a _cow_. Now, though cattle
+may be cows, yet it does by no means follow that cows must be cattle.
+
+_Serjeant_--Bravo, bravo! buss me, you rogue; you are your father's
+own son! go on and prosper. I am sorry, dear Jack, I must leave thee.
+If Providence but sends thee life and health, I prophesy thou wilt
+wrest as much land from the owners, and save as many thieves from the
+gallows, as any practitioner since the days of King Alfred.
+
+_Jack_--I'll do my endeavor. [_Exit Serjeant._]
+
+
+
+
+A MISFORTUNE IN ORTHOGRAPHY
+
+From 'The Lame Lover'
+
+
+SIR LUKE--A pox o' your law; you make me lose sight of my story. One
+morning a Welsh coach-maker came with his bill to my lord, whose name
+was unluckily Lloyd. My lord had the man up: "You are called, I think,
+Mr. Lloyd?"--"At your Lordship's service, my lord."--"What, Lloyd with
+an L?"--"It was with an L indeed, my lord."--"Because in your part of
+the world I have heard that Lloyd and Floyd were synonymous, the very
+same names."--"Very often indeed, my Lord."--"But you always spell
+yours with an L?"--"Always."--"That, Mr. Lloyd, is a little unlucky;
+for you must know I am now paying my debts alphabetically, and in four
+or five years you might have come in with an F; but I am afraid I can
+give you no hopes for your L. Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE 'MEMOIRS'
+
+
+A CURE FOR BAD POETRY
+
+A physician of Bath told him that he had a mind to publish his own
+poems; but he had so many irons in the fire he did not well know what
+to do.
+
+"Then take my advice, doctor," said Foote, "and put your poems where
+your irons are."
+
+
+THE RETORT COURTEOUS
+
+Following a man in the street, who did not bear the best of
+characters, Foote slapped him familiarly on the shoulder, thinking he
+was an intimate friend. On discovering his mistake he cried out, "Oh,
+sir, I beg your pardon! I really took you for a gentleman who--"
+
+"Well, sir," said the other, "and am I not a gentleman?"
+
+"Nay, sir," said Foote, "if you take it in that way, I must only beg
+your pardon a second time."
+
+
+ON GARRICK'S STATURE
+
+Previously to Foote's bringing out his 'Primitive Puppet Show' at the
+Haymarket Theatre, a lady of fashion asked him, "Pray, sir, are your
+puppets to be as large as life?"
+
+"Oh dear, madam, no. Not much above the size of Garrick!"
+
+
+CAPE WINE
+
+Being at the dinner-table one day when the Cape was going round in
+remarkably small glasses, his host was very profuse on the excellence
+of the wine, its age, etc. "But you don't seem to relish it, Foote, by
+keeping your glass so long before you."
+
+"Oh, yes, my lord, perfectly well. I am only admiring how little it
+is, considering its great age."
+
+
+THE GRACES
+
+Of an actress who was remarkably awkward with her arms, Foote said
+that "she kept the Graces at arm's-length."
+
+
+THE DEBTOR
+
+Of a young gentleman who was rather backward in paying his debts, he
+said he was "a very promising young gentleman."
+
+
+AFFECTATION
+
+An assuming, pedantic lady, boasting of the many books which she had
+read, often quoted 'Locke Upon Understanding,' a work she said she
+admired above all things, yet there was one word in it which, though
+often repeated, she could not distinctly make out; and that was the
+word ide-a (pronouncing it very long): "but I suppose it comes from a
+Greek derivation."
+
+"You are perfectly right, madam," said Foote, "it comes from the word
+ideaousky."
+
+"And pray, sir, what does that mean?"
+
+"The feminine of idiot, madam."
+
+
+ARITHMETICAL CRITICISM
+
+A mercantile man of his acquaintance, who would read a poem of his to
+him one day after dinner, pompously began:--
+
+  "Hear me, O Phoebus! and ye Muses nine!
+  Pray be attentive."
+
+"I am," said Foote. "Nine and one are ten: go on."
+
+
+THE DEAR WIFE
+
+A gentleman just married, telling Foote that he had that morning laid
+out three thousand pounds in jewels for his "dear wife": "Well," said
+the other, "you have but done her justice, as by your own reckoning
+she must be a very valuable woman."
+
+
+GARRICK AND THE GUINEA
+
+Foote and Garrick, supping together at the Bedford, the former in
+pulling out his purse to pay the reckoning dropped a guinea, which
+rolled in such a direction that they could not readily find it.
+
+"Where the deuce," says Foote, "can it be gone to?"
+
+"Gone to the Devil, I suppose," said Garrick.
+
+"Well said, David; you are always what I took you for, ever contriving
+to make a guinea go farther than any other man."
+
+
+DR. PAUL HIFFERMAN
+
+Paul was fond of laying, or rather offering, wagers. One day in the
+heat of argument he cried out, "I'll lay my head you are wrong upon
+that point."
+
+"Well," said Foote, "I accept the wager. Any trifle, among friends,
+has a value."
+
+
+FOOTE AND MACKLIN
+
+One night, when Macklin was formally preparing to begin a lecture,
+hearing Foote rattling away at the lower end of the room, and thinking
+to silence him at once, he called out in his sarcastic manner, "Pray,
+young gentleman, do you know what I am going to say?"
+
+"No, sir," said Foote quickly: "do you?"
+
+
+BARON NEWMAN
+
+This celebrated gambler (well known about town thirty years ago by the
+title of the left-handed Baron), being detected in the rooms at Bath
+in the act of secreting a card, the company in the warmth of their
+resentment threw him out of the window of a one-pair-of-stairs room,
+where they were playing. The Baron, meeting Foote some time afterward,
+loudly complained of this usage, and asked him what he should do to
+repair his injured honor.
+
+"Do?" said the wit; "why, 'tis a plain case: never play so high again
+as long as you live."
+
+
+MRS. ABINGTON
+
+When Mrs. Abington returned from her very first successful trip to
+Ireland, Foote wished to engage her for his summer theatre; but in the
+mean time Garrick secured her for Drury Lane. Foote, on hearing this,
+asked her why she gave Garrick the preference.
+
+"I don't know how it was," said she: "he talked me over by telling me
+that he would make me immortal, so that I did not know how to refuse
+him."
+
+"Oh! did he so? Then I'll soon outbid him that way; for come to me and
+I will give you two pounds a week more, and charge you nothing for
+immortality."
+
+
+GARLIC-EATERS
+
+Laughing at the imbecilities of a common friend one day, somebody
+observed, "It was very surprising; and Tom D---- knew him very well,
+and thought him far from being a fool."
+
+"Ah, poor Tom!" said Foote, "he is like one of those people who eat
+garlic themselves, and therefore can't smell it in a companion."
+
+
+MODE OF BURYING ATTORNEYS IN LONDON
+
+A gentleman in the country, who had just buried a rich relation who
+was an attorney, was complaining to Foote, who happened to be on a
+visit with him, of the very great expense of a country funeral in
+respect to carriages, hat-bands, scarves, etc.
+
+"Why, do you bury your attorneys here?" asked Foote gravely.
+
+"Yes, to be sure we do; how else?"
+
+"Oh, we never do that in London."
+
+"No?" said the other much surprised, "how do you manage?"
+
+"Why, when the patient happens to die, we lay him out in a room over
+night by himself, lock the door, throw open the sash, and in the
+morning he is entirely off."
+
+"Indeed!" said the other in amazement; "what becomes of him?"
+
+"Why, that we cannot exactly tell, not being acquainted with
+supernatural causes. All that we know of the matter is, that there's a
+strong smell of brimstone in the room the next morning."
+
+
+DINING BADLY
+
+Foote, returning from dinner with a lord of the admiralty, was met by
+a friend, who asked him what sort of a day he had had. "Very
+indifferent indeed; bad company and a worse dinner."
+
+"I wonder at that," said the other, "as I thought the admiral a good
+jolly fellow."
+
+"Why, as to that, he may be a good sea lord, but take it from me, he
+is a very bad landlord."
+
+
+DIBBLE DAVIS
+
+Dibble Davis, one of Foote's butts-in-ordinary, dining with him one
+day at North-end, observed that "well as he loved porter, he could
+never drink it without a head."
+
+"That must be a mistake, Dibble," returned his host, "as you have done
+so to my knowledge alone these twenty years."
+
+
+AN EXTRAORDINARY CASE
+
+Being at the levee of Lord Townsend, when that nobleman was Lord
+Lieutenant of Ireland, he thought he saw a person in his Excellency's
+suite whom he had known to have lived many years a life of expediency
+in London. To convince himself of the fact, he asked his Excellency
+who it was.
+
+"That is Mr. T----, one of my gentlemen at large," was the answer. "Do
+you know him?"
+
+"Oh, yes! perfectly well," said Foote, "and what your Excellency tells
+me is doubly extraordinary: first, that he is a gentleman; and next,
+that he is at large."
+
+
+MUTABILITY OF THE WORLD
+
+Being at dinner in a mixed company soon after the bankruptcy of one
+friend and the death of another, the conversation naturally turned on
+the mutability of the world. "Can you account for this?" said S----, a
+master builder, who happened to sit next to Foote. "Why, not very
+clearly," said the other; "except we could suppose the world was built
+by contract."
+
+
+AN APPROPRIATE MOTTO
+
+During one of Foote's trips to Dublin, he was much solicited by a
+silly young man of fashion to assist him in a miscellany of poems and
+essays which he was about to publish; but when he asked to see the
+manuscript, the other told him "that at present he had only conceived
+the different subjects, but had put none of them to paper."
+
+"Oh! if that be the state of the case," replied Foote, "I will give
+you a motto from Milton for the work in its present state:
+
+    'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.'"
+
+
+REAL FRIENDSHIP
+
+A young gentleman, making an apology to his father for coming late to
+dinner, said "that he had been visiting a poor friend of his in St.
+George's Fields." "Ah! a pretty kind of friend indeed," says the
+father, "to keep us waiting for dinner in this manner."
+
+"Aye, and for the best kind, too," said Foote: "as you know, my dear
+sir, a friend in need is a friend indeed."
+
+
+ANECDOTE OF AN AUTHOR
+
+An author was boasting that as a reviewer he had the power of
+distributing literary reputations as he liked. "Take care," said
+Foote, "you are not too prodigal of that, or you may leave none for
+yourself."
+
+
+DR. BLAIR
+
+When Foote first heard of Dr. Blair's writing 'Notes on Ossian' (a
+work the reality of which has always been much doubted), he observed,
+"The publishers ought to allow a great discount to the purchaser, as
+the notes required such a stretch of credit."
+
+
+ADVICE TO A DRAMATIC WRITER
+
+A dull dramatic writer, who had often felt the severity of the public,
+was complaining one day to Foote of the injustice done him by the
+critics; but added, "I have, however, one way of being even with them,
+by constantly laughing at all they say."
+
+"You do perfectly right, my friend," said Foote; "for by this method
+you will not only disappoint your enemies, but lead the merriest life
+of any man in England."
+
+
+THE GRAFTON MINISTRY
+
+A gentleman coming into the Cocoa-Tree one morning during the Duke of
+Grafton's administration, was observing "that he was afraid the poor
+ministry were at their wits' end."
+
+"Well, if it should be so," said Foote, "what reason have they to
+complain of so short a journey?"
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FORD
+
+(1586-?)
+
+
+The dramatic genius of the English Renaissance had well-nigh spent
+itself when the sombre creations of John Ford appeared upon a stage
+over which the clouds of the Civil War were fast gathering. Little is
+known of this dramatist, who represents the decadent period which
+followed the age of Shakespeare. He was born in 1586; entered the
+Middle Temple in 1602; after 1641 he is swallowed up in the turmoil of
+the time. The few scattered records of his life add nothing to, nor do
+they take anything from, the John Ford of 'The Broken Heart' and
+'Perkin Warbeck.'
+
+His plays are infected with a spirit alien to the poise and beauty of
+the best Elizabethan drama. His creations tell of oblique vision; of a
+disillusioned genius, predisposed to abnormal or exaggerated forms of
+human experience. He breaks through the moral order, in his love for
+the eccentricities of passion. He weaves the spell of his genius
+around strange sins.
+
+The problems of despair which Ford propounds but never solves, form
+the plot of 'The Broken Heart'; Calantha, Ithocles, Penthea, Orgilus,
+are wan types of the passive suffering which numbs the soul to death.
+Charles Lamb has eulogized the final scene of this drama. To many
+critics, the self-possession of Calantha savors of the theatrical. The
+scene between Penthea and her brother Ithocles, who had forced her to
+marry Bassanes though she loved Orgilus, is replete with the
+tenderness, the sense of subdued anguish, of which Ford was a master.
+He is the dramatist of broken hearts, whose waste places are
+unrelieved by a touch of sunlight. His love of "passion at war with
+circumstance" again finds expression in 'Love's Sacrifice,' a drama of
+moral confusions. In 'The Lover's Melancholy' sorrow has grown
+pensive. A quiet beauty rests upon the famous scene in which
+Parthenophil strives with the nightingale for the prize of music.
+
+'The Lady's Trial,' 'The Fancies Chaste and Noble,' 'The Sun's
+Darling' (written in conjunction with Dekker), are worthy only of
+passing notice. They leave but a pale impression upon the mind. In
+'Perkin Warbeck,' the one historical play of Ford, he exhibits his
+mastery over straightforward, sinewy verse. 'The Witch of Edmonton,'
+of which he wrote the first act, gives a signal example of his modern
+style and spirit.
+
+With the exception of 'Perkin Warbeck,' his dramas are destitute of
+outlook. This moral contraction heightens the intensity of passion,
+which in his conception of it has always its ancient significance of
+suffering. His comic scenes are contemptible. He is at his greatest
+when dealing with the subtleties of the human heart. Through him we
+enter into the darker zones of the soul; we apprehend its remoter
+sufferings. Confusion of spiritual vision, blended with the tyranny of
+passion, produce his greatest scenes. His are the tragedies of
+"unfulfilled desire."
+
+The verse of Ford is measured, passionless, polished. There is a
+subtle music in his lines which haunts the memory.
+
+  "Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;
+  For he is like to something I remember,
+  A great while since, a long, long time ago."
+
+With Ford the sun-born radiance of the noblest Elizabethan drama fades
+from the stage. An artificial light, thereafter, replaced it.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'PERKIN WARBECK'
+
+
+    [Perkin Warbeck and his followers are presented to King Henry
+    VII. by Lord Dawbeny as prisoners.]
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+  Life to the King, and safety fix his throne.
+  I here present you, royal sir, a shadow
+  Of Majesty, but in effect a substance
+  Of pity; a young man, in nothing grown
+  To ripeness, but th' ambition of your mercy;
+  Perkin, the Christian world's strange wonder!
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                              Dawbeny,
+  We observe no wonder; I behold ('tis true)
+  An ornament of nature, fine and polished,
+  A handsome youth, indeed, but not admire him.
+  How come he to thy hands?
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                                    From sanctuary.
+  At Bewley, near Southampton; registered,
+  With these few followers, for persons privileged.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  I must not thank you, sir! you were to blame
+  To infringe the liberty of houses sacred;
+  Dare we be irreligious?
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                              Gracious lord!
+  They voluntarily resigned themselves,
+  Without compulsion.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                      So? 'twas very well
+  'Twas very well. Turn now thine eyes,
+  Young man! upon thyself and thy past actions:
+  What revels in combustion through our kingdom
+  A frenzy of aspiring youth has danced;
+  Till wanting breath, thy feet of pride have slipt
+  To break thy neck.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                      But not my heart; my heart
+  Will mount till every drop of blood be frozen
+  By death's perpetual winter. If the sun
+  Of Majesty be darkened, let the sun
+  Of life be hid from me, in an eclipse
+  Lasting and universal. Sir, remember
+  There was a shooting in of light when Richmond
+  (Not aiming at the crown) retired, and gladly,
+  For comfort to the Duke of Bretagne's court.
+  Richard, who swayed the sceptre, was reputed
+  A tyrant then; yet then, a dawning glimmer'd
+  To some few wand'ring remnants, promising day
+  When first they ventur'd on a frightful shore
+  At Milford Haven.
+
+_Dawbeny_--
+
+                      Whither speeds his boldness?
+  Check his rude tongue, great sir.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                          Oh, let him range:
+  The player's on the stage still; 'tis his part:
+  He does but act.--What followed?
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                                      Bosworth Field:
+  Where at an instant, to the world's amazement,
+  A morn to Richmond and a night to Richard
+  Appear'd at once. The tale is soon applied:
+  Fate which crowned these attempts, when least assured,
+  Might have befriended others, like resolved.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  A pretty gallant! thus your aunt of Burgundy,
+  Your duchess aunt, informed her nephew: so
+  The lesson, prompted, and well conned, was molded
+  Into familiar dialogue, oft rehearsed,
+  Till, learnt by heart, 'tis now received for truth.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+  Truth in her pure simplicity wants art
+  To put a feigned blush on; scorn wears only
+  Such fashion as commends to gazers' eyes
+  Sad ulcerated novelty, far beneath; in such a court
+  Wisdom and gravity are proper robes
+  By which the sovereign is best distinguished
+  From zanies to his greatness.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                Sirrah, shift
+  Your antic pageantry, and now appear
+  In your own nature; or you'll taste the danger
+  Of fooling out of season.
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                            I expect
+  No less than what severity calls justice,
+  And politicians safety; let such beg
+  As feed on alms: but if there can be mercy
+  In a protested enemy, then may it
+  Descend to these poor creatures whose engagements
+  To the bettering of their fortunes have incurred
+  A loss of all to them, if any charity
+  Flow from some noble orator; in death
+  I owe the fee of thankfulness.
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+                                  So brave?
+  What a bold knave is this!
+  We trifle time with follies.
+  Urswick, command the Dukeling and these fellows
+  To Digby, the Lieutenant of the Tower.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Warbeck_--
+
+                                          Noble thoughts
+  Meet freedom in captivity: the Tower,
+  Our childhood's dreadful nursery!
+
+_King Henry_--
+
+  Was ever so much impudence in forgery?
+  The custom, sure, of being styled a king
+  Hath fastened in his thought that he is such.
+
+
+
+
+PENTHEA'S DYING SONG
+
+From 'The Broken Heart'
+
+
+    Oh, no more, no more,--too late;
+    Sighs are spent; the burning tapers
+      Of a life as chaste as fate,
+      Pure as are unwritten papers,
+    Are burnt out; no heat, no light
+    Now remains; 'tis ever night.
+    Love is dead; let lovers' eyes
+      Locked in endless dreams,
+      Th' extremes of all extremes,
+    Ope no more, for now Love dies;
+        Now Love dies--implying
+  Love's martyrs must be ever, ever dying.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE LOVER'S MELANCHOLY'
+
+AMETHUS AND MENAPHON
+
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+  Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales
+  Which poets of an elder time have feigned
+  To glorify their Temple, bred in me
+  Desire of visiting that paradise.
+  To Thessaly I came; and living private
+  Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
+  Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
+  I day by day frequented silent groves
+  And solitary walks. One morning early
+  This accident encountered me: I heard
+  The sweetest and most ravishing contention
+  That art and nature ever were at strife in.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  I cannot yet conceive what you infer
+  By art and nature.
+
+_Menaphon_--
+
+                      I shall soon resolve ye.
+  A sound of music touched my ears, or rather
+  Indeed entranced my soul. As I stole nearer,
+  Invited by the melody, I saw
+  This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
+  With strains of strange variety and harmony,
+  Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge
+  To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds,
+  That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,
+  Wondering at what they heard: I wondered too.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  And so do I: good, on!
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                          A nightingale,
+  Nature's best skilled musician, undertakes
+  The challenge, and for every several strain
+  The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own;
+  He could not run division with more art
+  Upon his quaking instrument than she,
+  The nightingale, did with her various notes
+  Reply to: for a voice and for a sound,
+  Amethus, 'tis much easier to believe
+  That such they were than hope to hear again.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  How did the rivals part?
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                            You term them rightly;
+  For they were rivals, and their mistress harmony.
+  Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
+  Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
+  Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes,
+  Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
+  Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
+  To end the controversy, in a rapture
+  Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly
+  So many voluntaries and so quick,
+  That there was curiosity and cunning,
+  Concord in discord, lines of differing method
+  Meeting in one full centre of delight.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+  Now for the bird.
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+                     The bird, ordained to be
+  Music's first martyr, strove to imitate
+  These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
+  Failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute,
+  And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness,
+  To see the conqueror upon her hearse
+  To weep a funeral elegy of tears;
+  That trust me, my Amethus, I could chide
+  Mine own unmanly weakness that made me
+  A fellow mourner with him.
+
+_Amethus_--
+
+                              I believe thee.
+
+_Menaphon--_
+
+  He looked upon the trophies of his art,
+  Then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed and cried:--
+  "Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge
+  This cruelty upon the author of it;
+  Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
+  Shall never more betray a harmless peace
+  To an untimely end:" and in that sorrow,
+  As he was pushing it against a tree,
+  I suddenly stept in.
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH, BARON DE LA MOTTE FOUQUE
+
+(1777-1843)
+
+[Illustration: FOUQUE]
+
+
+The romantic school had many false and erratic tendencies, but it
+produced some of the most fanciful and poetic creations of literature.
+Fouque was called the Don Quixote of the Romanticists, and his early
+romances of chivalry were devoured by the public as quickly as they
+appeared. But his fame proved to be a passing fancy; and his later
+works scarcely found a publisher. This was owing partly to a change in
+public taste, and partly to his mannerisms. His descriptions often
+deteriorate into tediousness, and the narrative is broken by
+far-fetched digressions. He was so imbued with the spirit of chivalry
+that he became one-sided, and his scenes were always laid in "the
+chapel or the tilt-yard." Critics of his time speak of his mediaeval
+romances as "full of sweet strength and lovely virtue." Others say
+"the heroes are almost absurd, and do not arouse enthusiasm." Heine
+asserts that Fouque's laurel is genuine; Coleridge places him above
+Walter Scott; Thomas Carlyle compares him to Southey, and describes
+him as a man of genius, with little more than an ordinary share of
+talent. Fouque was introduced to romanticism by Wilhelm von Schlegel,
+and drew his first inspiration from Cervantes. Whatever his
+shortcomings, it cannot be denied that he succeeded in catching the
+spirit of chivalry. His knights may be unreal and quixotic, but he
+delineates his characters with the irresistible touch of a poet, and
+his work displays noble thoughts and depth of feeling.
+
+Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouque, was descended from a French
+family that had emigrated to Prussia, and his grandfather was a
+general under Frederick the Great. Fouque was born at Brandenburg,
+February 12th, 1777, and was a thorough German at heart. He received a
+military education, and at the age of nineteen proved himself a brave
+soldier in the campaign of the Rhine. He served under the Duke of
+Weimar, and his friend, and comrade in arms was the wonderfully gifted
+but unfortunate Heinrich von Kleist. He was obliged to resign on
+account of ill health, and withdrawing to his estates he devoted
+himself to literary pursuits. Once again, however, in the exciting
+times of the war against Napoleon, his sword defended his country. He
+enlisted as a volunteer, and was afterwards honorably retired with the
+rank of major and decorated with the Order of St. John. One of his
+patriotic poems, 'Frisch auf zum Froehlichen Jagen' (Come, rouse ye for
+the merry hunt), with reference to the rising against Napoleon, is
+still a popular song. In Halle, Fouque delivered lectures on history
+and poetry which attracted much attention and admiration. In 1842 he
+was called to Berlin by Frederick William IV., but his literary
+efforts were at an end. He died in Berlin, January 23d, 1843.
+
+At the beginning of this century, Fouque was one of the most
+celebrated authors. At the present day, with a few brilliant
+exceptions, all of his plays, romances, and poems have been relegated
+to oblivion. There is one work, however, a gem in German literature,
+that has won for its author an enduring place in the memory of
+readers; and that is the charming and graceful narrative of 'Undine.'
+It affords an example of the writer's best style of production; it
+breathes the fresh fragrance of the woods, and is animated by the
+beautiful thought that peoples the sea and air with nymphs and
+spirits. With exquisite tenderness Fouque portrays the beautiful
+character of Undine. At first her nature reflects all the
+capriciousness of the elements, then, gradually growing more human
+through her love, her soul expands and she becomes an ideal of womanly
+love, devotion, and unselfishness.
+
+The real and unreal are so perfectly blended in this story, that the
+suffering of Undine excites deep sympathy. Undine, the foster-daughter
+of a good old fisherman and his wife, is a water nymph, and as such is
+born without a soul. The knight Huldbrand von Ringstetten is sent by
+Bertalda in quest of adventure, and riding through an enchanted forest
+he reaches the fisherman's hut, where he is detained by a storm. He
+falls in love with the laughing, wayward Undine, and marries her. At
+once the bewitching maiden gives up her wild pranks, grows gentle, and
+is devoted to the knight with all her heart; for through her marriage
+to a human being she receives a soul. Her uncle Kuehleborn, a forest
+brook, tries to entice her back to her native element the sea.
+
+The bridal couple go to their castle, where Bertalda joins them, doing
+much to disturb their happiness. Huldbrand, though he still loves his
+beautiful wife, cannot at times suppress an instinctive shudder, and
+he is attracted to Bertalda, whose nature is more akin to his own.
+
+One day, while they are sailing on the Danube, Kuehleborn manages to
+steal away a necklace with which Bertalda is playing in the water.
+Undine richly compensates Bertalda for her loss by a much rarer gift,
+but Huldbrand angrily upbraids her for continuing to hold intercourse
+with her uncanny relatives. In tears she parts from him, and vanishes
+in the waves. The knight marries Bertalda, but on the wedding-day,
+Undine, deeply veiled, rises from the sea to claim her husband, and
+with a kiss she takes away his life.
+
+Heine says of 'Undine':--
+
+    "A wondrous lovely poem. The genius of Poetry kissed
+    slumbering Spring, and smiling he opened his eyes, and all
+    the roses and the nightingales sang; and what the fragrant
+    roses said and what the nightingales sang, our worthy Fouque
+    put into words and called it 'Undine.'"
+
+
+
+
+THE MARRIAGE OF UNDINE
+
+From 'Undine'
+
+
+Before the nuptial ceremony, and during its performance, Undine had
+shown a modest gentleness and maidenly reserve; but it now seemed as
+if all the wayward freaks that effervesced within her burst forth with
+an extravagance only the more bold and unrestrained. She teased her
+bridegroom, her foster-parents, and even the priest, whom she had just
+now revered so highly, with all sorts of childish tricks; but when the
+ancient dame was about to reprove her too frolicsome spirit, the
+knight in a few words imposed silence upon her by speaking of Undine
+as his wife.
+
+The knight was himself indeed just as little pleased with Undine's
+childish behavior as the rest; but all his looks and half-reproachful
+words were to no purpose. It is true, whenever the bride observed the
+dissatisfaction of her husband--and this occasionally happened--she
+became more quiet, and placed herself beside him, stroked his face
+with caressing fondness, whispered something smilingly in his ear, and
+in this manner smoothed the wrinkles that were gathering on his brow.
+But the moment after, some wild whim would make her resume her antic
+movements; and all went worse than before.
+
+The priest then spoke in a kind although serious tone:--
+
+"My fair young maiden, surely no one can look on you without pleasure;
+but remember betimes so to attune your soul, that it may produce a
+harmony ever in accordance with the soul of your wedded bridegroom."
+
+"Soul!" cried Undine, with a laugh. "What you say has a remarkably
+pretty sound; and for most people, too, it may be a very instructive
+and profitable caution. But when a person has no soul at all, how, I
+pray you, can such attuning be then possible? And this in truth is
+just my condition."
+
+The priest was much hurt, but continued silent in holy displeasure,
+and turned away his face from the maiden in sorrow. She went up to
+him, however, with the most winning sweetness, and said:--
+
+"Nay, I entreat you, first listen to me, before you are angry with me;
+for your anger is painful to me, and you ought not to give pain to a
+creature that has not hurt you. Only have patience with me, and I will
+explain to you every word of what I meant."
+
+It was evident that she had come to say something important; when she
+suddenly faltered as if seized with inward shuddering, and burst into
+a passion of tears. They were none of them able to understand the
+intenseness of her feelings; and with mingled emotions of fear and
+anxiety, they gazed on her in silence. Then wiping away her tears and
+looking earnestly at the priest, she at last said:--
+
+"There must be something lovely, but at the same time something most
+awful, about a soul. In the name of God, holy man, were it not better
+that we never shared a gift so mysterious?"
+
+Again she paused, and restrained her tears, as if waiting for an
+answer. All in the cottage had risen from their seats, and stepped
+back from her with horror. She, however, seemed to have eyes for no
+one but the holy man; an awful curiosity was painted on her features,
+which appeared terrible to the others.
+
+"Heavily must the soul weigh down its possessor," she pursued, when no
+one returned her any answer--"very heavily! for already its
+approaching image overshadows me with anguish and mourning. And alas,
+I have till now been so merry and light-hearted!" and she burst into
+another flood of tears and covered her face with her veil.
+
+The priest, going up to her with a solemn look, now addressed himself
+to her, and conjured her, by the name of God most holy, if any spirit
+of evil possessed her, to remove the light covering from her face. But
+she sank before him on her knees, and repeated after him every sacred
+expression he uttered, giving praise to God, and protesting that she
+"wished well to the whole world."
+
+The priest then spoke to the knight: "Sir bridegroom, I leave you
+alone with her whom I have united to you in marriage. So far as I can
+discover there is nothing of evil in her, but assuredly much that is
+wonderful. What I recommend to you is prudence, love, and fidelity."
+
+Thus speaking, he left the apartment; and the fisherman with his wife
+followed him, crossing themselves.
+
+Undine had sunk upon her knees. She uncovered her face, and exclaimed,
+while she looked fearfully round upon Huldbrand, "Alas, you will now
+refuse to look upon me as your own; and I still have done nothing
+evil, poor unhappy child that I am!" She spoke these words with a look
+so infinitely sweet and touching, that her bridegroom forgot both the
+confession that had shocked and the mystery that had perplexed him;
+and hastening to her, he raised her in his arms. She smiled through
+her tears; and that smile was like the morning light playing upon a
+small stream. "You cannot desert me!" she whispered confidingly, and
+stroked the knight's cheeks with her little soft hands. He turned away
+from the frightful thoughts that still lurked in the recesses of his
+soul, and were persuading him that he had been married to a fairy, or
+some spiteful and mischievous being of the spirit world. Only the
+single question, and that almost unawares, escaped from his lips:--
+
+"Dearest Undine, tell me this one thing: what was it you meant by
+'spirits of earth' and 'Kuehleborn,' when the priest stood knocking at
+the door?"
+
+"Tales! mere tales of children!" answered Undine laughing, now quite
+restored to her wonted gayety. "I first frightened you with them, and
+you frightened me. This is the end of my story, and of our nuptial
+evening."
+
+"Nay, not so," replied the enamored knight, extinguishing the tapers,
+and a thousand times kissing his beautiful and beloved bride; while,
+lighted by the moon that shone brightly through the windows, he bore
+her into their bridal apartment.
+
+The fresh light of morning woke the young married pair: but Huldbrand
+lay lost in silent reflection. Whenever, during the night, he had
+fallen asleep, strange and horrible dreams of spectres had disturbed
+him; and these shapes, grinning at him by stealth, strove to disguise
+themselves as beautiful females; and from beautiful females they all
+at once assumed the appearance of dragons. And when he started up,
+aroused by the intrusion of these hideous forms, the moonlight shone
+pale and cold before the windows without. He looked affrighted at
+Undine, in whose arms he had fallen asleep: and she was reposing in
+unaltered beauty and sweetness beside him. Then pressing her rosy lips
+with a light kiss, he again fell into a slumber, only to be awakened
+by new terrors.
+
+When fully awake he had thought over this connection. He reproached
+himself for any doubt that could lead him into error in regard to his
+lovely wife. He also confessed to her his injustice; but she only gave
+him her fair hand, sighed deeply, and remained silent. Yet a glance of
+fervent tenderness, an expression of the soul beaming in her eyes,
+such as he had never witnessed there before, left him in undoubted
+assurance that Undine bore him no ill-will.
+
+He then rose joyfully, and leaving her, went to the common apartment,
+where the inmates of the house had already met. The three were sitting
+round the hearth with an air of anxiety about them, as if they feared
+trusting themselves to raise their voice above a low, apprehensive
+undertone. The priest appeared to be praying in his inmost spirit,
+with a view to avert some fatal calamity. But when they observed the
+young husband come forth so cheerful, they dispelled the cloud that
+remained upon their brows: the old fisherman even began to laugh with
+the knight, till his aged wife herself could not help smiling with
+great good-humor.
+
+Undine had in the mean time got ready, and now entered the room: all
+rose to meet her, but remained fixed in perfect admiration--she was so
+changed, and yet the same. The priest, with paternal affection beaming
+from his countenance, first went up to her; and as he raised his hand
+to pronounce a blessing, the beautiful bride sank on her knees before
+him with religious awe; she begged his pardon in terms both respectful
+and submissive for any foolish things she might have uttered the
+evening before, and entreated him with emotion to pray for the welfare
+of her soul. She then rose, kissed her foster-parents, and after
+thanking them for all the kindness they had shown her, said:
+
+"Oh, I now feel in my inmost heart how much, how infinitely much, you
+have done for me, you dear, dear friends of my childhood!"
+
+At first she was wholly unable to tear herself away from their
+affectionate caresses; but the moment she saw the good old mother
+busy in getting breakfast, she went to the hearth, applied herself to
+cooking the food and putting it on the table, and would not suffer her
+to take the least share in the work.
+
+She continued in this frame of spirit the whole day: calm, kind,
+attentive--half matronly and half girlish. The three who had been
+longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her
+capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive
+vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as
+mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to
+remove his eyes from her; and he often said to the bridegroom:--
+
+"The bounty of Heaven, sir, through me its unworthy instrument,
+intrusted to you yesterday an invaluable treasure: cherish it as you
+ought, and it will promote your temporal and eternal welfare."
+
+Toward evening Undine was hanging upon the knight's arm with lowly
+tenderness, while she drew him gently out before the door, where the
+setting sun shone richly over the fresh grass and upon the high
+slender boles of the trees. Her emotion was visible; the dew of
+sadness and love swam in her eyes, while a tender and fearful secret
+seemed to hover upon her lips, but was only made known by hardly
+breathed sighs. She led her husband farther and farther onward without
+speaking. When he asked her questions, she replied only with looks, in
+which, it is true, there appeared to be no immediate answer to his
+inquiries, but a whole heaven of love and timid devotion. Thus they
+reached the margin of the swollen forest stream, and the knight was
+astonished to see it gliding away with so gentle a murmuring of its
+waves, that no vestige of its former swell and wildness was now
+discernible.
+
+"By morning it will be wholly drained off," said the beautiful wife,
+almost weeping, "and you will then be able to travel, without anything
+to hinder you, whithersoever you will."
+
+"Not without you, dear Undine," replied the knight, laughing: "think
+only, were I disposed to leave you, both the Church and the spiritual
+powers, the emperor and the laws of the realm, would require the
+fugitive to be seized and restored to you."
+
+"All this depends on you--all depends on you," whispered his little
+companion, half weeping and half smiling. "But I still feel sure that
+you will not leave me; I love you too deeply to fear that misery. Now
+bear me over to that little island which lies before us. There shall
+the decision be made. I could easily, indeed, glide through that mere
+rippling of the water without your aid, but it is so sweet to lie in
+your arms; and should you determine to put me away, I shall have
+rested in them once more, ... for the last time."
+
+Huldbrand was so full of strange anxiety and emotion, that he knew not
+what answer to make her. He took her in his arms and carried her over,
+now first realizing the fact that this was the same little island from
+which he had borne her back to the old fisherman, the first night of
+his arrival. On the farther side he placed her upon the soft grass,
+and was throwing himself lovingly near his beautiful burden; but she
+said to him:--"Not here, but opposite me. I shall read my doom in your
+eyes, even before your lips pronounce it; now listen attentively to
+what I shall relate to you." And she began:--
+
+"You must know, my own love, that there are beings in the elements
+which bear the strongest resemblance to the human race, and which at
+the same time but seldom become visible to you. The wonderful
+salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the
+meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest spirits
+belong to the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers,
+and streams live the widespread race of water spirits. These last,
+beneath resounding domes of crystal, through which the sky can shine
+with its sun and stars, inhabit a region of light and beauty; lofty
+coral-trees glow with blue and crimson fruits in their gardens; they
+walk over the pure sand of the sea, among exquisitely variegated
+shells, and amid whatever of beauty the old world possessed, such as
+the present is no more worthy to enjoy,--creations which the floods
+covered with their secret veils of silver; and now these noble
+monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the water,
+which loves them, and calls forth from their crevices delicate
+moss-flowers and enwreathing tufts of sedge.
+
+"Now, the nation that dwell there are very fair and lovely to behold,
+for the most part more beautiful than human beings. Many a fisherman
+has been so fortunate as to catch a view of a delicate maiden of the
+waters, while she was floating and singing upon the deep. He would
+then spread far the fame of her beauty; and to such wonderful females
+men are wont to give the name of Undines.--But what need of saying
+more? You, my dear husband, now actually behold an Undine before
+you."
+
+The knight would have persuaded himself that his lovely wife was under
+the influence of one of her odd whims, and that she was only amusing
+herself and him with her extravagant inventions. He wished it might be
+so. But with whatever emphasis he said this to himself, he still could
+not credit the hope for a moment: a strange shivering shot through his
+soul; unable to utter a word, he gazed upon the sweet speaker with a
+fixed eye. She shook her head in distress, sighed from her full heart,
+and then proceeded in the following manner:--
+
+"We should be far superior to you, who are another race of the human
+family,--for we also call ourselves human beings, as we resemble them
+in form and features,--had we not one evil peculiar to ourselves. Both
+we and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other elements
+vanish into air at death and go out of existence, spirit and body, so
+that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake to a purer
+state of being, we shall remain where sand and sparks and wind and
+waves remain. Thus, we have no souls; the element moves us, and again
+is obedient to our will while we live, though it scatters us like dust
+when we die; and as we have nothing to trouble us, we are as merry as
+nightingales, little gold-fishes, and other pretty children of nature.
+
+"But all beings aspire to rise in the scale of existence higher than
+they are. It was therefore the wish of my father, who is a powerful
+water prince in the Mediterranean Sea, that his only daughter should
+become possessed of a soul, although she should have to endure many of
+the sufferings of those who share that gift.
+
+"Now, the race to which I belong have no other means of obtaining a
+soul than by forming with an individual of your own the most intimate
+union of love. I am now possessed of a soul, and my soul thanks you,
+my best beloved, and never shall cease to thank you, if you do not
+render my whole future life miserable. For what will become of me, if
+you avoid and reject me? Still, I would not keep you as my own by
+artifice. And should you decide to cast me off, then do it now, and
+return alone to the shore. I will plunge into this brook, where my
+uncle will receive me; my uncle, who here in the forest, far removed
+from his other friends, passes his strange and solitary existence. But
+he is powerful, as well as revered and beloved by many great rivers;
+and as he brought me hither to the fisherman a light-hearted and
+laughing child, he will take me home to my parents a woman, gifted
+with a soul, with power to love and to suffer."
+
+She was about to add something more, when Huldbrand with the most
+heartfelt tenderness and love clasped her in his arms, and again bore
+her back to the shore. There amid tears and kisses he first swore
+never to forsake his affectionate wife, and esteemed himself even more
+happy than Pygmalion, for whom Venus gave life to this beautiful
+statue, and thus changed it into a beloved wife. Supported by his arm,
+and in the confidence of affection, Undine returned to the cottage;
+and now she first realized with her whole heart how little cause she
+had for regretting what she had left--the crystal palaces of her
+mysterious father.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST APPEARANCE OF UNDINE
+
+From 'Undine'
+
+
+Should I relate to you how passed the marriage feast at Castle
+Ringstetten, it would be as if you saw a heap of bright and pleasant
+things, but all overspread with a black mourning crape, through whose
+darkening veil their brilliancy would appear but a mockery of the
+nothingness of all earthly joys.
+
+It was not that any spectral delusion disturbed the scene of
+festivity; for the castle, as we well know, had been secured against
+the mischief of the water spirits. But the knight, the fisherman, and
+all the guests were unable to banish the feeling that the chief
+personage of the feast was still wanting, and that this chief
+personage could be no other than the gentle and beloved Undine.
+
+Whenever a door was heard to open, all eyes were involuntarily turned
+in that direction; and if it was nothing but the steward with new
+dishes, or the cup-bearer with a supply of wine of higher flavor than
+the last, they again looked down in sadness and disappointment, while
+the flashes of wit and merriment which had been passing at times from
+one to another were extinguished by tears of mournful remembrance.
+
+The bride was the least thoughtful of the company, and therefore the
+most happy; but even to her it sometimes seemed strange that she
+should be sitting at the head of the table, wearing a green wreath and
+gold-embroidered robe, while Undine was lying a corpse, stiff and
+cold, at the bottom of the Danube, or carried out by the current into
+the ocean. For ever since her father had suggested something of this
+sort, his words were continually sounding in her ear; and this day in
+particular, they would neither fade from her memory nor yield to other
+thoughts.
+
+Evening had scarcely arrived when the company returned to their homes;
+not dismissed by the impatience of the bridegroom, as wedding parties
+are sometimes broken up, but constrained solely by heavy sadness and
+forebodings of evil. Bertalda retired with her maidens, and the knight
+with his attendants, to undress; but there was no gay laughing company
+of bridesmaids and bridesmen at this mournful festival.
+
+Bertalda wished to awake more cheerful thoughts: she ordered her
+maidens to spread before her a brilliant set of jewels, a present from
+Huldbrand, together with rich apparel and veils, that she might select
+from among them the brightest and most beautiful for her dress in the
+morning. The attendants rejoiced at this opportunity of pouring forth
+good wishes and promises of happiness to their young mistress, and
+failed not to extol the beauty of the bride with the most glowing
+eloquence. This went on for a long time, until Bertalda at last,
+looking in a mirror, said with a sigh:--
+
+"Ah, but do you not see plainly how freckled I am growing? Look here
+on the side of my neck."
+
+They looked at the place and found the freckles indeed, as their fair
+mistress had said; but they called them mere beauty-spots, the
+faintest touches of the sun, such as would only heighten the whiteness
+of her delicate complexion. Bertalda shook her head, and still viewed
+them as a blemish.
+
+"And I could remove them," she said at last, sighing. "But the castle
+fountain is covered, from which I formerly used to have that precious
+water, so purifying to the skin. Oh, had I this evening only a single
+flask of it!"
+
+"Is that all?" cried an alert waiting-maid, laughing as she glided out
+of the apartment.
+
+"She will not be so foolish," said Bertalda, well pleased and
+surprised, "as to cause the stone cover of the fountain to be taken
+off this very evening?" That instant they heard the tread of men
+already passing along the court-yard, and could see from the window
+where the officious maiden was leading them directly up to the
+fountain, and that they carried levers and other instruments on their
+shoulders.
+
+"It is certainly my will," said Bertalda with a smile, "if it does not
+take them too long." And pleased with the thought that a word from her
+was now sufficient to accomplish what had formerly been refused with a
+painful reproof, she looked down upon their operations in the bright
+moonlit castle court.
+
+The men raised the enormous stone with an effort; some one of the
+number indeed would occasionally sigh, when he recollected that they
+were destroying the work of their former beloved mistress. Their
+labor, however, was much lighter than they had expected. It seemed as
+if some power from within the fountain itself aided them in raising
+the stone.
+
+"It appears," said the workmen to one another in astonishment, "as if
+the confined water had become a springing fountain." And the stone
+rose more and more, and almost without the assistance of the
+workpeople, rolled slowly down upon the pavement with a hollow sound.
+But an appearance from the opening of the fountain filled them with
+awe, as it rose like a white column of water; at first they imagined
+it really to be a fountain, until they perceived the rising form to be
+a pale female, veiled in white. She wept bitterly, raised her hands
+above her head, wringing them sadly as with slow and solemn step she
+moved toward the castle. The servants shrank back, and fled from the
+spring, while the bride, pale and motionless with horror, stood with
+her maidens at the window. When the figure had now come close beneath
+their room, it looked up to them sobbing, and Bertalda thought she
+recognized through the veil the pale features of Undine. But the
+mourning form passed on, sad, reluctant, and lingering, as if going to
+the place of execution. Bertalda screamed to her maids to call the
+knight; not one of them dared to stir from her place; and even the
+bride herself became again mute, as if trembling at the sound of her
+own voice.
+
+While they continued standing at the window, motionless as statues,
+the mysterious wanderer had entered the castle, ascended the
+well-known stairs, and traversed the well-known halls, in silent
+tears. Alas, how differently had she once passed through these rooms!
+
+The knight had in the mean time dismissed his attendants. Half
+undressed and in deep dejection, he was standing before a large
+mirror; a wax taper burned dimly beside him. At this moment some one
+tapped at his door very, very softly. Undine had formerly tapped in
+this way, when she was playing some of her endearing wiles.
+
+"It is all an illusion!" said he to himself. "I must to my nuptial
+bed."
+
+"You must indeed, but to a cold one!" he heard a voice, choked with
+sobs, repeat from without; and then he saw in the mirror that the door
+of his room was slowly, slowly opened, and the white figure entered,
+and gently closed it behind her.
+
+"They have opened the spring," said she in a low tone; "and now I am
+here, and you must die."
+
+He felt in his failing breath that this must indeed be; but covering
+his eyes with his hands, he cried:--"Do not in my death-hour, do not
+make me mad with terror. If that veil conceals hideous features, do
+not lift it! Take my life, but let me not see you."
+
+"Alas!" replied the pale figure, "will you not then look upon me once
+more? I am as fair now as when you wooed me on the island!"
+
+"Oh, if it indeed were so," sighed Huldbrand, "and that I might die by
+a kiss from you!"
+
+"Most willingly, my own love," said she. She threw back her veil;
+heavenly fair shone forth her pure countenance. Trembling with love
+and the awe of approaching death, the knight leant towards her. She
+kissed him with a holy kiss; but she relaxed not her hold, pressing
+him more closely in her arms, and weeping as if she would weep away
+her soul. Tears rushed into the knight's eyes, while a thrill both of
+bliss and agony shot through his heart, until he at last expired,
+sinking softly back from her fair arms upon the pillow of his couch a
+corpse.
+
+"I have wept him to death!" said she to some domestics who met her in
+the ante-chamber; and passing through the terrified group, she went
+slowly out, and disappeared in the fountain.
+
+
+
+
+SONG FROM 'MINSTREL LOVE'
+
+
+  Oh welcome, Sir Bolt, to me!
+  And a welcome, Sir Arrow, to thee!
+    But wherefore such pride
+    In your swift airy ride?
+  You're but splints of the ashen tree.
+    When once on earth lying,
+    There's an end of your flying!
+      Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!
+    But we freshly will wing you
+    And back again swing you,
+    And teach you to wend
+    To your Moorish friend.
+
+  Sir Bolt, you have oft been here;
+  And Sir Arrow, you've often flown near;
+    But still from pure haste
+    All your courage would waste
+  On the earth and the streamlet clear.
+    What! over all leaping,
+    In shame are you sleeping?
+      Lullaby! lullaby! lullaby!
+    Or if you smote one,
+    'Twas but darklingly done,
+    As the grain that winds fling
+    To the bird on the wing.
+
+
+
+
+ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+(1844-)
+
+[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]
+
+
+Anatole France, whose real name of Thibault is sunk in his literary
+signature, was born in Paris, April 16th, 1844. His father, a wealthy
+bookseller, seems to have been a thoughtful, meditative man, and his
+mother a woman of great refinement and tenderness. Their son shows the
+result of the double influence. Always fond of books, he early devoted
+himself to literary work, and made his debut as writer in 1868 in a
+biographical study of Alfred de Vigny. This was shortly followed by
+two volumes of poetry: 'Les Poemes Dores' (Golden Verses) and 'Les
+Noces Corintheennes' (Corinthian Revels). Since this work of his youth
+he has published at least twelve novels and romances, of which the
+most familiar are: 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' (The Crime of
+Sylvestre Bonnard), 'Le Livre de Mon Ami' (My Friend's Book), 'Le Lys
+Rouge' (The Red Lily), and 'Les Desirs de Jean Servieu' (Jean
+Servieu's Wishes). Several volumes of essays, critical introductions
+to splendid editions of Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine, and Le Sage, of
+'Manon Lescaut' and 'Paul and Virginia,' numberless studies of men and
+books for the reviews and journals,--these measure the tireless
+industry of an incessant worker. In 1876 M. France became an attache
+of the Library of the Senate. In December 1896 he was received as
+member of the French Academy, succeeding to the chair of Ferdinand de
+Lesseps, whose eulogy he pronounced with exquisite taste and grace.
+
+Like Renan, whose disciple he is, this fine artist was formed in the
+clerical schools. His perfection of style, clear, distinguished,
+scintillating with wit and fancy, furnishes, as a distinguished French
+critic remarks, a strong contrast to the painful and heavy periods of
+the literary products of a State education. He is an enthusiastic
+humanist, a fervent Neo-Hellenist, delicately sensitive to the beauty
+of the antique, the magic of words, and the harmony of phrase.
+
+Outside of France, his best known works are 'Le Crime de Sylvestre
+Bonnard' (crowned by the Academy) and 'Le Livre de Mon Ami.' The
+first of these expresses the author's Hellenism, sentiment,
+experience, love of form, and gentle pessimism. Into the character of
+Sylvestre Bonnard, that intelligent, contemplative, ironical,
+sweet-natured old philosopher, he has put most of himself. In 'Le
+Livre de Mon Ami' are reflected the childhood and youth of the author.
+It is a living book, made out of the impulses of the heart, holding
+the very essence of moral grace, written with exquisite irony
+absolutely free from bitterness.
+
+It is to be regretted that in some of his later writings this charming
+writer has fallen short of the standard of these works, though the
+versatility of talent he displays is great and admirable. In 'Thais'
+he has painted the magnificent Alexandria of the Ptolemies; in 'Le Lys
+Rouge' the Florence of to-day. In 'La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque'
+(The Cook-Shop of the Queen Pedauque) and in 'Les Opinions de M.
+Jerome Coignard,' Gil Blas, Rabelais, Wilhelm Meister, and Montaigne
+seem to jostle each other. In 'Le Jardin d'Epicure' (The Garden of
+Epicurus) a modern Epicurus, discreet, indulgent, listless, listens to
+lively discussions between the shades of Plato, Origen, Augustine,
+Hegel, and Schopenhauer, while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a
+Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin
+agree in their estimate of a future life.
+
+In his own words, M. Anatole France has always been inclined to take
+life as a spectacle, offering no solution of its perplexities,
+proposing no remedies for its ills. His literary quality, as M. Jules
+Lemaitre observes, owes little or nothing to the spirit or literature
+of the North. His intelligence is the pure and extreme product of
+Greek and Latin tradition.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE GARDENS
+
+From 'The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.' Copyright, 1890, by Harper &
+Brothers
+
+
+                                                         APRIL 16.
+
+St. Droctoveus and the early abbots of Saint-Germain-des-Pres have
+been occupying me for the past forty years; but I do not know whether
+I shall be able to write their history before I go to join them. It is
+already quite a long time since I became an old man. One day last
+year, on the Pont des Arts, one of my fellow-members at the Institute
+was lamenting before me over the _ennui_ of becoming old.
+
+"Still," Sainte-Beuve replied to him, "it is the only way that has yet
+been found of living a long time."
+
+I have tried this way, and I know just what it is worth. The trouble
+of it is not that one lasts too long, but that one sees all about him
+pass away--mother, wife, friends, children. Nature makes and unmakes
+all these divine treasures with gloomy indifference, and at last we
+find that we have not loved,--we have only been embracing shadows. But
+how sweet some shadows are! If ever creature glided like a shadow
+through the life of a man, it was certainly that young girl whom I
+fell in love with when--incredible though it now seems--I was myself a
+youth.
+
+A Christian sarcophagus from the catacombs of Rome bears a formula of
+imprecation, the whole terrible meaning of which I only learned with
+time. It says:--"_Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may
+he die the last of his own people!_" In my capacity of archaeologist I
+have opened tombs and disturbed ashes, in order to collect the shreds
+of apparel, metal ornaments, or gems that were mingled with those
+ashes. But I did it only through that scientific curiosity which does
+not exclude the feelings of reverence and of piety. May that
+malediction graven by some one of the first followers of the Apostles
+upon a martyr's tomb never fall upon me! I ought not to fear to
+survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there
+are always some whom one can love.
+
+But the power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with
+age, like all the other energies of man. Example proves it; and it is
+this which terrifies me. Am I sure that I have not myself already
+suffered this great loss? I should surely have felt it, but for the
+happy meeting which has rejuvenated me. Poets speak of the Fountain of
+Youth: it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we
+take. And one passes by without drinking of it!
+
+The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed,
+all gray-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter--so
+that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now once more
+finds a purpose and a reason for being.
+
+To-day I "take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the
+terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite de
+Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. I sit and
+dream. My thoughts escape from my head like the foam from a bottle of
+beer. They are light, and their fizzing amuses me. I dream; such a
+pastime is certainly permissible to an old fellow who has published
+thirty volumes of texts, and contributed to the Journal des Savants
+for twenty-six years. I have the satisfaction of feeling that I
+performed my task as well as it was possible for me, and that I
+utilized to their fullest extent those mediocre faculties with which
+nature endowed me. My efforts were not all in vain, and I have
+contributed, in my own modest way, to that renaissance of historical
+labors which will remain the honor of this restless century. I shall
+certainly be counted among those ten or twelve who revealed to France
+her own literary antiquities. My publication of the poetical works of
+Gautier de Coincy inaugurated a judicious system and made a date. It
+is in the austere calm of old age that I decree to myself this
+deserved credit, and God, who sees my heart, knows whether pride or
+vanity have aught to do with this self-award of justice.
+
+But I am tired; my eyes are dim; my hand trembles, and I see an image
+of myself in those old men of Homer, whose weakness excluded them from
+the battle, and who, seated upon the ramparts, lifted up their voices
+like crickets among the leaves.
+
+So my thoughts were wandering, when three young men seated themselves
+near me. I do not know whether each one of them had come in three
+boats, like the monkey of La Fontaine, but the three certainly
+displayed themselves over the space of twelve chairs. I took pleasure
+in watching them, not because they had anything very extraordinary
+about them, but because I discerned in them that brave joyous manner
+which is natural to youth. They were from the schools. I was less
+assured of it by the books they were carrying than by the character of
+their physiognomy. For all who busy themselves with the things of the
+mind can be at once recognized by an indescribable something which is
+common to all of them. I am very fond of young people; and these
+pleased me, in spite of a certain provoking wild manner which recalled
+to me my own college days with marvelous vividness. But they did not
+wear velvet doublets and long hair, as we used to do; they did not
+walk about, as we used to do, with a death's-head; they did not cry
+out, as we used to do, "Hell and malediction!" They were quite
+properly dressed, and neither their costume nor their language had
+anything suggestive of the Middle Ages. I must also add that they paid
+considerable attention to the women passing on the terrace, and
+expressed their admiration of some of them in very animated language.
+But their reflections, even on this subject, were not of a character
+to oblige me to flee from my seat. Besides, so long as youth is
+studious, I think it has a right to its gayeties.
+
+One of them having made some gallant pleasantry which I forget, the
+smallest and darkest of the three exclaimed, with a slight Gascon
+accent:--
+
+"What a thing to say! Only physiologists like us have any right to
+occupy ourselves about living matter. As for you, Gelis, who only live
+in the past,--like all your fellow archivists and paleographers,--you
+will do better to confine yourself to those stone women over there,
+who are your contemporaries."
+
+And he pointed to the statues of the Ladies of Ancient France which
+towered up, all white, in a half-circle under the trees of the
+terrace. This joke, though in itself trifling, enabled me to know that
+the young man called Gelis was a student at the Ecole des Chartes.
+From the conversation which followed I was able to learn that his
+neighbor, blond and wan almost to diaphaneity, taciturn and sarcastic,
+was Boulmier, a fellow-student. Gelis and the future doctor (I hope he
+will become one some day) discoursed together with much fantasy and
+spirit. In the midst of the loftiest speculations they would play upon
+words, and make jokes after the peculiar fashion of really witty
+persons--that is to say, in a style of enormous absurdity. I need
+hardly say, I suppose, that they only deigned to maintain the most
+monstrous kind of paradoxes. They employed all their powers of
+imagination to make themselves as ludicrous as possible, and all their
+powers of reasoning to assert the contrary of common-sense. All the
+better for them! I do not like to see young folks too rational.
+
+The student of medicine, after glancing at the title of the book that
+Boulmier held in his hand, exclaimed:--
+
+"What!--you read Michelet--you?"
+
+"Yes," replied Boulmier very gravely. "I like novels."
+
+Gelis, who dominated both by his fine stature, imperious gestures, and
+ready wit, took the book, turned over a few pages rapidly, and said:--
+
+"Michelet always had a great propensity to emotional tenderness. He
+wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man who introduced
+_la paperasserie_ into the September massacres. But as emotional
+tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the
+victims. There is no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age.
+The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite
+unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever
+before. There is no common-sense in it; it is simply wonderful!
+Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies
+and fainting spells and epileptic fits over matters which he never
+deigns to explain. Childish outcries--_envies de femme grosse!_--and a
+style, my friends!--not a single finished phrase! It is astounding!"
+
+And he handed the book back to his comrade. "This is amusing madness,"
+I thought to myself, "and not quite so devoid of common-sense as it
+appears. This young man, though only playing, has sharply touched the
+defect in the cuirass."
+
+But the Provencal student declared that history was a thoroughly
+despicable exercise of rhetoric. According to him, the only true
+history was the natural history of man. Michelet was in the right path
+when he came in contact with the fistula of Louis XIV., but he fell
+back into the old rut almost immediately afterwards.
+
+After this judicious expression of opinion, the young physiologist
+went to join a party of passing friends. The two archivists, less well
+acquainted in the neighborhood of a garden so far from the Rue
+Paradis-aux-Marais, remained together, and began to chat about their
+studies. Gelis, who had completed his third class-year, was preparing
+a thesis, on the subject of which he expatiated with youthful
+enthusiasm. Indeed, I thought the subject a very good one,
+particularly because I had recently thought myself called upon to
+treat a notable part of it. It was the 'Monasticum Gallicanum.' The
+young erudite (I give him the name as a presage) wants to describe all
+the engravings made about 1690 for the work which Dom Michel Germain
+would have had printed, but for the one irremediable hindrance which
+is rarely foreseen and never avoided. Dom Michel Germain left his
+manuscript complete, however, and in good order when he died. Shall I
+be able to do as much with mine?--but that is not the present
+question. So far as I am able to understand, M. Gelis intends to
+devote a brief archaeological notice to each of the abbeys pictured by
+the humble engravers of Dom Michel Germain.
+
+His friend asked him whether he was acquainted with all the
+manuscripts and printed documents relating to the subject. It was then
+that I pricked up my ears. They spoke at first of original sources;
+and I must confess they did so in a satisfactory manner, despite
+their innumerable and detestable puns. Then they began to speak about
+contemporary studies on the subject.
+
+"Have you read," asked Boulmier, "the notice of Courajod?"
+
+"Good!" I thought to myself.
+
+"Yes," replied Gelis; "it is accurate."
+
+"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the article by Tamisey de Larroque in
+the Revue des Questions Historiques?"
+
+"Good!" I thought to myself, for the second time.
+
+"Yes," replied Gelis, "it is full of things...."
+
+"Have you read," said Boulmier, "the 'Tableau des Abbayes Benedictines
+en 1600,' by Sylvestre Bonnard?"
+
+"Good!" I said to myself, for the third time.
+
+"_Ma foi!_ no!" replied Gelis. "Bonnard is an idiot!"
+
+Turning my head, I perceived that the shadow had reached the place
+where I was sitting. It was growing chilly, and I thought to myself
+what a fool I was to have remained sitting there, at the risk of
+getting the rheumatism, just to listen to the impertinence of those
+two young fellows!
+
+"Well! well!" I said to myself as I got up. "Let this prattling
+fledgeling write his thesis, and sustain it! He will find my colleague
+Quicherat, or some other professor at the school, to show him what an
+ignoramus he is. I consider him neither more nor less than a rascal;
+and really, now that I come to think of it, what he said about
+Michelet awhile ago was quite insufferable, outrageous! To talk in
+that way about an old master replete with genius! It was simply
+abominable!"
+
+
+
+
+CHILD-LIFE
+
+From 'The Book of My Friend'
+
+
+Everything in immortal nature is a miracle to the little child.
+
+I was happy. A thousand things at once familiar and mysterious filled
+my imagination, a thousand things which were nothing in themselves,
+but which made my life. It was very small, that life of mine; but it
+was a life--which is to say, the centre of all things, the kernel of
+the world. Do not smile at what I say,--or smile only in sympathy, and
+reflect: whoever lives, be it only a dog, is at the centre of all
+things.
+
+Deciding to be a hermit and a saint, and to resign the good things of
+this world, I threw my toys out of the window.
+
+"The child is a fool!" cried my father, closing the window. I felt
+anger and shame at hearing myself thus judged. But immediately I
+considered that my father, not being so holy as I, could never share
+with me the glory of the blessed, and this thought was for me a great
+consolation.
+
+Every Saturday we were taken to confession. If any one will tell me
+why, he will greatly oblige me. The practice inspired me with both
+respect and weariness. I hardly think it probable that M. le Cure took
+a lively interest in hearing my sins; but it was certainly
+disagreeable to me to cite them to him. The first difficulty was to
+find them. You can perhaps believe me, when I declare that at ten
+years of age I did not possess the psychic qualities and the methods
+of analysis which would have made it possible rationally to explore my
+inmost conscience. Nevertheless it was necessary to have sins: for--no
+sins, no confession. I had been given, it is true, a little book which
+contained them all: I had only to choose. But the choice itself was
+difficult. There was so much obscurely said of "larceny, simony,
+prevarication"! I read in the little book, "I accuse myself of having
+despaired; I accuse myself of having listened to evil conversations."
+Even this furnished little wherewith to burden my conscience.
+Therefore ordinarily I confined myself to "distractions." Distractions
+during mass, distractions during meals, distractions in "religious
+assemblies,"--I avowed all; yet the deplorable emptiness of my
+conscience filled me with deep shame. I was humiliated at having no
+sins....
+
+I will tell you what, each year, the stormy skies of autumn, the first
+dinners by lamplight, the yellowing leaves on the shivering trees,
+bring to my mind; I will tell you what I see as I cross the Luxembourg
+garden in the early October days--those sad and beautiful days when
+the leaves fall, one by one, on the white shoulders of the statues
+there.
+
+What I see then is a little fellow who with his hands in his pockets
+is going to school, hopping along like a sparrow. I see him in thought
+only, for he is but a shadow, a shadow of the "me" as I was
+twenty-five years ago. Really, he interests me,--this little fellow.
+When he was living I gave him but little thought, but now that he is
+no more, I love him well. He was worth altogether more than the rest
+of the "me's" that I have been since. He was a happy-hearted boy as he
+crossed the Luxembourg garden in the fresh air of the morning. All
+that he saw then I see to-day. It is the same sky, and the same
+earth; the same soul of things is here as before,--that soul that
+still makes me gay, or sad, or troubled: only _he_ is no more! He was
+heedless enough, but he was not wicked; and in justice to him I must
+declare that he has not left me a single harsh memory. He was an
+innocent child that I have lost. It is natural that I should regret
+him; it is natural that I should see him in thought, and delight in
+recalling him to memory....
+
+Nothing is of more value for giving a child a knowledge of the great
+social machine than the life of the streets. He should see in the
+morning the milkwomen, the water carriers, the charcoal men; he should
+look in the shop windows of the grocer, the pork vender, and the
+wine-seller; he should watch the regiments pass, with the music of the
+band. In short, he should suck in the air of the streets, that he may
+learn that the law of labor is Divine, and that each man has his work
+to do in the world....
+
+Oh! ye sordid old Jews of the Rue Cherche-Midi, and you my masters,
+simple sellers of old books on the quays, what gratitude do I owe you!
+More and better than university professors, have you contributed to my
+intellectual life! You displayed before my ravished eyes the
+mysterious forms of the life of the past, and every sort of monument
+of precious human thought. In ferreting among your shelves, in
+contemplating your dusty display laden with the pathetic relics of our
+fathers and their noble thoughts, I have been penetrated with the most
+wholesome of philosophies. In studying the worm-eaten volumes, the
+rusty iron-work, the worn carvings of your stock, I experienced, child
+as I was, a profound realization of the fluent, changing nature of
+things and the nothingness of all, and I have been always since
+inclined to sadness, to gentleness, and pity.
+
+The open-air school taught me, as you see, great lessons; but the home
+school was more profitable still. The family repast, so charming when
+the glasses are clear, the cloth white, and the faces tranquil,--the
+dinner of each day with its familiar talk,--gives to the child the
+taste for the humble and holy things of life, the love of loving. He
+eats day by day that blessed bread which the spiritual Father broke
+and gave to the pilgrims in the inn at Emmaus, and says, like them,
+"My heart is warmed within me." Ah! how good a school is the school of
+home!...
+
+The little fellow of whom I spoke but just now to you, with a sympathy
+for which you pardon me, perhaps, reflecting that it is not egotistic
+but is addressed only to a shadow,--the little fellow who crossed the
+Luxembourg garden, hopping like a sparrow,--became later an
+enthusiastic humanist.
+
+I studied Homer. I saw Thetis rise like a white mist over the sea, I
+saw Nausicaa and her companions, and the palm-tree of Delos, and the
+sky, and the earth, and the sea, and the tearful smile of Andromache.
+I comprehended, I felt. For six months I lived in the Odyssey. This
+was the cause of numerous punishments: but what to me were _pensums_?
+I was with Ulysses on his violet sea. Alcestis and Antigone gave me
+more noble dreams than ever child had before. With my head swallowed
+up in the dictionary on my ink-stained desk, I saw divine
+forms,--ivory arms falling on white tunics,--and heard voices sweeter
+than the sweetest music, lamenting harmoniously.
+
+This again cost me fresh punishments. They were just; I was "busying"
+myself "with things foreign to the class." Alas! the habit remains
+with me still. In whatever class in life I am put for the rest of my
+days, I fear yet, old as I am, to encounter again the reproach of my
+old professor: "Monsieur Pierre Nozierre, you busy yourself with
+things foreign to the class."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the evening falls over the plane-trees of the Luxembourg, and the
+little phantom which I have evoked disappears in the shadow. Adieu!
+little "me" whom I have lost, whom I should forever regret, had I not
+found thee again, beautified, in my son!
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS'
+
+
+Irony and pity are two good counselors: the one, who smiles, makes
+life amiable; the other, who weeps, makes it sacred. The Irony that I
+invoke is not cruel. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle
+and benevolent. Her smile calms anger, and it is she who teaches us to
+laugh at fools and sinners whom, but for her, we might be weak enough
+to hate.
+
+
+
+
+ST. FRANCIS D'ASSISI
+
+(1182-1226)
+
+BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+
+
+Francis d'Assisi was at first called Francis Bernardone. His father
+Pietro was a merchant of Assisi, much given to the pomps and vanities
+of the world, a lover of France and of everything French. It was after
+a visit to France in 1182 that, rejoining his beloved wife Pica in the
+vale of Umbria, he found that God had given to him a little son. Pica
+called the boy John, in honor of the playmate of the little Christ;
+but Pietro commanded that he should be named Francis, because of the
+bright land from whence he drew the rich silks and thick velvets he
+liked to handle and to sell.
+
+The vale of Umbria is the place for poets; it should be visited in the
+summer, when the roses bloom on the trellises which the early Italian
+painters put as backgrounds to their mothers and children. Florence is
+not far away; and near is the birthplace of one of the fathers of the
+sonnet, Fra Guittone, and of another poet, Propertius.
+
+Francis's childhood, boyhood, and later youth were happy. His father
+denied him no luxury in his power to give; he was sent to the priests
+of the church of St. George. They taught him some Latin and much of
+the Provencal tongue,--for at that time there was no Italian language;
+there were only dialects, and the Provencal was used by the elegant,
+those who loved poetry. Francis Bernardone was one of these; he sang
+the popular Provencal songs of the day to the lute, for he had learned
+music. And so passionately did he long for "excess of it," that, the
+legend says, he stayed up all one night singing a duet with a
+nightingale. The bird conquered; and later, Francis made a poem
+glorifying the Creator who had given such a thrilling voice to it.
+
+Up to the age of twenty-four Francis had been one of the lightest
+hearted and the lightest headed of the rich young men of Assisi. His
+father openly rejoiced in his extravagance, and admired the graceful
+manner with which he wore gay clothes cut in latest fashions of
+France. Madonna Pica, his mother, trembled for his future, while she
+adored him and in spite of herself believed in him. Her neighbors
+reproached her: "Your son throws money away; he is the son of a
+prince!" And Pica, troubled, answered, "He whom you call the child of
+a prince will one day be a child of God."
+
+Pietro was delighted to see his son lead in all the sports of the
+_corti_ of Assisi. The _corti_ were associations of young men addicted
+to Provencal poetry and music and all sorts of gayety. Folgore da San
+Gemiano gives, in a series of sonnets, well translated by Dante
+Gabriel Rossetti, descriptions of their sports arranged according to
+the months. March was the season for
+
+  "--lamprey, salmon, eel, and trout,
+  Dental and dolphin, sturgeon, all the rout
+  Of fish in all the streams that fill the seas."
+
+In April are dances:--
+
+  "And through hollow brass
+  A sound of German music on the air."
+
+When summer came, Folgore says the _corti_ had other things:--
+
+  "For July, in Siena by the willow-tree
+  I give you barrels of white Tuscan wine,
+  In ice far down your cellars stored supine;
+  And morn and eve to eat, in company,
+  Of those vast jellies dear to you and me;
+  Of partridges and youngling pheasants sweet,
+  Boiled capons, sovereign kids;--and let their treat
+  Be veal and garlic, with whom these agree."
+
+Francis was permeated with the ideas of chivalry, and his language was
+its phraseology. So much was he in love with chivalry that he became
+the founder of a new order, whose patroness should be the Lady
+Poverty. Never had there been a time in Europe since the decay of the
+Roman empire, when poverty was more derided. Princes, merchants, even
+many prelates and priests, neglected and contemned the poor. The
+voices of the outcasts and the leper went up to God, and he sent their
+terrible echoes to awaken the heart of Francis.
+
+In Sicily, Frederick II.--the Julian of the time--lived among
+fountains and orange blossoms and gorgeous pomegranate arches,--a type
+of the arrogant voluptuousness of the time, a voluptuousness which
+Dante symbolized later as the leopard. Against this luxury Francis put
+the lady of his love, Poverty. In the 'Poetes Franciscains,' Frederick
+Ozanam says:--
+
+"He thus designated what had become for him the ideal of all
+perfection,--the type of all moral beauty. He loved to personify
+Poverty as the symbolic genius of his time: he imagined her as the
+daughter of Heaven; and he called her by turns the lady of his
+thoughts, his affianced, and his bride."
+
+The towns of Italy were continually at war, in 1206 and thereabout.
+Francis was taken prisoner in a battle of his native townsmen with the
+Perugians. Restless and depressed, unsatisfied by the revelry of his
+comrades, he threw himself into the train of the Count de Brienne, who
+was making war on the German Emperor for the two Sicilies. About this
+time, he was moved to give his fine military clothes to a shivering
+soldier. At Spoleto, after this act of charity, he dreamed that the
+voice of God asked what he valued most in life. "Earthly fame," he
+said.--"But which of two is better for you,--the Master, or the
+servant? And why will you forsake the Master for the servant, the Lord
+for the slave?"--"O Lord, what shall I do?" asked Francis.--"Return
+unto the city," said the voice, "and there it will be told you what
+you shall do and how you may interpret this vision."
+
+He obeyed; he left the army; his old companions were glad to see him,
+and again he joined the _corti_. But he was paler and more silent.
+"You are in love!" his companions said, laughingly.
+
+"I am in truth thinking of a bride more noble, more richly dowered,
+and more beautiful than the world has ever seen."
+
+Pietro was away from home, and his son made donations to the poor. He
+grew more tranquil, though the Voice had not explained its message. He
+knelt at the foot of the crucifix one day in the old chapel of St.
+Damian, and waited. Then the revelation came:--"Francis, go to rebuild
+my house, which is falling into ruin!"
+
+Francis took this command, which seemed to have come from the lips of
+his crucified Redeemer, literally. It meant that he should repair the
+chapel of St. Damian. Later, he accepted it in a broader sense. More
+important things than the walls of St. Damian were falling into ruin.
+
+Francis was a man of action, and one who took life literally. He went
+to his father's shop, chose some precious stuffs, and sold them with
+his horse at Foliquo, for much below their value. Pietro had brought
+Francis up in a princely fashion: why should he not behave as a
+prince? And surely the father who had not grudged the richest of his
+stuffs for the celebrations of the _corti_, would not object to their
+sacrifice at the command of the Voice for the repairing of St. Damian!
+Pietro, who had not heard the Voice, vowed vengeance on his son for
+his foolishness. The priest at St. Damian's had refused the money; but
+Francis threw it into the window, and Pietro, finding it, went away
+swearing that his son had kept some of it. Francis wandered about
+begging stones for the rebuilding of St. Damian's. Pietro, maddened by
+the foolishness of his son, appealed to a magistrate. Francis cast off
+all his garments, and gave them to his father. The Bishop of Assisi
+covered his nakedness with his own mantle until the gown of a poor
+laborer was brought to him. Dipping his right hand in a pile of
+mortar, Francis drew a rough cross upon his breast: "Pietro
+Bernardone," he said, "until now I have called you my father;
+henceforth I can truly say, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' for
+he is my wealth, and in him do I place all my hope."
+
+Francis went away, to build his chapel and sing in the Provencal
+speech hymns in honor of God and of love for his greatness. In June
+1208 he began to preach. He converted two men, one rich and of rank,
+the other a priest. They gave all to the poor, and took up their abode
+near a hospital for lepers. They had no home but the chapel of the
+Angels, near the Portiuncula. This was the beginning of the great
+order of the Friars Minors, the Franciscans.
+
+Francis was the first poet to use the Italian speech--a poet who was
+inspired to change the fate of Europe. "He would never," the author of
+a recent monograph on St. Francis says, "destroy or tread on a written
+page. If it were Christian writing, it might contain the name of God;
+even if it were the work of a pagan, it contained the letters that
+make up the sacred name. When St. Francis, of the people and singing
+for the people, wrote in the vernacular, he asked Fra Pacifico, who
+had been a great poet in the world, to reduce his verses to the rules
+of metre."
+
+St. Bonaventura, Jacomino di Verona, and Jacopone di Todi, the author
+of the 'Stabat Mater,' were Franciscans who followed in his footsteps.
+"The Crusades were," to quote again, "defensive as well as offensive.
+The Sultan, whom St. Francis visited and filled with respect, was not
+far from Christendom." Frederick of Sicily, with his Saracens, menaced
+Assisi itself. Hideous doctrines and practices were rife; and the
+thirty thousand friars who soon enrolled themselves in the band of
+Francis gained the love of the people, preached Christianity anew,
+symbolized it rudely for folk that could not read, and, as St. Francis
+had done, they appealed to the imagination. The legends of St.
+Francis--one can find them in the 'Little Flowers,' of which there are
+at least two good English translations--became the tenderest poems of
+the poor.
+
+If St. Francis had been less of a poet, he would have been less of a
+saint. He died a poet, on October 4, 1226: he asked to be buried on
+the Infernal Hill of Assisi, where the crusaders were laid to rest;
+"and," he said, "sing my 'Canticle of the Sun,' so that I may add a
+song in praise of my sister Death. The lines," he added, "will be
+found at the end of the 'Cantico del Sole.'"
+
+Paul Sabatier's 'Life of St. Francis,' and Mrs. Oliphant's, are best
+known to English-speaking readers. The most exhaustive 'Life' is by
+the Abbe Leon Le Monnier, in two volumes. It has lately been
+translated into English.
+
+                                 [Signature: Maurice Francis Egan]
+
+
+
+
+ORDER
+
+[_Our Lord Speaks_]
+
+
+  And though I fill thy heart with hottest love,
+    Yet in true order must thy heart love me,
+    For without order can no virtue be;
+  By thine own virtue, then, I from above
+  Stand in thy soul; and so, most earnestly,
+  Must love from turmoil be kept wholly free:
+    The life of fruitful trees, the seasons of
+    The circling year move gently as a dove:
+  I measured all the things upon the earth;
+    Love ordered them, and order kept them fair,
+      And love to order must be truly wed.
+  O soul, why all this heat of little worth?
+    Why cast out order with no thought of care?
+      For by love's heat must love be governed?
+
+                                Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.
+
+
+
+
+THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN
+
+
+    [The title is 'Incipiunt Laudes Creaturarum quas fecit
+    Franciscus ad Laudem et Honorem Dei cum esset Infirmus ad
+    Sanctum Damianum.' It is sometimes called the 'Canticle of
+    the Creatures.' It is in Italian, and it opens with these
+    words:--"Altissimi, omnipotente, bon Signore, tue so le laude
+    la gloria e l'onore et omne benedictione."]
+
+O Most High, Almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory,
+honor, and all blessing.
+
+Praised be my Lord God, with all his creatures, and specially our
+brother the sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light;
+fair is he, and he shines with a very great splendor. O Lord, he
+signifies to us thee!
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the
+which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and clouds,
+calms and all weather, by which thou upholdest life in all creatures.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable to
+us, and humble and precious and clean.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us
+light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant, and very mighty
+and strong.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us
+and keep us, and bringest forth divers fruits, and flowers of many
+colors, and grass.
+
+Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for love's
+sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who
+peacefully shall endure, for thou, O Most High, wilt give them a
+crown.
+
+Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from which no
+man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin. Blessed are those
+who die in thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no
+power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks
+to him and serve him with great humility.
+
+    [The last stanza, in praise of death, was added to the poem
+    on the day St. Francis left the world, October 4th, 1225.]
+
+                                Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN.]
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
+
+(1706-1790)
+
+BY JOHN BIGELOW
+
+
+The youngest son of the seventeen children of a Boston tallow-chandler
+named Franklin was born a subject of Queen Anne of England, on the 6th
+of January, 1706; and on the same day received the baptismal name of
+Benjamin at the Old South Church in that city. He continued for more
+than seventy of the eighty-four years of his life a subject of four
+successive British monarchs. During that period, neither Anne nor
+either of the three Georges who succeeded her had a subject of whom
+they had more reason to be proud, nor one whom at his death their
+people generally supposed they had more reason to detest. No
+Englishman of his generation can now be said to have established a
+more enduring fame, in any way, than Franklin established in many
+ways. As a printer, as a journalist, as a diplomatist, as a statesman,
+as a philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.
+
+On the other hand, it is no disparagement of the services of any of
+his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, to say that no one
+of his generation contributed more effectually to the dissolution of
+the bonds which united the principal British-American colonies to the
+mother country, and towards conferring upon them independence and a
+popular government.
+
+As a practical printer Franklin was reported to have had no superiors;
+as a journalist he exerted an influence not only unrivaled in his day,
+but more potent, on this continent at least, than either of his
+sovereigns or their Parliaments. The organization of a police, and
+later of the militia, for Philadelphia; of companies for extinguishing
+fires; making the sweeping and paving of the streets a municipal
+function; the formation of the first public library for Philadelphia,
+and the establishment of an academy which has matured into the now
+famous University of Pennsylvania, were among the conspicuous reforms
+which he planted and watered in the columns of the Philadelphia
+Gazette. This journal he founded; upon the earnings of it he mainly
+subsisted during a long life, and any sheet of it to-day would bring a
+larger price in the open market probably than a single sheet of any
+other periodical ever published.
+
+Franklin's Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism,
+published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,--better known since
+as Poor Richard,--is still one of the marvels of modern literature.
+Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication,
+exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue
+having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers,
+probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any
+other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the
+first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in
+foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being
+the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity
+entirely to its literary merit.
+
+What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and
+fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its
+reputation was established by its first number, and when its author
+was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years,
+and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward
+to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more
+impatience than now awaits a President's annual message to Congress.
+
+Franklin graduated from journalism into diplomacy as naturally as
+winter glides into spring. This was simply because he was by common
+acclaim the fittest man for any kind of public service the colony
+possessed, and especially for any duty requiring talents for
+persuasion, in which he proved himself to be unquestionably past
+master among the diplomatists of his time.
+
+The question of taxing the Penn proprietary estates in Pennsylvania,
+for the defense of the province from the French and Indians, had
+assumed such an acute stage in 1757 that the Assembly decided to
+petition the King upon the subject; and selected Franklin, then in the
+forty-first year of his age, to visit London and present their
+petition. The next forty-one years of his life were practically all
+spent in the diplomatic service. He was five years absent on this his
+first mission. Every interest in London was against him. He finally
+surmounted all obstacles by a compromise, which pledged the Assembly
+to pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed lands of the
+Penn estate,--the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the
+usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never
+forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.
+
+Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The
+question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust
+upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out
+again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he
+remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the
+surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the colonies would never be
+made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III.
+Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for
+Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his
+arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the
+Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies,
+placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first
+Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the
+imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the
+empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people
+and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on
+ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up
+the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September
+following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to
+be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and
+the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance
+of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly
+favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science.
+While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity,
+which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an
+English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of
+these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the
+Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent
+natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore,
+he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe,
+one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the
+eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three
+editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these
+advantages must be added another of even greater weight: his errand
+there was to assist in dismembering the British Empire, than which
+nothing of a political nature was at this time much nearer every
+Frenchman's heart.
+
+The history of this mission, and how Franklin succeeded in procuring
+from the French King financial aid to the amount of twenty-six
+millions of francs, at times when the very existence of the republic
+depended upon them, and finally a treaty of peace more favorable to
+his country than either England or France wished to concede, has been
+often told; and there is no chapter in the chronicles of this republic
+with which the world is more familiar.
+
+Franklin's reputation grew with his success. "It was," wrote his
+colleague John Adams, "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton,
+Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and
+esteemed than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the
+gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a
+greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon _le grand Franklin_
+would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever
+lived."
+
+A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty of peace in 1783,
+Franklin renewed an application which he had previously made just
+after signing the preliminary treaty, to be relieved of his mission;
+but it was not until the 7th of March, 1785, that Congress adopted a
+resolution permitting "the Honorable Benjamin Franklin to return to
+America as soon as convenient." Three days later, Thomas Jefferson was
+appointed to succeed him.
+
+On the 13th of September, 1785, and after a sojourn of nearly nine
+years in the French capital, first in the capacity of commissioner and
+subsequently of minister plenipotentiary, Franklin once more landed in
+Philadelphia, on the same wharf on which, sixty-two years before, he
+had stepped, a friendless and practically penniless runaway apprentice
+of seventeen.
+
+Though now in his seventy-ninth year, and a prey to infirmities not
+the necessary incidents of old age, he had scarcely unpacked his
+trunks after his return when he was chosen a member of the municipal
+council of Philadelphia, and its chairman. Shortly after, he was
+elected president of Pennsylvania, his own vote only lacking to make
+the vote unanimous. "I have not firmness," he wrote to a friend, "to
+resist the unanimous desire of my countryfolks; and I find myself
+harnessed again into their service another year. They engrossed the
+prime of my life; they have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to
+pick my bones."
+
+He was unanimously re-elected to this dignity for the two succeeding
+years, and while holding that office was chosen a member of the
+convention which met in May 1787 to frame the Constitution under which
+the people of the United States are still living.
+
+With the adoption of that instrument, to which he probably contributed
+as much as any other individual, he retired from official life; though
+not from the service of the public, to which for the remaining years
+of his stay on earth his genius and his talents were faithfully
+consecrated.
+
+Among the fruits of that unfamiliar leisure, always to be remembered
+among the noblest achievements of his illustrious career, was the part
+he had in organizing the first anti-slavery society in the world; and
+as its president, writing and signing the first remonstrance against
+slavery ever addressed to the Congress of the United States.
+
+In surveying the life of Dr. Franklin as a whole, the thing that most
+impresses one is his constant study and singleness of purpose to
+promote the welfare of human society. It was his daily theme as a
+journalist, and his yearly theme as an almanac-maker. It is that
+which first occurs to us when we recall his career as a member of the
+Colonial Assembly; as an agent of the provinces in England; as a
+diplomatist in France; and as a member of the conventions which
+crowned the consistent labors of his long life. Nor are there any now
+so bold as to affirm that there was any other person who could have
+been depended upon to accomplish for his country or the world, what
+Franklin did in any of the several stages of his versatile career.
+
+Though holding office for more than half of his life, the office
+always sought Franklin, not Franklin the office. When sent to England
+as the agent of the colony, he withdrew from business with a modest
+competence judiciously invested mostly in real estate. He never seems
+to have given a thought to its increase. Frugal in his habits, simple
+in his tastes, wise in his indulgences, he died with a fortune neither
+too large nor too small for his fame as a citizen or a patriot. For
+teaching frugality and economy to the colonists, when frugality and
+economy were indispensable to the conservation of their independence
+and manhood, he has been sneered at as the teacher of a
+"candle-end-saving philosophy," and his 'Poor Richard' as a
+"collection of receipts for laying up treasures on earth rather than
+in heaven." Franklin never taught, either by precept or example, to
+lay up treasures on earth. He taught the virtues of industry, thrift,
+and economy, as the virtues supremely important in his time, to keep
+people out of debt and to provide the means of educating and
+dignifying society. He never countenanced the accumulation of wealth
+for its own sake, but for its uses,--its prompt convertibility into
+social comforts and refinements. It would be difficult to name another
+man of any age to whom an ambition to accumulate wealth as an end
+could be imputed with less propriety. Though probably the most
+inventive genius of his age, and thus indirectly the founder of many
+fortunes, he never asked a patent for any of his inventions or
+discoveries. Though one of the best writers of the English language
+that his country has yet produced, he never wrote a line for money
+after he withdrew from the calling by which he made a modest provision
+for his family.
+
+For the remaining half of his life both at home and abroad, though
+constantly operating upon public opinion by his pen, he never availed
+himself of a copyright or received a penny from any publisher or
+patron for any of these labors. In none of the public positions which
+he held, even when minister plenipotentiary, did his pay equal his
+expenditures. He was three years president of Pennsylvania after his
+return from France, and for his services declined to appropriate to
+his own use anything beyond his necessary expenditures for stationery,
+postage, and transportation. It is not by such methods that men
+justly incur the implied reproach of "laying up treasures on earth,"
+or of teaching a candle-end-saving philosophy.
+
+Franklin courted fame no more than fortune. The best of his writings,
+after his retirement from journalism, he never gave to the press at
+all; not even his incomparable autobiography, which is still
+republished more frequently than any of the writings of Dickens or of
+Thackeray. He always wrote for a larger purpose than mere personal
+gratification of any kind. Even his bagatelles and _jeux d'esprit_
+read in the salons of Paris, though apparently intended for the eyes
+of a small circle, were inspired by a desire to make friends and
+create respect for the struggling people and the great cause he
+represented. Few if any of them got into print until many years after
+his decease.
+
+Franklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he
+entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as
+agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too
+eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not
+to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of
+every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly
+correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any
+distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say
+planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long
+resist.
+
+Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from
+his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least
+printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose
+names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about
+him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his
+autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official
+correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and
+correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr.
+Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson,
+Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters,
+Voltaire, the habitues of the Helvetius salon, the Marquis de Segur,
+the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le
+Veillard, the _maire_ of Passy,--all that we learn of his
+achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or
+many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might
+be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater
+obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and
+except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written
+anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written
+in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began
+to be published a quarter of a century after his death) that we must
+turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this
+last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his
+correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a
+necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the
+posthumous fame to which his correspondence during that period was
+destined to contribute so much. Hence, all the biographies--and they
+are numberless--owe almost their entire interest and value to his own
+pen. All, so far as they are biographies, are autobiographies; and for
+that reason it may be fairly said that all of them are interesting.
+
+It is also quite remarkable that though Franklin's life was a
+continuous warfare, he had no personal enemies. His extraordinary and
+even intimate experience of every phase of human life, from the very
+lowest to the very highest, had made him so tolerant that he regarded
+differences of opinion and of habits much as he regarded the changes
+of the weather,--as good or bad for his purposes, but which, though he
+might sometimes deplore, he had no right to quarrel with or assume
+personal responsibility for. Hence he never said or did things
+personally offensive. The causes that he represented had enemies, for
+he was all his life a reformer. All men who are good for anything have
+such enemies. "I have, as you observe," wrote Franklin to John Jay the
+year that he retired from the French mission, "some enemies in
+England, but they are my enemies as an American; I have also two or
+three in America who are my enemies as a minister; but I thank God
+there are not in the whole world any who are my enemies as a man: for
+by his grace, through a long life, I have been enabled so to conduct
+myself that there does not exist a human being who can justly say,
+'Ben Franklin has wronged me.' This, my friend, is in old age a
+comfortable reflection. You too have or may have your enemies; but let
+not that render you unhappy. If you make a right use of them, they
+will do you more good than harm. They point out to us our faults; they
+put us upon our guard and help us to live more correctly."
+
+Franklin's place in literature as a writer has not been generally
+appreciated, probably because with him writing was only a means, never
+an end, and his ends always dwarfed his means, however effective. He
+wrote to persuade others, never to parade his literary skill. He never
+wrote a dull line, and was never _nimious_. The longest production of
+his pen was his autobiography, written during the closing years of his
+life. Nearly all that he wrote besides was in the form of letters,
+which would hardly average three octavo pages in length. And yet
+whatever the subject he touched upon, he never left the impression of
+incompleteness or of inconclusiveness. Of him may be said, perhaps
+with as much propriety as of any other man, that he never said a word
+too soon, nor a word too late, nor a word too much. Tons of paper have
+been devoted to dissuasives from dueling, but the argument was never
+put more effectively than Franklin put it in these dozen lines of a
+letter to a Mr. Percival, who had sent him a volume of literary and
+moral dissertations.
+
+    "A gentleman in a coffee-house desired another to sit further
+    from him. 'Why so?'--'Because you stink.'--'That is an
+    affront, and you must fight me.'--'I will fight you if you
+    insist upon it, but I do not see how that will mend the
+    matter. For if you kill me, I shall stink too; and if I kill
+    you, you will stink, if possible, worse than at present.' How
+    can such miserable sinners as we are, entertain so much pride
+    as to conceit that every offense against our imagined honor
+    merits death? These petty princes, in their opinion, would
+    call that sovereign a tyrant who should put one of them to
+    death for a little uncivil language, though pointed at his
+    sacred person; yet every one of them makes himself judge in
+    his own cause, condemns the offender without a jury, and
+    undertakes himself to be the executioner."
+
+Some one wrote him that the people in England were abusing the
+Americans and speaking all manner of evil against them. Franklin
+replied that this was natural enough:
+
+    "They impute to us the evil they wished us. They are angry
+    with us, and speak all manner of evil of us; but we flourish
+    notwithstanding. They put me in mind of a violent High Church
+    factor, resident in Boston when I was a boy. He had bought
+    upon speculation a Connecticut cargo of onions which he
+    flattered himself he might sell again to great profit; but
+    the price fell, and they lay upon his hands. He was heartily
+    vexed with his bargain, especially when he observed they
+    began to grow in his store he had filled with them. He showed
+    them one day to a friend. 'Here they are,' said he, 'and they
+    are growing too. I damn them every day, but I think they are
+    like the Presbyterians; the more I curse them, the more they
+    grow.'"
+
+Mr. Jefferson tells us that Franklin was sitting by his side in the
+convention while the delegates were picking his famous declaration of
+Independence to pieces, and seeing how Jefferson was squirming under
+their mutilations, comforted him with the following stories, the rare
+excellence of which has given them a currency which has long since
+worn off their novelty:--
+
+    "'I have made it a rule,' said he, 'whenever in my power, to
+    avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a
+    public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will
+    relate to you.
+
+    "'When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an
+    apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to
+    open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a
+    handsome sign-board with the proper inscription. He composed
+    it in these words: _John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells
+    Hats for ready Money_, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But
+    he thought he would submit it to his friends for their
+    amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word
+    _hatter_ tautologous, because followed by the words _makes
+    hats_, which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The
+    next observed that the word _makes_ might as well be omitted,
+    because his customers would not care who made the hats; if
+    good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.
+    He struck it out. A third said he thought the words _for
+    ready money_ were useless, as it was not the custom of the
+    place to sell on credit: every one who purchased expected to
+    pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood,
+    _John Thompson sells hats_. "_Sells_ hats," says his next
+    friend; "why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What
+    then is the use of that word?" It was stricken out, and
+    _hats_ followed, the rather as there was one painted on the
+    board. So his inscription was ultimately reduced to _John
+    Thompson_, with the figure of a hat subjoined.'"
+
+When the members were about to sign the document, Mr. Hancock is
+reported to have said, "We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling
+different ways; we must all hang together." "Yes," replied Franklin,
+"we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang
+separately."
+
+The Doric simplicity of his style; his incomparable facility of
+condensing a great principle into an apologue or an anecdote, many of
+which, as he applied them, have become the folk-lore of all nations;
+his habitual moderation of statement, his aversion to exaggeration,
+his inflexible logic, and his perfect truthfulness,--made him one of
+the most persuasive men of his time, and his writings a model which no
+one can study without profit. A judicious selection from Franklin's
+writings should constitute a part of the curriculum of every college
+and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure style
+and correct literary taste.
+
+There was one incident in Franklin's life, which, though more
+frequently referred to in terms of reproach than any other, will
+probably count for more in his favor in the Great Assize than any
+other of his whole life. While yet in his teens he became a father
+before he was a husband. He never did what men of the loftiest moral
+pretensions not unfrequently do,--shirk as far as possible any
+personal responsibility for this indiscretion. On the contrary, he
+took the fruit of it to his home; gave him the best education the
+schools of the country then afforded. When he went abroad, this son
+accompanied him, was presented as his son wherever he went, was
+presented in all the great houses in which he himself was received; he
+entered him at the Inns of Court, and in due time had him admitted to
+the English bar; made him his private secretary, and at an early age
+caused him to be appointed by the Crown, Governor of New Jersey. The
+father not only did everything to repair the wrong he had done his
+son, but at a time when he was at the zenith of his fame and official
+importance, publicly proclaimed it as one of the great errors of his
+life. The world has always abounded with bastards; but with the
+exception of crowned heads claiming to hold their sceptres by Divine
+right, and therefore beyond the reach of popular criticism or
+reproach, it would be difficult to name another parent of his
+generation of anything like corresponding eminence with Franklin, who
+had the courage and the magnanimity to expiate such a wrong to his
+offspring so fully and effectively.
+
+Franklin was not a member of the visible Church, nor did he ever
+become the adherent of any sect. He was three years younger than
+Jonathan Edwards, and in his youth heard his share of the then
+prevailing theology of New England, of which Edwards was regarded, and
+perhaps justly, as the most eminent exponent. The extremes to which
+Edwards carried those doctrines at last so shocked the people of
+Massachusetts that he was rather ignominiously expelled from his
+pulpit at Northampton; and the people of Massachusetts, in very
+considerable proportions, gradually wandered over into the Unitarian
+communion. To Jonathan Edwards and the inflexible law of action and
+reaction, more than to Priestley or any one else of their generation,
+that sect owes to this day its numerical strength, its influence, and
+its dignity, in New England. With the creed of that sect Dr. Franklin
+had more in common than with any other, though he was much too wise a
+man to suppose that there was but one gate of admission to the Holy
+City. He believed in one God; that Jesus was the best man that ever
+lived, and his example the most profitable one ever given us to
+follow. He never succeeded in accepting the doctrine that Jehovah and
+Jesus were one person, or that miracles attributed to the latter in
+the Bible were ever worked. He thought the best service and sufficient
+worship of God was in doing all the good we can to his creatures. He
+therefore never occupied himself much with ecclesiastical ceremonies,
+sectarian differences, or theological subtleties. A reverend candidate
+for episcopal orders wrote to Franklin, complaining that the
+Archbishop of Canterbury had refused to ordain him unless he would
+take the oath of allegiance, which he was too patriotic a Yankee to
+do. Franklin, in reply, asked what necessity there was for his being
+connected with the Church of England; if it would not be as well were
+it the Church of Ireland. Perhaps were he to apply to the Bishop of
+Derry, who was a man of liberal sentiments, he might give him orders,
+as of that Church. Should both England and Ireland refuse, Franklin
+assumed that the Bishops of Sweden and Norway would refuse also,
+unless the candidates embraced Lutheranism. He then added:--
+
+    "Next to becoming Presbyterians, the Episcopalian clergy of
+    America, in my humble opinion, cannot do better than to
+    follow the example of the first clergy of Scotland, soon
+    after the conversion of that country to Christianity. When
+    the King had built the cathedral of St. Andrew's, and
+    requested the King of Northumberland to lend his bishops to
+    ordain one for them, that their clergy might not as
+    heretofore be obliged to go to Northumberland for orders, and
+    their request was refused, they assembled in the cathedral,
+    and the mitre, crosier, and robes of a bishop being laid upon
+    the altar, they after earnest prayers for direction in their
+    choice elected one of their own number; when the King said to
+    him, "_Arise, go to the altar, and receive your office at the
+    hand of God._" His brethren led him to the altar, robed him,
+    put the crosier in his hand and the mitre on his head, and he
+    became the first Bishop of Scotland.
+
+    "If the British islands were sunk in the sea (and the surface
+    of this globe has suffered great changes), you would probably
+    take some such method as this; and if they persist in denying
+    your ordination, it is the same thing. A hundred years hence,
+    when people are more enlightened, it will be wondered at that
+    men in America, qualified by their learning and piety to pray
+    for and instruct their neighbors, should not be permitted to
+    do it till they had made a voyage of six thousand miles out
+    and home, to ask leave of a cross old gentleman at
+    Canterbury."
+
+Franklin, however, was in no sense an agnostic. What he could not
+understand he did not profess to understand or believe; neither was
+he guilty of the presumption of holding that what he could not
+understand, he might not have understood if he had been a wiser and
+better man. Though impatient of cant and hypocrisy, especially in the
+pulpit, he never spoke lightly of the Bible, or of the Church and its
+offices. When his daughter Sally was about to marry, he wrote to
+her:--
+
+    "My dear child, the natural prudence and goodness of heart
+    God has blest you with, make it less necessary for me to be
+    particular in giving you advice. I shall therefore only say,
+    that the more attentively dutiful and tender you are towards
+    your good mamma, the more you will recommend yourself to me.
+    But why should I mention _me_, when you have so much higher a
+    promise in the Commandments, that such conduct will recommend
+    you to the favor of God? You know I have many enemies, all
+    indeed on the public account (for I cannot recollect that I
+    have in a private capacity given just cause of offense to any
+    one whatever): yet they are enemies, and very bitter ones;
+    and you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree
+    to you, so that your slightest indiscretions will be
+    magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound
+    and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to
+    be extremely circumspect in all your behavior, that no
+    advantage may be given to their malevolence.
+
+    "Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of
+    devotion in the Common Prayer Book is your principal business
+    there, and if properly attended to will do more towards
+    amending the heart than sermons generally can do. For they
+    were composed by men of much greater piety and wisdom than
+    our common composers of sermons can pretend to be; and
+    therefore I wish you would never miss the prayer days: yet
+    I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the
+    preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better
+    than the man, as sweet and clear waters come through very
+    dirty earth. I am the more particular on this head, as you
+    seemed to express a little before I came away some
+    inclination to leave our church, which I would not have you
+    do."
+
+I cannot more fitly close this imperfect sketch of America's
+most illustrious citizen, than by quoting from a touching and
+most affectionate letter from Mrs. Hewson (Margaret Stevenson),--one
+of Franklin's worthiest, most faithful, and most valued
+friends,--addressed to one of Franklin's oldest friends in England.
+
+    "We have lost that valued, venerable, kind friend whose
+    knowledge enlightened our minds and whose philanthropy warmed
+    our hearts. But we have the consolation to think that if a
+    life well spent in acts of universal benevolence to mankind,
+    a grateful acknowledgment of Divine favor, a patient
+    submission under severe chastisement, and an humble trust in
+    Almighty mercy, can insure the happiness of a future state,
+    our present loss is his gain. I was the faithful witness of
+    the closing scene, which he sustained with that calm
+    fortitude which characterized him through life. No repining,
+    no peevish expression ever escaped him during a confinement
+    of two years, in which, I believe, if every moment of ease
+    could be added together, would not amount to two whole
+    months. When the pain was not too violent to be amused, he
+    employed himself with his books, his pen, or in conversation
+    with his friends; and upon every occasion displayed the
+    clearness of his intellect and the cheerfulness of his
+    temper. Even when the intervals from pain were so short that
+    his words were frequently interrupted, I have known him to
+    hold a discourse in a sublime strain of piety. I say this to
+    you because I know it will give you pleasure.
+
+    "I never shall forget one day that I passed with our friend
+    last summer. I found him in bed in great agony; but when that
+    agony abated a little I asked if I should read to him. He
+    said yes; and the first book I met with was Johnson's 'Lives
+    of the Poets.' I read the 'Life of Watts,' who was a favorite
+    author with Dr. Franklin; and instead of lulling him to
+    sleep, it roused him to a display of the powers of his memory
+    and his reason. He repeated several of Watts's 'Lyric Poems,'
+    and descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of them
+    and of their pious author. It is natural for us to wish that
+    an attention to some ceremonies had accompanied that religion
+    of the heart which I am convinced Dr. Franklin always
+    possessed; but let us who feel the benefit of them continue
+    to practice them, without thinking lightly of that piety
+    which could support pain without a murmur, and meet death
+    without terror."
+
+Franklin made a somewhat more definite statement of his views on the
+subject of religion, in reply to an inquiry from President Styles of
+Yale College, who expressed a desire to know his opinion of Jesus of
+Nazareth. Franklin's reply was written the last year of his life, and
+in the eighty-fourth of his age:--
+
+    "You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first
+    time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your
+    curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify
+    it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of
+    the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he
+    ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we
+    render to him is doing good to his other children. That the
+    soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in
+    another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to
+    be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard
+    them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
+
+    "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly
+    desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he
+    left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to
+    see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting
+    changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in
+    England, some doubts as to his Divinity; though it is a
+    question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
+    and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I
+    expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less
+    trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if
+    that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of
+    making his doctrines more respected and more observed;
+    especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it
+    amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of
+    the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
+
+    "I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having
+    experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me
+    prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its
+    continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit
+    of meriting such goodness. My sentiments on this head you
+    will see in the copy of an old letter inclosed, which I wrote
+    in answer to one from an old religionist whom I had relieved
+    in a paralytic case by electricity, and who, being afraid I
+    should grow proud upon it, sent me his serious though rather
+    impertinent caution."
+
+                                         [Signature: John Bigelow]
+
+
+
+
+OF FRANKLIN'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with three
+children into New England about 1682. The conventicles having been
+forbidden by law and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable
+men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was
+prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy
+their mode of religion with freedom. By the same wife he had four
+children more born there, and by a second wife ten more, in all
+seventeen; of which I remember thirteen sitting at one time at his
+table, who all grew up to be men and women, and married. I was the
+youngest son and the youngest child but two, and was born in Boston,
+New England. My mother, the second wife, was Abiah Folger, daughter of
+Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom
+honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in his church history of
+that country, entitled 'Magnalia Christi Americana,' as "_a goodly,
+learned Englishman_," if I remember the words rightly. I have heard
+that he wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was
+printed, which I saw now many years since....
+
+My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was
+put to the grammar school at eight years of age, my father intending
+to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.
+My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very
+early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of
+all his friends that I should certainly make a good scholar,
+encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin too approved
+of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of
+sermons,--I suppose as a stock to set up with,--if I would learn his
+character. I continued, however, at the grammar school not quite one
+year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the
+class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was removed into
+the next class above it, in order to go with that into the third at
+the end of the year. But my father in the mean time,--from a view of
+the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he
+could not well afford, and the mean living many so educated were
+afterwards able to obtain,--reasons that he gave to his friends in my
+hearing,--altered his first intention, took me from the grammar
+school, and sent me to a school for writing and arithmetic, kept by a
+then famous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his
+profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging methods. Under him
+I acquired fair writing pretty soon, but I failed in the arithmetic,
+and made no progress in it. At ten years old I was taken home to
+assist my father in his business, which was that of a tallow-chandler
+and soap-boiler,--a business he was not bred to, but had assumed on
+his arrival in New England, and on finding his dyeing trade would not
+maintain his family, being in little request. Accordingly I was
+employed in cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping-mold and
+the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands, etc.
+
+I disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my
+father declared against it: however, living near the water, I was much
+in and about it, learnt early to swim well and to manage boats; and
+when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to
+govern, especially in any case of difficulty; and upon other occasions
+I was generally a leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into
+scrapes, of which I will mention one instance, as it shows an early
+projecting public spirit, though not then justly conducted.
+
+There was a salt-marsh that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge
+of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much
+trampling we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a
+wharf there, fit for us to stand upon; and I showed my comrades a
+large heap of stones which were intended for a new house near the
+marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the
+evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number of my
+playfellows, and working with them diligently like so many emmets,
+sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought them all away and built
+our little wharf. The next morning the workmen were surprised at
+missing the stones, which were found in our wharf. Inquiry was made
+after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of
+us were corrected by our fathers, and though I pleaded the usefulness
+of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not
+honest.
+
+I continued thus employed in my father's business for two years, that
+is, till I was twelve years old; and my brother John, who was bred to
+that business, having left my father, married, and set up for himself
+at Rhode Island, there was all appearance that I was destined to
+supply his place and become a tallow-chandler. But my dislike to the
+trade continuing, my father was under apprehensions that if he did not
+find one for me more agreeable, I should break away and get to sea, as
+his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation. He therefore sometimes
+took me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners,
+braziers, etc., at their work, that he might observe my inclination,
+and endeavor to fix it on some trade or other on land. It has ever
+since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools;
+and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it as to be
+able to do little jobs myself in my house when a workman could not
+readily be got, and to construct little machines for my experiments,
+while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my
+mind. My father at last fixed upon the cutler's trade, and my uncle
+Benjamin's son Samuel, who was bred to that business in London, being
+about that time established in Boston, I was sent to be with him some
+time on liking. But his expectations of a fee with me displeasing my
+father, I was taken home again.
+
+From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came
+into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's
+Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate
+little volumes. I afterward sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton's
+'Historical Collections'; they were small chapmen's books, and cheap,
+40 or 50 in all. My father's little library consisted chiefly of books
+in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often
+regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more
+proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved I
+should not be a clergyman. Plutarch's Lives there was, in which I read
+abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage.
+There was also a book of De Foe's, called 'An Essay on Projects,' and
+another of Dr. Mather's, called 'Essays To Do Good,' which perhaps
+gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the
+principal future events of my life.
+
+This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a
+printer, though he had already one son (James) of that profession. In
+1717 my brother James returned from England with a press and letters,
+to set up his business in Boston. I liked it much better than that of
+my father, but still had a hankering for the sea. To prevent the
+apprehended effect of such an inclination, my father was impatient to
+have me bound to my brother. I stood out some time, but at last was
+persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve years
+old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of
+age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year.
+In a little time I made great proficiency in the business, and became
+a useful hand to my brother. I now had access to better books. An
+acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes
+to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and clean.
+Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when
+the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the
+morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.
+
+
+
+
+FRANKLIN'S JOURNEY TO PHILADELPHIA: HIS ARRIVAL THERE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+I proceeded on my journey on foot, having fifty miles to Burlington,
+where I was told I should find boats that would carry me the rest of
+the way to Philadelphia.
+
+It rained very hard all the day; I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon
+a good deal tired; so I stopt at a poor inn, where I stayed all night,
+beginning now to wish that I had never left home. I cut so miserable a
+figure too that I found, by the questions asked me, I was suspected to
+be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that
+suspicion. However, I proceeded the next day, and got in the evening
+to an inn within eight or ten miles of Burlington, kept by one Dr.
+Brown. He entered into conversation with me while I took some
+refreshment; and finding I had read a little, became very sociable and
+friendly. Our acquaintance continued as long as he lived. He had been,
+I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England or
+country in Europe of which he could not give a very particular
+account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an
+unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travestie the
+Bible in doggrel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he
+set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt
+weak minds if his work had been published, but it never was.
+
+At his house I lay that night, and the next morning reached
+Burlington, but had the mortification to find that the regular boats
+were gone a little before my coming, and no other expected to go
+before Tuesday, this being Saturday; wherefore I returned to an old
+woman in the town, of whom I had bought ginger-bread to eat on the
+water, and asked her advice. She invited me to lodge at her house
+till a passage by water should offer; and being tired with my
+foot-traveling, I accepted the invitation. She, understanding I was a
+printer, would have had me stay at that town and follow my business,
+being ignorant of the stock necessary to begin with. She was very
+hospitable, gave me a dinner of ox-cheek with great good-will,
+accepting only of a pot of ale in return; and I thought myself fixed
+till Tuesday should come. However, walking in the evening by the side
+of the river, a boat came by, which I found was going towards
+Philadelphia, with several people in her. They took me in, and as
+there was no wind, we rowed all the way; and about midnight, not
+having yet seen the city, some of the company were confident we must
+have passed it, and would row no farther; the others knew not where we
+were; so we put toward the shore, got into a creek, landed near an old
+fence, with the rails of which we made a fire,--the night being cold,
+in October,--and there we remained till daylight. Then one of the
+company knew the place to be Cooper's Creek, a little above
+Philadelphia, which we saw as soon as we got out of the creek, and
+arrived there about eight or nine o'clock on the Sunday morning, and
+landed at the Market Street wharf.
+
+I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and
+shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your
+mind compare such unlike beginnings with the figure I have since made
+there. I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round
+by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with
+shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for
+lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I
+was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch
+dollar and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of
+the boat for my passage, who at first refused it, on account of my
+rowing, but I insisted on their taking it; a man being sometimes more
+generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty,
+perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.
+
+Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house
+I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and inquiring
+where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to,
+in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in
+Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I
+asked for a threepenny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not
+considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater
+cheapness nor the names of his bread, I bade him give me threepenny
+worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I
+was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and having no room in my
+pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm and eating the other.
+Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the
+door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the
+door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward,
+ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and
+part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way, and coming round
+found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to
+which I went for a draught of the river water; and being filled with
+one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came
+down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther.
+
+Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had
+many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I
+joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the
+Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and after looking
+round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labor
+and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and
+continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to
+rouse me. This was therefore the first house I was in, or slept in, in
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+
+
+FRANKLIN AS A PRINTER
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+I now began to think of getting a little money beforehand, and
+expecting better work, I left Palmer's to work at Watts's, near
+Lincoln's Inn Fields, a still greater printing-house. Here I continued
+all the rest of my stay in London.
+
+At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at
+press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been used
+to in America, where presswork is mixed with composing. I drank only
+water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of
+beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types
+in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered
+to see, from this and several instances, that the _Water American_, as
+they called me, was _stronger_ than themselves, who drank _strong_
+beer! We had an alehouse boy, who attended always in the house to
+supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint
+before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a
+pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the
+afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's
+work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he
+supposed, to drink _strong_ beer that he might be _strong_ to labor. I
+endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer
+could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley
+dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour
+in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a
+pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.
+He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his
+wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was
+free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.
+
+Watts after some weeks desiring to have me in the composing-room, I
+left the pressmen: a new _bien venu_ or sum for drink, being five
+shillings, was demanded of me by the compositors. I thought it an
+imposition, as I had paid below: the master thought so too, and
+forbade my paying it. I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly
+considered as an excommunicate, and had so many little pieces of
+private mischief done me, by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages,
+breaking my matter, etc., etc., if I were ever so little out of the
+room,--and all ascribed to the chappel ghost, which they said ever
+haunted those not regularly admitted,--that notwithstanding the
+master's protection I found myself obliged to comply and pay the
+money, convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is
+to live with continually.
+
+I was now on a fair footing with them, and soon acquired considerable
+influence. I proposed some reasonable alterations in their chappel
+laws, and carried them against all opposition. From my example, a
+great part of them left their muddling breakfast of beer and bread and
+cheese, finding they could with me be supplied from a neighboring
+house with a large porringer of hot water-gruel sprinkled with pepper,
+crumbed with bread, and a bit of butter in it, for the price of a pint
+of beer; viz., three half-pence. This was a more comfortable as well
+as cheaper breakfast, and kept their heads clearer. Those who
+continued sotting with beer all day were often, by not paying, out of
+credit at the alehouse, and used to make interest with me to get beer;
+their _light_, as they phrased it, _being out_. I watched the
+pay-table on Saturday night, and collected what I stood engaged for
+them, having to pay sometimes near thirty shillings a week on their
+account. This, and my being esteemed a pretty good _rigile_,--that is,
+a jocular verbal satirist,--supported my consequence in the society.
+My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to
+the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being
+put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid. So I
+went on now very agreeably.
+
+
+
+
+RULES OF HEALTH
+
+From Poor Richard's Almanack: 1742
+
+
+Eat and drink such an exact quantity as the constitution of thy body
+allows of, in reference to the services of the mind.
+
+They that study much ought not to eat as much as those that work hard,
+their digestion being not so good.
+
+The exact quantity and quality being found out, is to be kept to
+constantly.
+
+Excess in all other things whatever, as well as in meat and drink, is
+also to be avoided.
+
+Youth, age, and sick require a different quantity.
+
+And so do those of contrary complexions; for that which is too much
+for a phlegmatic man, is not sufficient for a choleric.
+
+The measure of food ought to be (as much as possibly may be) exactly
+proportionable to the quality and condition of the stomach, because
+the stomach digests it.
+
+That quantity that is sufficient, the stomach can perfectly concoct
+and digest, and it sufficeth the due nourishment of the body.
+
+A greater quantity of some things may be eaten than of others, some
+being of lighter digestion than others.
+
+The difficulty lies in finding out an exact measure; but eat for
+necessity, not pleasure: for lust knows not where necessity ends.
+
+Wouldst thou enjoy a long life, a healthy body, and a vigorous mind,
+and be acquainted also with the wonderful works of God, labor in the
+first place to bring thy appetite to reason.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAY TO WEALTH
+
+From Poor Richard's Almanack
+
+
+Courteous reader, I have heard that nothing gives an author so great
+pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by others. Judge,
+then, how much I must have been gratified by an incident I am going to
+relate to you. I stopped my horse lately where a great number of
+people were collected at an auction of merchants' goods. The hour of
+the sale not being come, they were conversing on the badness of the
+times; and one of the company called to a plain, clean old man with
+white locks: "Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the times? Will
+not these heavy taxes quite ruin the country? How shall we ever be
+able to pay them? What would you advise us to?" Father Abraham stood
+up and replied, "If you would have my advice, I will give it you in
+short; for 'A word to the wise is enough,' as Poor Richard says." They
+joined in desiring him to speak his mind, and gathering round him, he
+proceeded as follows:--
+
+"Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those
+laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might
+more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more
+grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness,
+three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly;
+and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by
+allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and
+something may be done for us: 'God helps them that help themselves,'
+as Poor Richard says....
+
+"Beware of little expenses: 'A small leak will sink a great ship,' as
+Poor Richard says; and again, 'Who dainties love, shall beggars
+prove;' and moreover, 'Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.'
+
+"Here you are all got together at this sale of fineries and
+knick-knacks. You call them _goods_; but if you do not take care, they
+will prove _evils_ to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap,
+and perhaps they may, for less than they cost; but if you have no
+occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor
+Richard says: 'Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt
+sell thy necessaries.' And again, 'At a great pennyworth pause a
+while.' He means that perhaps the cheapness is apparent only and not
+real; or the bargain, by straitening thee in thy business, may do thee
+more harm than good. For in another place he says, 'Many have been
+ruined by buying good pennyworths.' Again, 'It is foolish to lay out
+money in a purchase of repentance;' and yet this folly is practiced
+every day at auctions, for want of minding the Almanack. Many a one,
+for the sake of finery on the back, have gone with a hungry belly and
+half starved their families. 'Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets,
+put out the kitchen fire,' as Poor Richard says.
+
+"These are not the necessaries of life; they can scarcely be called
+the conveniences: and yet, only because they look pretty, how many
+want to have them! By these and other extravagances the genteel are
+reduced to poverty, and forced to borrow of those whom they formerly
+despised, but who through industry and frugality have maintained their
+standing; in which case it appears plainly that 'A plowman on his legs
+is higher than a gentleman on his knees,' as poor Richard says.
+Perhaps they have had a small estate left them, which they knew not
+the getting of; they think, 'It is day, and will never be night;' that
+a little to be spent out of so much is not worth minding; but 'Always
+taking out of the meal-tub and never putting in, soon comes to the
+bottom,' as Poor Richard says; and then, 'When the well is dry, they
+know the worth of water.' But this they might have known before, if
+they had taken his advice. 'If you would know the value of money, go
+and try to borrow some: for he that goes a-borrowing goes
+a-sorrowing,' as Poor Richard says; and indeed, so does he that lends
+to such people, when he goes to get it in again. Poor Dick further
+advises and says:--
+
+  'Fond pride of dress is sure a very curse;
+  Ere fancy you consult, consult your purse.'
+
+And again, 'Pride is as loud a beggar as Want, and a great deal more
+saucy.' When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more,
+that your appearance may be all of a piece; but Poor Dick says, 'It is
+easier to suppress the first desire, than to satisfy all that follow
+it.' And it is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the
+frog to swell in order to equal the ox.
+
+  'Vessels large may venture more,
+  But little boats should keep near shore.'
+
+It is however a folly soon punished; for, as Poor Richard says, 'Pride
+that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. Pride breakfasted with Plenty,
+dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy.' And after all, of what
+use is this pride of appearance, for which so much is risked, so much
+is suffered? It cannot promote health nor ease pain; it makes no
+increase of merit in the person; it creates envy; it hastens
+misfortune.
+
+"But what madness must it be to _run in debt_ for these superfluities!
+We are offered by the terms of this sale six months' credit; and that
+perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare
+the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But ah! think
+what you do when you run in debt: you give to another power over your
+liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see
+your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will
+make poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your
+veracity and sink into base downright lying; for 'The second vice is
+lying, the first is running in debt,' as Poor Richard says: and again
+to the same purpose, 'Lying rides upon Debt's back;' whereas a
+free-born Englishman ought not to be ashamed nor afraid to see or
+speak to any man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all
+spirit and virtue. 'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'
+
+"What would you think of that prince or of that government who should
+issue an edict forbidding you to dress like a gentleman or a
+gentlewoman, on pain of imprisonment or servitude? Would you not say
+that you were free, have a right to dress as you please; and that such
+an edict would be a breach of your privileges, and such a government
+tyrannical? And yet you are about to put yourself under such tyranny,
+when you run in debt for such dress! Your creditor has authority, at
+his pleasure, to deprive you of your liberty by confining you in jail
+till you shall be able to pay him. When you have got your bargain, you
+may perhaps think little of payment; but as Poor Richard says,
+'Creditors have better memories than debtors; creditors are a
+superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.' The day
+comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you
+are prepared to satisfy it; or if you bear your debt in mind, the
+term which at first seemed so long will, as it lessens, appear
+extremely short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as
+well as his shoulders. 'Those have a short Lent who owe money to be
+paid at Easter.' At present, perhaps, you may think yourselves in
+thriving circumstances, and that you can bear a little extravagance
+without injury, but--
+
+  'For age and want save while you may;
+  No morning sun lasts a whole day.'
+
+Gain may be temporary and uncertain, but ever while you live, expense
+is constant and certain; and 'It is easier to build two chimneys than
+to keep one in fuel,' as Poor Richard says; so, 'Rather go to bed
+supperless than rise in debt.'
+
+  'Get what you can, and what you get hold;
+  'Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.'
+
+And when you have got the Philosopher's Stone, sure you will no longer
+complain of bad times or the difficulty of paying taxes.
+
+"This doctrine, my friends, is reason and wisdom: but after all, do
+not depend too much upon your own industry and frugality and prudence,
+though excellent things; for they may all be blasted, without the
+blessing of Heaven; and therefore ask that blessing humbly, and be not
+uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it; but comfort and
+help them. Remember, Job suffered and was afterwards prosperous.
+
+"And now, to conclude, 'Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will
+learn in no other,' as Poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it
+is true, 'We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.' However,
+remember this: 'They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped;'
+and further, that 'If you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap
+your knuckles,' as Poor Richard says."
+
+Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it and
+approved the doctrine; and immediately practiced the contrary, just as
+if it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened and they began
+to buy extravagantly. I found the good man had thoroughly studied my
+Almanacks, and digested all I had dropped on these topics during the
+course of twenty-five years. The frequent mention he made of me must
+have tired any one else; but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with
+it, though I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my
+own, which he had ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings that I had
+made of the sense of all ages and nations. However, I resolved to be
+the better for the echo of it; and though I had at first determined to
+buy stuff for a new coat, I went away resolved to wear my old one a
+little longer. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy profit will be as
+great as mine. I am, as ever, thine to serve thee,
+
+                                                   RICHARD SAUNDERS.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH IN THE FEDERAL CONVENTION, IN FAVOR OF OPENING ITS SESSIONS
+WITH PRAYER
+
+
+_Mr. President:_
+
+The small progress we have made, after four or five weeks' close
+attendance and continual reasons with each other, our different
+sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as
+many _Noes_ as _Ayes_, is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the
+imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to _feel_ our
+own want of political wisdom, since we have been running all about in
+search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of
+government, and examined the different forms of those republics,
+which, having been originally formed with the seeds of their own
+dissolution, now no longer exist; and we have viewed modern States all
+round Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our
+circumstances.
+
+In this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the dark to
+find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented
+to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once
+thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our
+understandings? In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we
+were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for the
+Divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard; and they were
+graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must
+have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our
+favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of
+consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national
+felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we
+imagine we no longer need its assistance? I have lived, sir, a long
+time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this
+truth, _that_ GOD _governs in the affairs of men_. And if a sparrow
+cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an
+empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the
+sacred writings, that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in
+vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that
+without his concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political
+building no better than the builders of Babel: we shall be divided by
+our little partial local interests, our projects will be confounded,
+and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future
+ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate
+instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom, and
+leave it to chance, war, and conquest.
+
+I therefore beg leave to move,--
+
+That henceforth prayers, imploring the assistance of Heaven and its
+blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning
+before we proceed to business; and that one or more of the clergy of
+this city be requested to officiate in that service.
+
+
+
+
+ON WAR
+
+
+I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war. Abstracted
+from the inhumanity of it, I think it wrong in point of human
+prudence; for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another,
+whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with
+them, free passage on their rivers, etc., it would be much cheaper to
+purchase such advantage with ready money than to pay the expense of
+acquiring it by war. An army is a devouring monster; and when you have
+raised it, you have, in order to subsist it, not only the fair charges
+of pay, clothing, provisions, arms, and ammunition, with numberless
+other contingent and just charges to answer and satisfy, but you have
+all the additional knavish charges of the numerous tribe of
+contractors to defray, with those of every other dealer who furnishes
+the articles wanted for your army, and takes advantage of that want to
+demand exorbitant prices. It seems to me that if statesmen had a
+little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars
+would be much less frequent. I am confident that Canada might have
+been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money England spent
+in the conquest of it. And if instead of fighting with us for the
+power of taxing us, she had kept us in good humor by allowing us to
+dispose of our own money, and now and then giving us a little of hers,
+by way of donation to colleges, or hospitals, or for cutting canals,
+or fortifying ports, she might have easily drawn from us much more by
+our occasional voluntary grants and contributions than ever she could
+by taxes. Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry
+pump, that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for.
+Her ministry were deficient in that little point of common-sense; and
+so they spent one hundred millions of her money and after all lost
+what they contended for.
+
+
+
+
+REVENGE
+
+LETTER TO MADAME HELVETIUS
+
+
+Mortified at the barbarous resolution pronounced by you so positively
+yesterday evening,--that you would remain single the rest of your
+life, as a compliment due to the memory of your husband,--I retired to
+my chamber. Throwing myself upon my bed, I dreamt that I was dead, and
+was transported to the Elysian Fields.
+
+I was asked whether I wished to see any persons in particular; to
+which I replied that I wished to see the philosophers.--"There are two
+who live here at hand in this garden; they are good neighbors, and
+very friendly towards one another."--"Who are they?"--"Socrates and
+Helvetius."--"I esteem them both highly; but let me see Helvetius
+first, because I understand a little French, but not a word of Greek."
+I was conducted to him: he received me with much courtesy, having
+known me, he said, by character, some time past. He asked me a
+thousand questions relative to the war, the present state of religion,
+of liberty, of the government in France. "You do not inquire, then,"
+said I, "after your dear friend, Madame Helvetius; yet she loves you
+exceedingly: I was in her company not more than an hour ago." "Ah,"
+said he, "you make me recur to my past happiness, which ought to be
+forgotten in order to be happy here. For many years I could think of
+nothing but her, though at length I am consoled. I have taken another
+wife, the most like her that I could find; she is not indeed
+altogether so handsome, but she has a great fund of wit and good
+sense; and her whole study is to please me. She is at this moment gone
+to fetch the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me; stay here awhile
+and you will see her." "I perceive," said I, "that your former friend
+is more faithful to you than you are to her; she has had several good
+offers, but refused them all. I will confess to you that I loved her
+extremely; but she was cruel to me, and rejected me peremptorily for
+your sake." "I pity you sincerely," said he, "for she is an excellent
+woman, handsome and amiable. But do not the Abbe de la Roche and the
+Abbe Morellet visit her?"--"Certainly they do; not one of your friends
+has dropped her acquaintance."--"If you had gained the Abbe Morellet
+with a bribe of good coffee and cream, perhaps you would have
+succeeded: for he is as deep a reasoner as Duns Scotus or St. Thomas:
+he arranges and methodizes his arguments in such a manner that they
+are almost irresistible. Or if by a fine edition of some old classic
+you had gained the Abbe de la Roche to speak _against_ you, that would
+have been still better; as I always observed that when he recommended
+anything to her, she had a great inclination to do directly the
+contrary." As he finished these words the new Madame Helvetius entered
+with the nectar, and I recognized her immediately as my former
+American friend Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she answered me
+coldly:--"I was a good wife to you for forty-nine years and four
+months,--nearly half a century; let that content you. I have formed a
+new connection here, which will last to eternity."
+
+Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately resolved to
+quit those ungrateful shades, and return to this good world again, to
+behold the sun and you! Here I am: let us _avenge ourselves_!
+
+
+
+
+THE EPHEMERA; AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE
+
+LETTER TO MADAME BRILLON OF PASSY, WRITTEN IN 1778
+
+
+You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy
+day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I
+stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the
+company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little
+fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told,
+were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living
+company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation.
+You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great
+application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the
+little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened
+through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as
+they in their natural vivacity spoke three, or four together, I could
+make but little of their conversation. I found however by some broken
+expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on
+the merit of two foreign musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a
+_moscheto_; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as
+regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living
+a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise,
+just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to
+complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and
+imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old
+gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to
+himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in
+hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the
+most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly
+harmony.
+
+"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race
+who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world,
+the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours;
+and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since by the
+apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature,
+and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the
+ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be
+extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in
+cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and
+destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no
+less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
+continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire.
+My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends
+of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them;
+for by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect
+to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my
+toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot
+live to enjoy? What the political struggles I have been engaged in for
+the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my
+philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general? for in
+politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of
+ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of
+other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in
+philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is
+short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I
+shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to
+nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no
+longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth
+hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to
+its end, and be buried in universal ruin?"
+
+To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but
+the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible
+conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind
+smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.
+
+
+
+
+A PROPHECY
+
+LETTER TO LORD KAMES, JANUARY 3D, 1760
+
+
+No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of
+Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a
+Briton. I have long been of opinion that _the foundations of the
+future grandeur and stability of the British empire lie in America_;
+and though like other foundations they are low and little now, they
+are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest
+political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected. I am therefore
+by no means for restoring Canada. If we keep it, all the country from
+the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled
+with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous,
+by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic sea will be
+covered with your trading ships; and your naval power, thence
+continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole
+globe, and awe the world! If the French remain in Canada they will
+continually harass our colonies by the Indians, and impede if not
+prevent their growth; your progress to greatness will at best be
+slow, and give room for many accidents that may forever prevent it.
+But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant,
+and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.
+
+
+
+
+EARLY MARRIAGES
+
+LETTER TO JOHN ALLEYNE, DATED CRAVEN STREET, AUGUST 9TH, 1768
+
+
+You desire, you say, my impartial thoughts on the subject of an early
+marriage, by way of answer to the numberless objections that have been
+made by numerous persons to your own. You may remember, when you
+consulted me on the occasion, that I thought youth on both sides to be
+no objection. Indeed, from the marriages that have fallen under my
+observation, I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the
+best chance of happiness. The temper and habits of the young are not
+become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life; they
+form more easily to each other, and hence many occasions of disgust
+are removed. And if youth has less of that prudence which is necessary
+to manage a family, yet the parents and elder friends of young married
+persons are generally at hand to afford their advice, which amply
+supplies that defect; and by early marriage, youth is sooner formed to
+regular and useful life; and possibly some of those accidents or
+connections that might have injured the constitution or reputation, or
+both, are thereby happily prevented.
+
+Particular circumstances of particular persons may possibly sometimes
+make it prudent to delay entering into that state; but in general,
+when nature has rendered our bodies fit for it, the presumption is in
+nature's favor, that she has not judged amiss in making us desire it.
+Late marriages are often attended, too, with this further
+inconvenience: that there is not the same chance that the parents will
+live to see their offspring educated. "_Late children_," says the
+Spanish proverb, "_are early orphans_." A melancholy reflection to
+those whose case it may be! With us in America, marriages are
+generally in the morning of life; our children are therefore educated
+and settled in the world by noon: and thus, our business being done,
+we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves;
+such as our friend at present enjoys. By these early marriages we are
+blessed with more children; and from the mode among us, founded by
+nature, every mother suckling and nursing her own child, more of them
+are raised. Thence the swift progress of population among us,
+unparalleled in Europe.
+
+In fine, I am glad you are married, and congratulate you most
+cordially upon it. You are now in the way of becoming a useful
+citizen; and you have escaped the unnatural state of celibacy for
+life, the fate of many here who never intended it, but who, having too
+long postponed the change of their condition, find at length that it
+is too late to think of it, and so live all their lives in a situation
+that greatly lessens a man's value. An odd volume of a set of books
+bears not the value of its proportion to the set. What think you of
+the odd half of a pair of scissors? It cannot well cut anything; it
+may possibly serve to scrape a trencher.
+
+Pray make my compliments and best wishes acceptable to your bride. I
+am old and heavy, or I should ere this have presented them in person.
+I shall make but small use of the old man's privilege, that of giving
+advice to younger friends. Treat your wife always with respect: it
+will procure respect to you, not only from her, but from all that
+observe it. Never use a slighting expression to her, even in jest; for
+slights in jest, after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry
+earnest. Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be
+industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate,
+and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be
+happy: at least, you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for
+such consequences. I pray God to bless you both; being ever your
+affectionate friend.
+
+
+
+
+THE ART OF VIRTUE
+
+From the 'Autobiography,' in Bigelow's Edition of Franklin's Works
+
+
+We have an English proverb that says, "_He that would thrive must ask
+his wife_." It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to
+industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me cheerfully in my
+business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing
+old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc. We kept no idle
+servants; our table was plain and simple, our furniture of the
+cheapest. For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and milk
+(no tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer, with a
+pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families, and make a
+progress, in spite of principle: being called one morning to
+breakfast, I found it in a china bowl, with a spoon of silver! They
+had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife, and had cost
+her the enormous sum of three-and-twenty shillings, for which she had
+no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought _her_ husband
+deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his
+neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate and china in our
+house, which afterward, in a course of years, as our wealth increased,
+augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value.
+
+I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and though some of
+the dogmas of that persuasion, such as _the eternal decrees of God,
+election, reprobation_, etc., appeared to me unintelligible, others
+doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of
+the sect (Sunday being my studying day), I never was without some
+religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of
+the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence;
+that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man;
+that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished and
+virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the
+essentials of every religion; and being to be found in all the
+religions we had in our country, I respected them all, though with
+different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mixed with
+other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or
+confirm morality, served principally to divide us and make us
+unfriendly to one another. This respect to all, with an opinion that
+the worst had some good effects, induced me to avoid all discourse
+that might tend to lessen the good opinion another might have of his
+own religion; and as our province increased in people, and new places
+of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary
+contribution, my mite for such purpose, whatever might be the sect,
+was never refused.
+
+Though I seldom attended any public worship, I had still an opinion of
+its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted, and I
+regularly paid my annual subscription for the support of the only
+Presbyterian minister or meeting we had in Philadelphia. He used to
+visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to attend his
+administrations; and I was now and then prevailed on to do so, once
+for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a good
+preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion
+I had for the Sunday's leisure in my course of study; but his
+discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of
+the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry,
+uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was
+inculcated or enforced; their aim seeming to be rather to make us
+Presbyterians than good citizens.
+
+At length he took for his text that verse of the fourth chapter of
+Philippians, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest,
+just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue or any
+praise, think on these things." And I imagined, in a sermon on such a
+text, we could not miss of having some morality. But he confined
+himself to five points only, as meant by the Apostle, viz.:--1.
+Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy
+Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the public worship. 4. Partaking of the
+Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God's ministers.--These might be
+all good things; but as they were not the kind of good things that I
+expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from
+any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more. I had
+some years before composed a little liturgy, or form of prayer, for my
+own private use (viz., in 1728), entitled 'Articles of Belief and Acts
+of Religion.' I returned to the use of this, and went no more to the
+public assemblies. My conduct might be blamable, but I leave it,
+without attempting further to excuse it; my present purpose being to
+relate facts, and not to make apologies for them.
+
+It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of
+arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any
+fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural
+inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or
+thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might
+not always do the one and avoid the other....
+
+I made a little book in which I allotted a page for each of the
+virtues. I ruled each page with red ink so as to have seven columns,
+one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for
+the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the
+beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues,
+on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little
+black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been
+committed respecting that virtue upon that day.
+
+And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom, I thought it right
+and necessary to solicit his assistance for obtaining it; to this end
+I formed the following little prayer, which was prefixed to my tables
+of examination, for daily use:--
+
+    "O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide!
+    Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest
+    interest. Strengthen my resolutions to perform what that
+    wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children
+    as the only return in my power for thy continual favors to
+    me."
+
+I used also sometimes a little prayer which I took from Thomson's
+Poems, viz.:--
+
+  "Father of light and life, thou Good supreme!
+  O teach me what is good; teach me thyself!
+  Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
+  From every low pursuit; and fill my soul
+  With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
+  Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!"
+
+I entered upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and
+continued it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was
+surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined;
+but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.
+
+My scheme of _Order_ gave me the most trouble; and I found that though
+it might be practicable where a man's business was such as to leave
+him the disposition of his time,--that of a journeyman printer, for
+instance,--it was not possible to be exactly observed by a master, who
+must mix with the world, and often receive people of business at their
+own hours. _Order_, too, with regard to places for things, papers,
+etc., I found extremely difficult to acquire. I had not been early
+accustomed to it; and having an exceeding good memory, I was not so
+sensible of the inconvenience attending want of method. This article,
+therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it
+vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had
+such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the
+attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that respect;
+like the man who in buying an axe of a smith, my neighbor, desired to
+have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith
+consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he
+turned, while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard and
+heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The
+man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went
+on, and at length would take his axe as it was without farther
+grinding. "No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have it
+bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes," says the man,
+"_but I think I like a speckled axe best_." And I believe this may
+have been the case with many who, having for want of some such means
+as I employed, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad
+habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle
+and concluded that "_a speckled axe was best_": for something that
+pretended to be reason was every now and then suggesting to me that
+such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery
+in morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a
+perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being
+envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults
+in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.
+
+In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to order; and now I
+am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.
+But on the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been
+so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the
+endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been
+if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by
+imitating the engraved copies, though they never reach the wished-for
+excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and
+is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.
+
+It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little
+artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor owed the constant
+felicity of his life down to his 79th year, in which this is written.
+What reverses may attend the remainder is in the hand of Providence;
+but if they arrive, the reflection on past happiness enjoyed ought to
+help his bearing them with more resignation. To Temperance he ascribes
+his long-continued health, and what is still left to him of a good
+constitution; to Industry and Frugality, the early easiness of his
+circumstances and acquisition of his fortune, with all that knowledge
+that enabled him to be a useful citizen, and obtained for him some
+degree of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice, the
+confidence of his country, and the honorable employs it conferred upon
+him; and to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even
+in the imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that evenness
+of temper, and that cheerfulness in conversation, which makes his
+company still sought for, and agreeable even to his younger
+acquaintance. I hope therefore that some of my descendants may follow
+the example and reap the benefit.
+
+It will be remarked that though my scheme was not wholly without
+religion, there was in it no mark of any of the distinguishing tenets
+of any particular sect. I had purposely avoided them; for being fully
+persuaded of the utility and excellency of my method, and that it
+might be serviceable to people in all religions, and intending some
+time or other to publish it, I would not have anything in it that
+should prejudice any one of any sect against it.
+
+In this piece it was my design to explain and enforce this doctrine:
+that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but
+forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
+considered; that it was therefore every one's interest to be virtuous,
+who wished to be happy even in this world; and I should from this
+circumstance (there being always in the world a number of rich
+merchants, nobility, States, and princes who have need of honest
+instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so
+rare) have endeavored to convince young persons that no qualities were
+so likely to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and
+integrity.
+
+My list of virtues contained at first but twelve: but a Quaker friend
+having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my
+pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content
+with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing
+and rather insolent, of which he convinced me by mentioning several
+instances;--I determined endeavoring to cure myself, if I could, of
+this vice or folly among the rest, and I added _Humility_ to my list,
+giving an extensive meaning to the word.
+
+I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the _reality_ of this
+virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the _appearance_ of it.
+I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments
+of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself,
+agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or
+expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as
+_certainly_, _undoubtedly_, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, _I
+conceive_, _I apprehend_, or _I imagine_ a thing to be so or so; or it
+_so appears to me at present_. When another asserted something that I
+thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him
+abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his
+proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain
+cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present
+case there _appeared_ or _seemed_ to me some difference, etc. I soon
+found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I
+engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed
+my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction;
+I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I
+more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join
+with me when I happened to be in the right.
+
+And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural
+inclination, became at length so easy and so habitual to me, that
+perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical
+expression escape me. And to this habit (after my character of
+integrity) I think it principally owing that I had early so much
+weight with my fellow-citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
+alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when
+I became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent,
+subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in
+language: and yet I generally carried my points.
+
+In reality, there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to
+subdue as _pride_. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle
+it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will
+every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it perhaps
+often in this history; for even if I could conceive that I had
+completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
+
+
+
+
+LOUIS HONORE FRECHETTE
+
+(1839-)
+
+BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
+
+
+Louis Honore Frechette, the best known of the French-Canadian poets,
+was born near the forties, at Levis, a suburb of Quebec. He is
+patriotic; his genius is plainly that of New France, while the form of
+it is of that older France which produced the too exquisite sonnets of
+Voiture; and what counts greatly with the Canadians, he has received
+the approbation of the Academy; he is a personage in Paris, where he
+spends a great deal of time. From 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary
+Workers: Montreal, 1873), we learn that the father of M. Frechette was
+a man of business, and that he did not encourage his son's poetic
+tendencies to the detriment of the practical side of his character.
+
+Levis has traditions which are part of that stirring French-Canadian
+history now being made known to us by Mrs. Catherwood and Gilbert
+Parker. And the great St. Lawrence spoke to him in
+
+  "All those nameless voices, which are
+  Beating at the heart."
+
+At the age of eight he began to write verses. He was told by his
+careful father that poets never become rich; but he still continued
+to make verses. He grew to be a philosopher as well as a poet, and a
+little later became firmly of Horace's opinion, that a poet to be
+happy does not need riches gained by work. His father, who no doubt
+felt that a philosopher of this cult was not fit for the world, sent
+him to the Seminary at Quebec. At the Seminary he continued to write
+verses. The teachers there found merit in the verses. The "nameless
+voices" still beat at his heart, though the desks of the preparatory
+college had replaced the elms of the St. Lawrence. But poets are so
+rare that even when one is caught young, his captors doubt his
+species. The captors in this case determined to see whether Pegasus
+could trot as well as gallop. "Transport yourself, little Frechette,"
+they said, "to the Council of Clermont and be a troubadour." What is
+time to the poet? He became a troubadour: but this was not enough; his
+preceptors were still in doubt; they locked him in a room and gave him
+as a subject the arrival of Mgr. de Laval in Canada. An hour passed;
+the first sufferings of the young poet having abated, he produced his
+verses. It was evident that Pegasus could acquire any pace. His
+talent was questioned no more.
+
+    [Illustration: _MUSIC, SCIENCE AND ART._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by Francois Lafon.]
+
+As he became older, Frechette had dreams of becoming a man of action,
+and began to learn telegraphy at Ogdensburg; but he found the art too
+long and life too brief. He went back to the seminary and contributed
+'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare Hours) to the college paper. From the
+seminary--the _Petit Seminaire_, of course,--he went to the College of
+Ste. Anne, to Nicolet, and finally to Laval University, "singing, and
+picking up such crumbs of knowledge as suited his taste."
+
+In 1864 M. Frechette was admitted to practice at the bar of Quebec. He
+was a poet first and always; but just at this time he was second a
+journalist, third a politician, and perhaps fourth a barrister. He
+began to publish a paper, Le Journal de Levis. It failed: disgusted,
+he bade farewell to Canada, and began in Chicago the publication of
+L'Observateur: it died in a day. He poured forth his complaints in
+'Voix d'un Exile' (The Voice of an Exile). "Never," cries M. Darveau
+in 'Nos Gens de Lettres' (Our Literary Workers), "did Juvenal scar the
+faces of the corrupt Romans as did Frechette lash the shoulders of our
+wretched politicians." His L'Amerique, a journal started in Chicago,
+had some success, but it temporarily ruined Frechette, as the Swiss
+whom he had placed in charge of it suddenly changed its policy, and
+made it sympathize with Germany in the Franco-Prussian war.
+
+Frechette's early prose is fiery and eloquent; his admirers compared
+it to that of Louis Veuillot and Junius, for the reason, probably,
+that he used it to denounce those whom he hated politically.
+Frechette's verse has the lyrical ring. And although M. Camille Doucet
+insisted that the French Academy in crowning his poems honored a
+Frenchman, it must be remembered that Frechette is both an American
+and a British subject; and these things, not likely to disarm
+Academical conservatism, made the action the more significant of the
+poet's value.
+
+There is strong and noble passion in 'La Voix d'un Exile' and in the
+'Ode to the Mississippi.' His arraignment of the Canadian politicians
+may be forgotten without loss,--no doubt he has by this time forgiven
+them,--but the real feeling of the poet, who finds in the Mississippi
+the brother of his beloved St. Lawrence, is permanent:--
+
+  "Adieu, vallons ombreux, mes campagnes fleuries,
+  Mes montagnes d'azur et mes blondes prairies,
+  Mon fleuve harmonieux, mon beau del embaume--
+  Dans les grandes cites, dans les bois, sur les greves,
+  Ton image flottera dans mes reves,
+                      O mon Canada, bien aime.
+
+  Je n'ecouterai plus, dans nos forets profondes,
+  Dans nos pres verdoyants, et sur nos grandes ondes,
+  Toutes ces voix sans nom qui font battre le coeur."
+
+    [Farewell, shaded valleys, my flowery meadows, my azure
+    mountains and my pale prairies, my musical stream, my fair
+    sky! In the great towns, in the wood, along the water-sides,
+    thy scenes will float on in my dreams, O Canada, my beloved!
+
+    I shall hear no more, in our deep forests, in our verdant
+    meads and upon our broad waters, all those nameless voices
+    which make one's heart throb.]
+
+In 1865 the first book of poems which appealed to the world from
+French Canada appeared. It was Frechette's 'Mes Loisirs' (My Spare
+Hours). Later came 'Pele-Mele' (Pell-Mell), full of fine cameo-like
+poems,--but like cameos that are flushed by an inner and vital fire.
+Longfellow praised 'Pele-Mele': it shows the influence of Hugo and
+Lamartine; it has the beauty of De Musset, with more freshness and
+"bloom" than that poet of a glorious past possessed; but there are
+more traces of Lamartine in 'Pele-Mele' than of Hugo.
+
+"Frechette's imagination," says an admiring countryman of his, "is a
+chisel that attacks the soulless block; and with it he easily forms a
+column or a flower." His poems have grown stronger as he has become
+more mature. There is a great gain in dramatic force, so that it has
+surprised none of his readers that he should have attempted tragedy
+with success. He lost some of that quality of daintiness which
+distinguished 'Le Matin' (Morning), 'La Nuit' (Night), and 'Fleurs
+Fanees' (Faded Flowers). The 'Pensees d'Hiver' (Winter Reflections)
+had this quality, but 'La Derniere Iroquoise' (The Last Iroquois) rose
+above it, and like much of 'Les Fleurs Boreales' (Boreal Flowers) and
+his latest work, it is powerful in spirit, yet retains the greatest
+chastity of form.
+
+M. Frechette translated several of Shakespeare's plays for the Theatre
+Francais. After 'Les Fleurs Boreales' was crowned by the Academy,
+there appeared 'Les Oiseaux de Neige' (The Snow-Birds), 'Feuilles
+Volantes' (Leaves in the Wind), and 'La Foret Vierge' (The Virgin
+Forest). The volume which shows the genius of Frechette at its highest
+is undoubtedly 'La Legende d'un Peuple' (The Legend of a Race), which
+has an admirable preface by Jules Claretie.
+
+                                 [Signature: Maurice Francis Egan]
+
+
+
+
+OUR HISTORY
+
+Fragments from 'La Legende d'un Peuple': translated by Maurice Francis
+Egan
+
+
+  O history of my country,--set with pearls unknown,--
+  With love I kiss thy pages venerated.
+
+  O register immortal, poem of dazzling light
+  Written by France in purest of her blood!
+  Drama ever acting, records full of pictures
+  Of high facts heroic, stories of romance,
+  Annals of the giants, archives where we follow,
+  As each leaf we turn, a life resplendent,
+  And find a name respected or a name beloved,
+  Of men and women of the antique time!
+
+  Where the hero of the past and the hero of the future
+  Give the hand of friendship and the kiss of love;
+  Where the crucifix and sword, the plowshare and the volume,--
+  Everything that builds and everything that saves,--
+  Shine, united, living glories of past time
+  And of time that is to be.
+
+  The glories of past time, serene and pure before you,
+  O virtues of our day!
+  Hail first to thee, O Cartier, brave and hardy sailor,
+  Whose footstep sounded on the unexplored shores
+  Of our immense St. Lawrence. Hail, Champlain,
+  Maisonneuve, illustrious founders of two cities,
+  Who show above our waves their rival beauties.
+  There was at first only a group of Bretons
+  Brandishing the sword-blade and the woodman's axe,
+  Sea-wolves bronzed by sea-winds at the port of St. Malo;
+  Cradled since their childhood beneath the sky and water.
+  Men of iron and high of heart and stature,
+  They, under eye of God, set sail for what might come.
+  Seeking, in the secrets of the foggy ocean,
+  Not the famous El Dorados, but a soil where they might plant,
+  As symbols of their saving, beside the cross of Christ,
+  The flag of France.
+
+  After them came blond-haired Normans
+  And black-eyed Pontevins, robust colonists,
+  To make the path a road, and for this holy work
+  To offer their strong arms: the motive was the same;
+  The dangers that they fronted brought out prodigies of courage.
+  They seemed to know no dangers; or rather,
+  They seemed to seek the ruin that they did not meet.
+  Frightful perils vainly rose before them,
+  And each element against them vainly had conspired:
+  These children of the furrow founded an empire!
+
+  Then, conquering the waves of great and stormy lakes,
+  Crossing savannahs with marshes of mud,
+  Piercing the depths of the forests primeval,
+  Here see our founders and preachers of Faith!
+  Apostles of France, princes of our God,
+  Having said farewell to the noise of the world,
+  They came to the bounds of the New World immense
+  To sow the seed of the future,
+  And to bear, as the heralds of eternal law,
+  To the end of the world the torch of progress.
+
+  Leaning on his bow, ferociously calm,
+  The child of the forest, bitter at heart,
+  A hunted look mingling with his piercing glance,
+  Sees the strangers pass,--encamped on the plain or ambushed in
+          the woods,--
+  And thinks of the giant spirits he has seen in his dreams.
+  For the first time he trembles and fears--
+  Then casting off his deceitful calm,
+  He will rush forth, uttering his war-cry,
+  To defend, foot by foot, his soil so lately virgin,
+  And ferocious, tomahawk in hand, bar this road to civilization!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A cowardly king, tool of a more cowardly court,
+  Satyr of the _Parc aux cerfs_, slave at the Trianon,
+  Plunged in the horrors of nameless debauches,
+  At the caprice of Pompadour dancing like an atom,--
+  The blood of his soldiers and the honor of his kingdom,
+  Of our dying heroes hearing he no voice.
+  Montcalm, alas! conquered for the first time,
+  Falling on the field of battle, wrapped in his banner.
+  Levis, last fighter of the last fight,
+  Tears--avenging France and her pride!--
+  A supreme triumph from fate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  That was all. In front of our tottering towers
+  The stranger planted his insolent colors,
+  And an old flag, wet with bitter tears,
+  Closed its white wings and went across the sea!
+
+
+
+
+CAUGHNAWAGA
+
+Paraphrased by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  A world in agony breathes its last sigh!
+    Gaze on the remnants of an ancient race,--
+    Great kings of desert terrible to face,
+  Crushed by the new weights that upon them lie;
+    Stand near the Falls, and at this storied place
+    You see a humble hamlet;--by-and-by
+  You'll talk of ambuscades and treacherous chase.
+
+  Can history or sight a traitor be?
+    Where are the red men of the rolling plains?
+    Ferocious Iroquois,--ah, where is he?--
+  Without concealment (this for all our pains!)
+  The Chief sells groceries for paltry gains,
+    With English tang in speech of Normandy!
+
+
+
+
+LOUISIANA
+
+Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  Land of the Sun! where Fancy free
+    Weaveth her woof beneath a sky of gold,
+  Another Andalusia, thee I see;
+    Thy charming memories my heart-strings hold,
+    As if the song of birds had o'er them rolled.
+
+  In thy fresh groves, where scented orange glows,
+    Circle vague loves about my longing heart;
+  Thy dark banana-trees, when soft wind flows,
+    In concert weird take up their sombre part,
+    As evening shadows, listening, float and dart.
+
+  'Neath thy green domes, where the lianas cling,
+    Show tropic flowers with wide-opened eyes,
+  With arteries afire till morn-birds sing;
+    More than old Werthier, in new love's surprise,
+    Stand on the threshold of thy Paradise.
+
+  Son of the North, I, of the realm of snows,--
+    Vision afar, but always still a power,--
+  In these soft nights and in the days of rose,
+    Dreaming I feel, e'en in the saddest hour,
+    Within my heart unclose a golden flower.
+
+
+
+
+THE DREAM OF LIFE
+
+TO MY SON
+
+Paraphrased from 'Les Feuilles Volantes,' by Maurice Francis Egan
+
+
+  At twenty years, a poet lone,
+    I, when the rosy season came,
+  Walked in the woodland, to make moan
+    For some fair dame;
+
+  And when the breezes brought to me
+    The lilac spent in fragrant stream,
+  I wove her infidelity
+    In love's young dream.
+
+  A lover of illusions, I!
+    Soon other dreams quite filled my heart,
+  And other loves as suddenly
+    Took old love's part.
+
+  One Glory, a deceitful fay,
+    Who flies before a man can stir,
+  Surprised my poor heart many a day,--
+    I dreamed of her!
+
+  But now that I have grown so old,
+    At lying things I grasp no more.
+  My poor, deceived heart takes hold
+    Of other lore.
+
+  Another life before us glows,
+    Casts on all faithful souls its gleam:
+  Late, late, my heart its glory knows,--
+    Of it I dream!
+
+
+
+
+HAROLD FREDERIC
+
+(1856-)
+
+[Illustration: HAROLD FREDERIC]
+
+
+Mr. Frederic was born in Utica, New York, August 19th, 1856. He spent
+his boyhood in that neighborhood, and was educated in its schools. The
+rural Central New York of a half-century ago was a region of rich
+farms, of conservative ideas, and of strong indigenous types of
+character. These undoubtedly offered unconscious studies to the future
+novelist.
+
+Like many of his guild he began writing on a newspaper, rising by
+degrees from the position of reporter to that of editor. The drill and
+discipline taught him to make the most of time and opportunity, and he
+contrived leisure enough to write two or three long stories. Working
+at journalism in Utica, Albany, and New York, in 1884 he became chief
+foreign correspondent of the New York Times, making his headquarters
+in London, where he has since lived.
+
+Mr. Frederic's reputation rests on journalistic correspondence of the
+higher class, and on his novels, of which he has published six. His
+stories are distinctively American. He has caught up contrasting
+elements of local life in the eastern part of the United States, and
+grouped them with ingenuity and power. His first important story was
+'Seth's Brother's Wife,' originally appearing as a serial in
+Scribner's Magazine. Following this came 'The Lawton Girl,' a study
+of rustic life; 'In the Valley,' a semi-historical novel, turning on
+aspects of colonial times along the Mohawk River; 'The Copperhead,'
+a tale of the Civil War; 'Mukena and Other Stories,' graphic character
+sketches, displaying humor and insight; 'The Damnation of Theron
+Ware,' the most serious and carefully studied of his books; and 'March
+Hares,' a sketch of contemporary society.
+
+A student of the life about him, possessing a dramatic sense and
+a saving grace of humor, Mr. Frederic in his fiction is often
+photographic and minute in detail, while he does not forget the
+importance of the mass which the detail is to explain or embellish.
+He likes to deal with types of that mixed population peculiar to
+the farming valleys of Central New York,--German, Irish, and
+American,--bringing out by contrast their marked social and individual
+traits. Not a disciple of realism, his books are emphatically "human
+documents."
+
+There is always moreover a definite plot, often a dramatic
+development. But it is the attrition of character against character
+that really interests him. 'Seth's Brother's Wife' and 'The Lawton
+Girl' leave a definite ethical intention. In the 'Damnation of Theron
+Ware' is depicted the tragedy of a weak and crude character suddenly
+put in touch with a higher intellectual and emotional life, which it
+is too meagre and too untrained to adopt, and through which it suffers
+shipwreck. In 'In the Valley' the gayety and seriousness of homely
+life stand out against a savage and martial background.
+
+Mr. Frederic profoundly respects his art, is never careless, and never
+unconscientious. Of his constructive instinct a distinguished English
+critic has said that it "ignores nothing that is significant; makes
+use of nothing that is not significant; and binds every element of
+character and every incident together in a consistent, coherent,
+dramatic whole."
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST RITE
+
+From 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Copyright 1896, by Stone &
+Kimball
+
+
+Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk, and his
+mind all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work and
+impatience to be at it, Theron Ware came abruptly upon a group of men
+and boys who occupied the whole path, and were moving forward so
+noiselessly that he had not heard them coming. He almost ran into the
+leader of this little procession, and began a stammering apology, the
+final words of which were left unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him
+and his talk were all the faces he saw.
+
+In the centre of the group were four workingmen, bearing between them
+an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured
+across them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by
+another blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From
+beneath its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown
+upward at such an angle as to hide everything beyond those in front.
+The tall young minister, stepping aside and standing tiptoe, could see
+sloping downward, behind this hedge of beard, a pinched and
+chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull
+lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
+
+Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter,
+a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in
+whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's
+workmen in the wagonshops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree
+in front of his employer's house, and being unused to such work, had
+fallen from the top and broken all his bones. They would have cared
+for him at Madden's house, but he insisted upon being taken home. His
+name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's
+and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause, the lad, a bright-eyed,
+freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information
+that his big brother had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance
+that he might be in time to administer "extry munction."
+
+The way of the silent little procession led through back
+streets,--where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the
+gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the
+passers-by,--and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy
+lane, before one of a half-dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps
+and debris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.
+
+A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some
+messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were
+whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster
+of women of the neighborhood; some of the more elderly of whom,
+shriveled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their
+eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently
+should rise into the _keen_ of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no
+moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than
+sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an
+instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked--one could have sworn
+impassively--into his staring eyes. Then, still without a word, she
+waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.
+
+Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself a minute later inside a
+dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
+from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved
+by the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze
+upon the open door of the only other apartment, the bedchamber.
+Through this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and
+standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife
+and old Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his
+crushed limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these
+proceedings, they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured
+man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home
+to his wife, and the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended
+to his religious duties. They admitted freely that by the light of his
+example, their own husbands and sons left much to be desired; and from
+this wandered easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But
+all the while their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron
+made out, after he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell,
+that many of them were telling their beads even while they kept the
+muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention to him,
+or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.
+
+Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a
+different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
+fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
+red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through
+the throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the
+owner of this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and
+pleasing spring attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized
+silver handle of a quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that
+her face was of a lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin,
+full red lips, and big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She
+made a grave little inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed
+in response. Since her arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others
+had entirely ceased.
+
+"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
+assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling
+that at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence
+in this Romish house was due. "I hope they won't feel that I have
+intruded."
+
+She nodded her head as if she quite understood.
+
+"They'll take the will for the deed," she whispered back. "Father
+Forbes will be here in a minute. Do you know, is it too late?"
+
+Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding
+bulk of a new-comer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the
+deferential way in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a
+passage, made his identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an
+unaccustomed way as this priest of a strange Church advanced across
+the room,--a broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height,
+with a shapely, strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm,
+commanding tread. He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small
+leather-bound case. To this and to him the women curtsied and bowed
+their heads as he passed.
+
+"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol, to Theron;
+and he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted
+the priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on
+the arm.
+
+"Just to tell you that I am here," she said. The priest nodded with a
+grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
+workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
+behind them.
+
+"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. "Stay here
+for a minute."
+
+She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
+tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among
+the crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table,
+covered with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a
+basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in
+readiness before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared
+space were kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the
+click of beads on their rosaries.
+
+The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway
+with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over
+his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender
+light.
+
+One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
+candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
+young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
+the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by
+Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and
+overflowed now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing
+with the others to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's
+white fingers; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in
+impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the
+priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears,
+nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil
+with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the
+invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all
+he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest
+rolled it forth in the 'Asperges me, Domine,' and 'Misereatur vestri
+omnipotens Deus,' with its soft Continental vowels and liquid _r_'s.
+It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the
+astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the 'Confiteor'
+vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a
+different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still
+dominated the murmured undertone of the other's prayers the last
+moment came.
+
+Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bed-sides; no
+other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the
+girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
+names,--'beatum Michaelem Archangelum,' 'beatum Joannem Baptistam,'
+'sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,'--invoked with such proud
+confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected
+him.
+
+He came out with the others at last,--the candles and the folded hands
+over the crucifix left behind,--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
+the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
+the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it
+had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all
+this.
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
+
+(1823-1892)
+
+BY JOHN BACH McMASTER
+
+[Illustration: EDWARD A. FREEMAN]
+
+
+Edward Augustus Freeman, one of the most prolific of recent English
+historians, was born at Harborne in Staffordshire, England, on August
+2d, 1823. His early education was received at home and in private
+schools, from which at the age of eighteen he went up to Oxford, where
+he was elected a scholar of Trinity College. Four years later (1845)
+he took his degree and was elected a Fellow of Trinity, an honor which
+he held till his marriage in 1847 forced him to relinquish it.
+
+Long before this event, Freeman was deep in historical study. His
+fortune was easy. The injunction that he should eat bread in the sweat
+of his face had not been laid on him. His time was his own, and was
+devoted with characteristic zeal and energy to labor in the field of
+history, which in the course of fifty years was made to yield him a
+goodly crop.
+
+Year after year he poured forth a steady stream of Essays, Thoughts,
+Remarks, Suggestions, Lectures, Short Histories on matters of current
+interest, little monographs on great events or great men,--all
+covering a range of subjects which bear evidence to most astonishing
+versatility and learning. Sometimes his topic was a cathedral church,
+as that of Wells or Leominster Priory; or a cathedral city, as Ely or
+Norwich. At others it was a grave historical theme, as the 'Unity of
+History'; or 'Comparative Politics'; or the 'Growth of the English
+Constitution from the Earliest Times'; or 'Old English History for
+Children.' His 'General Sketch of European History' is still a
+standard text book in our high schools and colleges. His 'William the
+Conqueror' in Macmillan's 'Twelve English Statesmen'; his 'Short
+History of the Norman Conquest of England' in the Clarendon Press
+Series; his studies of Godwin, Harold, and the Normans, in the
+'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' are the best of their kind.
+
+His contributions to the reviews and magazines make a small library,
+encyclopaedic in character. Thirty-one essays were published in the
+Fortnightly Review; thirty in the Contemporary Review; twenty-seven in
+Macmillan's Magazine; twelve in the British Quarterly, and as many
+more in the National Review; while such as are scattered through the
+other periodicals of Great Britain and the United States swell the
+list to one hundred and fifty-seven titles. Every conceivable subject
+is treated,--politics, government, history, field sports,
+architecture, archaeology, books, linguistics, finance, great men
+living and dead, questions of the day. But even this list does not
+comprise all of Freeman's writings, for regularly every week, for more
+than twenty years, he contributed two long articles to the Saturday
+Review.
+
+Taken as a whole, this array of publications represents an industry
+which was simply enormous, and a learning as varied as it was immense.
+If classified according to their subjects, they fall naturally into
+six groups. The antiquarian and architectural sketches and addresses
+are the least valuable and instructive. They are of interest because
+they exhibit a strong bent of mind which appears constantly in
+Freeman's works, and because it was by the aid of such remains that he
+studied the early history of nations. Then come the studies in
+politics and government, such as the essays on presidential
+government; on American institutional history; on the House of Lords;
+the growth of commonwealths, and such elaborate treatises as the six
+lectures on 'Comparative Politics,' and the 'History of Federal
+Government,'--all notable because of the liberal spirit and breadth of
+view that mark them, and because of a positiveness of statement and
+confidence in the correctness of the author's judgments. Then come the
+historical essays; then the lectures and addresses; then his
+occasional pieces, written at the request of publishers or editors to
+fill some long-felt want; and finally the series of histories on
+which, in the long run, the reputation of Freeman must rest. These, in
+the order of merit and value, are the 'Norman Conquest'; the 'Reign of
+William Rufus,' which is really a supplement to the 'Conquest'; the
+'History of Sicily,' which the author did not live to finish.
+
+The roll of his works is enough to show that the kind of history which
+appealed to Freeman was that of the distant past, and that which dealt
+with politics rather than with social life. Of ancient history he had
+a good mastery; English history from its dawn to the thirteenth
+century he knew minutely: European history of the same period he knew
+profoundly. After the thirteenth century his interest grew less and
+less as modern times were approached, and his knowledge smaller and
+smaller till it became that of a man very well read in history and no
+more.
+
+Freeman was therefore essentially a historian of the far past; and as
+such had, it is safe to say, no living superior in England. But in his
+treatment of the past he presents a small part of the picture. He is
+concerned with great conquerors, with military leaders, with battles
+and sieges and systems of government. The mass of the people have no
+interest for him at all. His books abound in battle-pieces of the age
+of the long-bow and the javelin, of the battle-axe, the mace, and the
+spear; of the age when brain went for little and when brawn counted
+for much; and when the fate of nations depended less on the skill of
+individual commanders than on the personal prowess of those who met in
+hand-to-hand encounters. He delights in descriptions of historic
+buildings; he is never weary of drawing long analogies between one
+kind of government and another; but for the customs, the manner, the
+usages, the daily life of the people, he has never a word. "History,"
+said he on one occasion, "is past politics; politics is present
+history," and to this epigram he is strictly faithful. The England of
+the serf and the villein, the curfew and the monastery, is brushed
+aside to leave room for the story of the way in which William of
+Normandy conquered the Saxons, and of the way in which William Rufus
+conducted his quarrels with Bishop Anselm.
+
+With all of this no fault is to be found. It was his cast of mind, his
+point of view; and the questions which alone concern us in any
+estimate of his work are: Did he do it well? What is its value? Did he
+make a real contribution to historical knowledge? What are its merits
+and defects? Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief
+merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an
+intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost;
+a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every
+man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to
+reproduce the past most graphically.
+
+From these merits comes Freeman's chief defect,--prolixity. His
+earnest desire to be accurate made him not only say the same thing
+over and over again, but say it with an unnecessary and useless
+fullness of detail, and back up his statement with a profusion of
+notes, which in many cases amount to more than half the text. Indeed,
+were they printed in the same type as the text, the space they occupy
+would often exceed it. Thus, in the first volume of the 'Norman
+Conquest' there are 528 pages of text, with foot-notes occupying from
+a third to a half of almost every page, and an appendix of notes of
+244 pages; in the second volume, the text and foot-notes amount to
+512, and the appendix 179; in the third, the text covers 562 and the
+appendix 206 pages. These notes are always interesting and always
+instructive. But the end of a volume is not the place for an
+exhibition of the doubts and fears that have tormented the historian,
+for a statement of the reasons which have led him to one conclusion
+rather than another, nor for the denunciation or reputation of the
+opinions of his predecessors. When the building is finished, we do not
+want to see the lumber used as the scaffolding piled in the back yard.
+Mr. Freeman's histories would be all the better for a condensation of
+the text and an elimination of the long appendices.
+
+With these exceptions, the workmanship is excellent. He entered so
+thoroughly into the past that it became to him more real and
+understandable than the present. He was not merely the contemporary
+but the companion of the men he had to deal with. He knew every spot
+of ground, every Roman ruin, every mediaeval castle, that came in any
+way to be connected with his story, as well as he knew the topography
+of the country that stretched beneath his study window, or the
+arrangement of the house in which he lived.
+
+In his histories, therefore, we are presented at every turn with
+life-like portraits of the illustrious dead, bearing all the marks of
+having been taken from life; with descriptions of castles and towers,
+minsters and abbeys, and of the scenes that have made them memorable;
+with comparisons of one ruler with another, always sane and just; and
+with graphic pictures of coronations, of battles, sieges, burnings,
+and all the havoc and pomp of war.
+
+The essays and studies in politics show Mr. Freeman in a yet more
+interesting light; many are elaborate reviews of historical works, and
+therefore cover a wide range of topics, both ancient and of the
+present time. Now his subject is Mr. Bryce's 'Holy Roman Empire'; now
+the Flavian Caesars; now Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer and the Homeric Age';
+now Kirk's 'Charles the Bold'; now presidential government; now
+Athenian democracy; now the Byzantine Empire; now the Eastern Church;
+now the growth of commonwealths; now the geographical aspects of the
+Eastern Question.
+
+By so wide a range of topics, an opportunity is afforded for a variety
+of remarks, analogies, judgments of men and times, far greater than
+the histories could give. In the main, these judgments may be
+accepted; but so thoroughly was Freeman a historian of the past, that
+some of his estimates of contemporary men and things were singularly
+erroneous. While our Civil War was still raging he began a 'History of
+Federal Government,' which was to extend from the Achaean League "to
+the disruption of the United States." A prudent historian would not
+have taken up the role of prophet. He would have waited for the end of
+the struggle. But absolute self-confidence in his own good judgment
+was one of Freeman's most conspicuous traits. His estimate of Lincoln
+is another instance of inability to understand the times in which he
+lived. In the 'Essay on Presidential Government,' published in the
+National Review in 1864 and republished in the first series of
+'Historical Essays' in 1871, the greatest President and the grandest
+public character the United States has yet produced is declared
+inferior to each and all the Presidents from Washington to John Quincy
+Adams. A comparison of Lincoln with Monroe or Madison or Jefferson by
+Freeman would have been entertaining.
+
+Two views of history as set forth in the essays are especially
+deserving of notice. He is never weary of insisting on the unity and
+the continuity of history in general and that of England in
+particular, and he attaches unreasonable importance to the influence
+of the Teutonic element in English history. This latter was the
+inevitable result of his method of studying the past along the lines
+of philology and ethnology, and has carried him to extremes which
+taken by anybody else he would have been quick to see.
+
+An examination of Freeman's minor contributions to the reviews--such
+essays, sketches, and discussions as he did not think important enough
+to republish in book form--is indicative of his interest in current
+affairs. They made little draft on his learning, yet the point of view
+is generally the result of his learning. He believed, for instance,
+that a sound judgment on the Franco-Prussian War could not be found
+save in the light of history. "The present war," he wrote to the Pall
+Mall Gazette, "has largely risen out of a misconception of history,
+out of the dream of a frontier of the Rhine which never existed. The
+war on the part of Germany is in truth a vigorous setting forth of the
+historical truth that the Rhine is, and always has been, a German
+river."
+
+Freeman was still busy with his 'History of Sicily' from the earliest
+times, and had just finished the preface to the third volume, when he
+died at Alicante in Spain, March 16th, 1892. Since his death a fourth
+volume, prepared from his notes, has been published.
+
+But one biography of Freeman has yet appeared, 'The Life and Letters
+of Edward A. Freeman,' by W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols., 1895.
+
+                                   [Signature: John Bach McMartin]
+
+
+
+
+THE ALTERED ASPECTS OF ROME
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' Third Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1879
+
+
+The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are
+the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the
+general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are
+fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that
+the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard--a sack and fire done in the
+cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor--was the immediate cause
+of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction
+which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were
+at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than
+dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could
+keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no
+resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on
+the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest
+itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient
+ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual
+amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without
+seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient
+wall on every side,--when we stumble at every step on fragments of
+marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,--we are apt to think that
+they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places.
+The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and
+fragments--again setting aside the more perfect monuments--proves that
+destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any
+other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly
+swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin.
+But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former
+existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly
+Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman
+cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare
+those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome
+as the dwelling-places of her own Caesars,--Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier
+itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and
+some pieces of wall through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier
+is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her _Porta Nigra_, one
+monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as
+Trier--the second Rome--is, she is certainly not richer in proportion
+than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a
+single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is
+something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick
+Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than
+Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,--Christian Roman,
+Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is
+no trace--no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no
+amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the
+city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of
+Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial
+residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is--even
+proportionally--far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman
+remains than Italy herself; but even the Provencal cities are hardly
+so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is
+nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued
+prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to
+the standard of each age, which has been always building and
+rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a
+gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the
+havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few
+special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state;
+but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered
+with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the
+perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman
+scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of
+the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their
+prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings,
+temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number
+were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble
+columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the
+loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with
+the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of
+the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes
+from another cause. As the buildings became disused,--and if we
+rejoice at the disuse of the amphitheatre, we must both mourn and
+wonder at the disuse of the baths,--they were sometimes turned into
+fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses.
+Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the
+ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his
+brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the
+slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator.
+Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came
+whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful
+government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the
+building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of
+robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and
+Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle
+Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric
+undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious
+objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any
+buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to
+Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of
+Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and
+accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the
+ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient
+Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from
+Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way
+towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman
+hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian
+were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.
+
+But the barons of mediaeval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction
+which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the
+basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome
+have had to suffer. The mediaeval barons simply did according to their
+kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings
+or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one
+purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic
+destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of
+Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and
+their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may
+have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews.
+Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace
+raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line--
+
+  "Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?
+
+And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of
+the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same
+evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so
+sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age
+of the _Renaissance_, the time when men turned away from all reverence
+for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the
+feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times
+when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed.
+Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand
+or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed
+to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in
+the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could
+to efface their truest interest, their local and historical
+association.
+
+A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds
+of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places,
+and which need special scientific classification, such collections are
+necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot
+where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far
+nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had
+been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he
+had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the
+Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a
+private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the
+recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that
+sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead;
+that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and
+that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more
+instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of
+the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of
+"Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the
+light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and
+_gentiles_ laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican,
+numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome
+inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber
+who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a
+heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of
+ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of
+heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.
+
+Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St.
+Constantia--be her legend true or false, it makes no difference--to
+trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian
+worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned
+about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see
+the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the
+central point of the building, with the series of images which is
+begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn
+away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as
+number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is
+the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities,
+pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their
+destroying will.
+
+In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other
+cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city
+itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome
+is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts
+of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in
+common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and
+of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond
+both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field
+of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city
+largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part
+of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no
+space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine,
+Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been
+spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined
+fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a
+Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre
+of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia;
+above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of
+Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point
+a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the
+utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of
+Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive
+transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most
+living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at
+such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the
+days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which
+adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is
+a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the
+Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at
+work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work
+in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is
+only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And
+wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be
+allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the
+Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of
+such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1871
+
+
+A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany,
+as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth
+working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common
+to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly
+different. The distinctive character of English history is its
+continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there
+is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be
+drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a
+superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman
+invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate
+us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the
+history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor
+Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest.
+Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign
+kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a
+foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of
+wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real
+and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the
+greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages
+before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England
+has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon
+kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and
+Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The
+England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all
+external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age
+immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely
+removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a
+conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and
+slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of
+power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is
+an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and
+circumstance of our own.
+
+When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its
+beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be
+drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great
+creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia--the
+thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England
+which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is
+essentially the still living England in which we have our own being.
+Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries;
+from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King
+AElfred's Witenagemot is a valuable link in the chain of our political
+progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by
+the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A
+statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be
+shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good
+to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we
+may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our
+political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see
+the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in
+wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought
+improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others
+capable of further improvement still.
+
+Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since
+the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never
+known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly,
+Witenagemot, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been,
+capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more
+or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria,
+England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary
+constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken
+it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English
+Witenagemots, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian
+research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries
+fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a
+veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In
+the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional
+principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the
+seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything
+new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is
+on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our
+rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or
+proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ,
+conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of
+England.
+
+This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point
+which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special
+continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most
+instructive part of the comparison between English history and the
+history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the
+many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one
+Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and
+barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every
+institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth
+century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young
+indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very
+things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a
+King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor
+impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high
+hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of
+the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen,
+and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons
+still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons
+whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual
+changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard
+questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take
+their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great
+offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have
+assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character
+they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun;
+doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but
+statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions
+of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is
+rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few
+great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy
+yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but
+both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent
+extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal
+status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.
+
+With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes,
+and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at
+least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language
+was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible
+at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it
+was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England
+at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest,
+ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a
+purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he
+could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could
+not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled
+over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds.
+The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems
+truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more
+on the throne of Cerdic and of AElfred. The modern English nation is
+now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French
+dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and
+fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of
+our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character
+for good and for evil.
+
+Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and
+institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before
+said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the
+early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagemot. The latter
+institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been
+substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be
+ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of
+ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to
+obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands
+the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all
+its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its mediaeval, and in all its
+modern forms--Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics
+without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories,
+Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments;
+all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of
+them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by
+year; his successors in the Eastern _Francia_, the Kings of the
+Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in
+Western _Francia_, after it fell away from the common centre, no such
+assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments;
+every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and
+Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to
+contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair,
+for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the
+States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish
+Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe,
+in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From
+that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful
+course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of
+England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of
+political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive
+measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King
+could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If
+they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked
+minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit
+reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from
+magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both
+were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the
+States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France
+generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their
+extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791
+to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year,
+made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our
+liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected
+nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old
+Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their
+constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian
+curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National
+Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen
+and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of
+Commons have gone on undisturbed.
+
+
+
+
+RACE AND LANGUAGE
+
+From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
+Macmillan & Co., 1871
+
+
+Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the
+working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups
+in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has
+grown,--how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to
+mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
+qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
+classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
+unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
+only; and that that test is language.
+
+It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined
+by the merely political arrangements which group men under various
+governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes
+of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this
+standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe
+for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer
+to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without
+their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national
+divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political
+divisions. That is to say, _prima facie_ a nation and a government
+should coincide. I say only _prima facie_, for this is assuredly no
+inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be
+otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good
+reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a
+government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the
+less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That
+is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it
+as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause;
+so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by
+asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation
+should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of
+governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of
+nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing,
+something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government
+should as far as possible conform. How then do we define the nation
+which is, if there is no special reason to the contrary, to fix the
+limits of a government? Primarily, I say, as a rule,--but a rule
+subject to exceptions,--as a _prima facie_ standard, subject to
+special reasons to the contrary,--we define the nation by language. We
+may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule
+that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality;
+but we may safely say that where there is not community of language,
+there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that
+without community of language there may be an artificial nationality,
+a nationality which may be good for all political purposes, and which
+may engender a common national feeling. Still, this is not quite the
+same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is
+community of language.
+
+In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of
+nationality. We so far take it as the badge, that we instinctively
+assume community of language as a nation as the rule, and we set down
+anything that departs from that rule as an exception. The first idea
+suggested by the word Frenchman, or German, or any other national
+name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother
+tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us
+think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a
+speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise,
+we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause.
+Again, the rule is none the less the rule nor the exceptions the
+exceptions, because the exceptions may easily outnumber the instances
+which conform to the rule. The rule is still the rule, because we take
+the instances which conform to it as a matter of course, while in
+every case which does not conform to it we ask for the explanation.
+All the larger countries of Europe provide us with exceptions; but we
+treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask why a native of France
+speaks French. But when a native of France speaks as his mother tongue
+some other tongue than French, when French, or something which
+popularly passes for French, is spoken as his mother tongue by some
+one who is not a native of France, we at once ask the reason. And the
+reason will be found in each case in some special historical cause,
+which withdraws that case from the operation of the general law. A
+very good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly
+passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose
+inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be
+given, and it may fairly be asked.
+
+In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the
+bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,
+we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In
+a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken
+which differ alike from English and from French, but which are
+strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of
+a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the
+settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other
+tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find
+islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as
+French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the
+English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems
+so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people
+which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did
+not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by
+force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part
+of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually
+became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave
+to their connection with the land which their forefathers had
+conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never
+became French in feeling. This last case, that of the Norman Islands,
+is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically
+connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union
+between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy,
+where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography
+together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a
+Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong,
+political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against
+language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not
+become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone
+remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached
+to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage.
+Between States of the relative size of England and the Norman Islands,
+the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of
+the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our
+forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman
+Islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.
+
+These instances and countless others bear out the position, that while
+community of language is the most obvious sign of common
+nationality,--while it is the main element, or something more than an
+element, in the formation of nationality,--the rule is open to
+exceptions of all kinds; and that the influence of language is at all
+times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the
+exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases
+which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases
+which do conform to it.
+
+
+
+
+THE NORMAN COUNCIL AND THE ASSEMBLY OF LILLEBONNE
+
+From 'The History of the Norman Conquest of England'
+
+
+The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his
+own people, on the minds of the neighboring countries whence he
+invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes
+whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and above all,
+on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these
+various negotiations is not very clear, and in all probability all
+were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that
+William's first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender
+his crown,--or whatever else was the exact purport of the English
+King's answer,--was to lay the matter before a select body of his most
+trusted counselors. The names of most of the men whom William thus
+honored with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They
+were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful
+vassals who had fought at his side against French invaders and Norman
+rebels. There was his brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, the lord of
+the castle by the waterfalls, the spoil of the banished Warling. And
+there was one closer than a brother,--the proud William the son of
+Osborn, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood. There,
+perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other
+brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of
+heart and as strong of arm as any of his race. There too, not
+otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of
+William, Robert, and Odo. There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate
+succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself,--Richard of
+Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the
+Fearless. There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the
+frontier fortress of Eu, the brother of the traitor Busac and of the
+holy prelate of Lisieux. There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the
+world of Roger of Toesny, and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old
+foe of Normandy and mankind. There was Ralph's companion in
+banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil, and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal
+son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle. There too were
+the other worthies of the day of Mortemar, Walter Giffard and Hugh of
+Montfort, and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received
+the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush. These men, chiefs of
+the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater
+houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign's
+bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the
+enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the
+land which with so many in that assembly was to become a second home,
+a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of
+their own right hands.
+
+To this select Council the duke made his first appeal. He told them,
+what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he
+had suffered from Harold of England. It was his purpose to cross the
+sea, in order to assert his rights and to chastise the wrong-doer.
+With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful
+Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed. He had
+gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they
+approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power?
+Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to recover his
+right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and
+friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved
+his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power
+of Normandy to accomplish. The valor of the Norman knighthood, the
+wealth of the Norman Church, was fully enough to put their duke in
+possession of all that he claimed. Their own personal service they
+pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge,
+they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But
+they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work,
+all ought to share in the counsel. Those whom the duke had gathered
+together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other
+wise and brave men in the duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose
+counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he
+spoke. Let the duke call a larger meeting of all the barons of his
+duchy, and lay his designs before them.
+
+The duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons
+for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we
+come across any details of the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And
+we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed
+from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or
+more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of
+political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the
+war against England was a widely different body from the Great Cemor
+which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his
+speech before the King and all the people of the land. That people had
+met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city
+of the realm. But in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons.
+The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories
+of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand.
+The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution
+of the mediaeval States had not yet arisen. There was no Third Estate,
+because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether
+vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular
+privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And if the Third Order was
+wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in
+other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as
+an important element in the duke's ways and means, and both the wealth
+and the personal prowess of the Norman clergy were, when the day came,
+freely placed at William's disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman
+Assemblies, which shut out the clergy from all share in the national
+deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied rather
+than asserted that the bishops of Normandy were present in the
+Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the
+debates fell on the lay barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly
+was a spirit which was especially theirs.
+
+Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it
+met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary
+boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of
+Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the
+people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the
+virtues and the vices of a real Popular Assembly. William had already
+consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by
+their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in
+Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman
+people. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were
+valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of
+what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the
+privileges of their order. The duke laid his case before them. He told
+once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had
+done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force
+of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on
+which they had entered. But without their help he could do nothing. Of
+his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an
+enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a
+cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how
+many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a
+free-will offering.
+
+A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent,
+even when the craft and the eloquence of William was brought to bear
+upon it. The barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They
+would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the
+conclusion to which they came. William was obliged to consent to this
+delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each
+eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty,
+thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic
+speaker. Some professed their readiness to follow the duke; others
+were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards. Other
+speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise.
+Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land
+would be ruined by the attempt. The conquest of England was an
+undertaking beyond the power of a Roman emperor. Harold and his land
+were rich; they had wealth to take foreign kings and dukes into their
+service; their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could
+not hope to strive against. They had abundance of tried soldiers, and
+above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other
+men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea. How could a fleet
+be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they
+be taught, within a year's space, to cope with such an enemy? The
+feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an
+enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and
+schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning
+through the opposition of his own subjects.
+
+A daring though cunning attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern,
+the duke's nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an
+assent to his master's will. He appealed to their sense of feudal
+honor; they owed the duke service for their fiefs: let them come
+forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their
+tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven
+to implore the services of his subjects. Let them rather forestall his
+will; let them win his favor by ready offerings even beyond their
+power to fulfill. He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom
+they had to deal. William's jealous temper would not brook
+disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the
+end, if the duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his
+enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.
+
+The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and
+perplexed even the stout hearts with whom he had to deal. The barons
+prayed him to be their spokesman with the duke. He knew their minds
+and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said.
+But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to
+the duke's demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way;
+they feared the sea,--so changed was the race which had once manned
+the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand,--and they were not bound to
+serve beyond it.
+
+A point seemed to have been gained, by the seeming license given by
+the Assembly to the duke's most intimate friend to speak as he would
+in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to
+the duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty,
+setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for
+their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not
+willingly undergo in his service. But the orator soon overshot his
+mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man
+would not only cross the sea with the duke, but would bring with him
+double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of
+twenty knights' fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a
+hundred with two hundred. He himself, of his love and zeal, would
+furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.
+
+The barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly
+the same case as the king against whom they were called on to march.
+They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to
+speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond
+all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to
+engagements which had never entered into their minds. Loud shouts of
+dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the
+regular contingent awakened special indignation. With a true
+parliamentary instinct, the Norman barons feared lest a consent to
+this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs
+should be forever burthened with this double service. The shouts grew
+louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no
+man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.
+
+The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of
+a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is
+possible that the duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment
+of his seneschal. It is even possible that the manoeuvre may have been
+concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely
+that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree
+to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth
+by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on
+a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the
+seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly,
+in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and
+the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy
+had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one,
+within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign.
+William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on
+minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd,
+could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the
+doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's
+fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from
+time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way
+within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to
+promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill.
+William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the
+formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won
+over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And
+wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should
+draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and
+the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once
+set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up
+in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday
+of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William
+of England in his royal palace at Winchester.
+
+
+
+
+FERDINAND FREILIGRATH
+
+(1810-1876)
+
+[Illustration: FERDINAND FREILIGRATH]
+
+
+In times of political degradation the poets of Germany, turning from
+their own surroundings, have sought poetical material either in the
+glories of a dim past or in the exotic splendors of remote lands.
+Goethe, disquieted by the French Revolution, took up Chinese and
+Persian studies; the romantic poets revivified the picturesqueness of
+the Middle Ages; and during the second quarter of this century the
+Orient began to exercise a potent charm. Platen wrote his beautiful
+'Gaselen,' Rueckert sang in Persian measure and translated the
+Indian 'Sakuntala,' and Bodenstedt fashioned the dainty songs of
+"Mirza-Schaffy." Freiligrath too, a child of his time, entered upon
+his literary career with poems which took their themes from distant
+climes. Among his earliest verses after 'Moosthee' (Iceland-Moss Tea),
+written at the age of sixteen, were 'Africa,' 'Der Scheik am Sinai'
+(The Sheik on Sinai), and 'Der Loewenritt' (The Lion's Ride). Even in
+these early poems, we find all that brilliancy of Oriental imagery to
+which he tells us he had been inspired by much poring over an
+illustrated Bible in his childhood.
+
+But Freiligrath, like Uhland and Herwegh, was a man of action and a
+patriot. The revolution of 1848 had brought fresh breezes into the
+stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again,
+the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams
+that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission,
+and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.
+
+Freiligrath was a schoolmaster's son; he was born at Detmold on June
+17th, 1810, and much against his private inclinations, he was sent in
+his sixteenth year to an uncle in Soest to prepare himself for a
+mercantile career. The death of his father threw him upon his own
+resources, and he took a position in an Amsterdam bank. Here the
+inspiration of the sea widened the range of his poetic fancy. To
+Chamisso is due the credit of introducing the poet to the general
+public through the pages of the Musenalmanach. This was in 1835. In
+1838 appeared the first volume of his poems, and it won instant and
+unusual favor; Gutzkow called him the German Hugo. With this
+encouragement Freiligrath definitely abandoned mercantile life. In
+1841 he married. At the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt, the King
+of Prussia granted him a royal pension; and as no conditions were
+attached, it was accepted. This was a bitter disappointment to the
+ardent revolutionary poets, who had counted Freiligrath as one of
+themselves; but the turbulent times which preceded the revolution soon
+forced him into an open declaration of principles, and although he had
+said in one of his poems that the poet was above all party, in 1844,
+influenced by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he resigned his pension,
+announced his position, and in May published a volume of revolutionary
+poems entitled 'Mein Glaubensbekenntniss' (My Confession of Faith).
+This book created the wildest enthusiasm, and placed its author at
+once in the front rank of the people's partisans. He fled to Brussels,
+and in 1846 published under the title of 'Ca Ira' six new songs, which
+were a trumpet-call to revolution. The poet deemed it prudent to
+retire to London, and he was about to accept an invitation from
+Longfellow to cross the ocean when the revolution broke out, and he
+returned to Duesseldorf to put himself at the head of the democratic
+party on the Rhine. But he was a poet and not a leader, and he
+indiscreetly exposed himself to arrest by an inflammatory poem, 'Die
+Todten an die Lebenden' (The Dead to the Living). The jury however
+acquitted him, and he at once assumed the management of the New
+Rhenish Gazette at Cologne.
+
+It is a curious fact that during this agitated time Freiligrath wrote
+some of his tenderest poetry. In the collection which appeared in 1849
+with the title 'Zwischen den Garben' (Between the Sheaves), was
+included that exquisite hymn to love: 'Oh, Love So Long as Love Thou
+Canst,' perhaps the most perfect of all his lyrical productions, and
+certainly evidence that the poet could touch the strings to deep
+emotions. In the following year both volumes of his 'New Political and
+Social Poems' were ready. Once more he prudently retired to London;
+his fears were confirmed by the immediate confiscation of these new
+volumes, and by the publication of a letter of apprehension. By way of
+reprisal he wrote his poem 'The Revolution,' which was published in
+London.
+
+In 1867 the Swiss bank with which Freiligrath was connected closed its
+London branch, and the poet again faced an uncertain future. His
+friends on the Rhine, hearing of his difficulties, raised a generous
+subscription, and taking advantage of a general amnesty, he returned
+to the fatherland and became associated with the Stuttgart Illustrated
+Magazine. In 1870 appeared a complete collection of his poems; in
+1876, 'New Poems'; and in the latter year, on March 18th, he died at
+Cannstatt in Wuertemburg.
+
+The question which Freiligrath asks the emigrants in his early poem of
+that name,--'O say, why seek ye other lands?'--was destined to find
+frequent and bitter answer in his own checkered career; but he never
+swerved from the liberal principles which he had publicly announced.
+His political poems were among the most powerful influences of his
+time, and they have a permanent value as the expression of the spirit
+of freedom. His translations are marvels of fidelity and beauty. His
+'Hiawatha' and 'The Ancient Mariner,' together with his versions of
+Victor Hugo, are perhaps the best examples of his surpassing skill.
+His own works have been for the most part excellently translated into
+English. His daughter published during her father's lifetime a volume
+of his poems, in which were collected all the best English
+translations then available. The exotic subjects of his early poems
+make them seem the most original, as for example 'Der Mohrenfuerst'
+(The Moorish Prince) and 'Der Blumen Rache' (The Revenge of the
+Flowers); the unusual rhymes hold the attention, and the sonorous
+melody of the verse delights the ear: but it is in a few of his superb
+love lyrics that he touches the highest point of his genius, although
+his fame continues to rest upon his impassioned songs of freedom and
+his name to be associated with the rich imagery of the Orient.
+
+
+
+
+THE EMIGRANTS
+
+
+  I cannot take my eyes away
+    From you, ye busy, bustling band,
+  Your little all to see you lay
+    Each in the waiting boatman's hand.
+
+  Ye men, that from your necks set down
+    Your heavy baskets on the earth,
+  Of bread, from German corn baked brown
+    By German wives on German hearth,--
+
+  And you, with braided tresses neat,
+    Black-Forest maidens, slim and brown,
+  How careful on the sloop's green seat
+    You set your pails and pitchers down!
+
+  Ah! oft have home's cool shady tanks
+    Those pails and pitchers filled for you;
+  By far Missouri's silent banks
+    Shall these the scenes of home renew,--
+
+  The stone-rimmed fount in village street
+    Where oft ye stooped to chat and draw,--
+  The hearth, and each familiar seat,--
+    The pictured tiles your childhood saw.
+
+  Soon, in the far and wooded West
+    Shall log-house walls therewith be graced;
+  Soon many a tired tawny guest
+    Shall sweet refreshment from them taste.
+
+  From them shall drink the Cherokee,
+    Faint with the hot and dusty chase;
+  No more from German vintage, ye
+    Shall bear them home, in leaf-crowned grace.
+
+  O say, why seek ye other lands?
+    The Neckar's vale hath wine and corn;
+  Full of dark firs the Schwarzwald stands;
+    In Spessart rings the Alp-herd's horn.
+
+  Ah, in strange forests you will yearn
+    For the green mountains of your home,--
+  To Deutschland's yellow wheat-fields turn,--
+    In spirit o'er her vine-hills roam.
+
+  How will the form of days grown pale
+    In golden dreams float softly by,
+  Like some old legendary tale,
+    Before fond memory's moistened eye!
+
+  The boatman calls,--go hence in peace!
+    God bless you,--wife, and child, and sire!
+  Bless all your fields with rich increase,
+    And crown each faithful heart's desire!
+
+                                         Translation of C.T. Brooks.
+
+
+
+
+THE LION'S RIDE
+
+
+  What! wilt thou bind him fast with a chain?
+    Wilt bind the king of the cloudy sands?
+    Idiot fool! he has burst from thy hands and bands,
+  And speeds like Storm through his far domain.
+      See! he crouches down in the sedge,
+                By the water's edge,
+  Making the startled sycamore boughs to quiver!
+  Gazelle and giraffe, I think, will shun that river.
+
+  Not so! The curtain of evening falls,
+    And the Caffre, mooring his light canoe
+    To the shore, glides down through the hushed karroo,
+  And the watch-fires burn in the Hottentot kraals,
+      And the antelope seeks a bed in the bush
+              Till dawn shall blush,
+  And the zebra stretches his limbs by the tinkling fountain,
+  And the changeful signals fade from the Table Mountain.
+
+  Now look through the dusk! What seest thou now?
+    Seest such a tall giraffe! She stalks,
+    All majesty, through the desert walks,--
+  In search of water to cool her tongue and brow.
+      From tract to tract of the limitless waste
+              Behold her haste!
+  Till, bowing her long neck down, she buries her face in
+  The reeds, and kneeling, drinks from the river's basin.
+
+  But look again! look! see once more
+    Those globe-eyes glare! The gigantic reeds
+    Lie cloven and trampled like puniest weeds,--
+  The lion leaps on the drinker's neck with a roar!
+      Oh, what a racer! Can any behold,
+              'Mid the housings of gold
+  In the stables of kings, dyes half so splendid
+  As those on the brindled hide of yon wild animal blended?
+
+  Greedily fleshes the lion his teeth
+    In the breast of his writhing prey; around
+    Her neck his loose brown mane is wound.
+  Hark, that hollow cry! She springs up from beneath
+      And in agony flies over plains and heights.
+              See, how she unites,
+  Even under such monstrous and torturing trammel,
+  With the grace of the leopard, the speed of the camel!
+
+  She reaches the central moon-lighted plain,
+    That spreadeth around all bare and wide;
+    Meanwhile, adown her spotted side
+  The dusky blood-gouts rush like rain--
+      And her woeful eyeballs, how they stare
+              On the void of air!
+  Yet on she flies--on, on; for her there is no retreating;
+  And the desert can hear the heart of the doomed one beating!
+
+  And lo! A stupendous column of sand,
+    A sand-spout out of that sandy ocean, upcurls
+    Behind the pair in eddies and whirls;
+  Most like some colossal brand,
+          Or wandering spirit of wrath
+              On his blasted path,
+  Or the dreadful pillar that lighted the warriors and women
+  Of Israel's land through the wilderness of Yemen.
+
+  And the vulture, scenting a coming carouse,
+    Sails, hoarsely screaming, down the sky;
+    The bloody hyena, be sure, is nigh,--
+  Fierce pillager, he, of the charnel-house!
+      The panther, too, who strangles the Cape-Town sheep
+              As they lie asleep,
+  Athirst for his share in the slaughter, follows;
+  While the gore of their victim spreads like a pool in the sandy
+          hollows!
+
+  She reels,--but the king of the brutes bestrides
+    His tottering throne to the last: with might
+    He plunges his terrible claws in the bright
+  And delicate cushions of her sides.
+      Yet hold!--fair play!--she rallies again!
+              In vain, in vain!
+  Her struggles but help to drain her life-blood faster;
+  She staggers, gasps, and sinks at the feet of her slayer and master!
+
+  She staggers, she falls; she shall struggle no more!
+    The death-rattle slightly convulses her throat;
+    Mayest look thy last on that mangled coat,
+  Besprent with sand, and foam, and gore!
+      Adieu! The orient glimmers afar,
+              And the morning-star
+  Anon will rise over Madagascar brightly.--
+  So rides the lion in Afric's deserts nightly.
+
+
+
+
+REST IN THE BELOVED
+
+(RUHE IN DER GELIEBTEN)
+
+    From 'Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and Other German Poets.'
+    Copyright 1892, by Frances Hellman. Reprinted by permission
+    of G.P. Putnam's Sons, publishers, New York.
+
+
+  Oh, here forever let me stay, love!
+    Here let my resting-place e'er be;
+  And both thy tender palms then lay, love,
+    Upon my hot brow soothingly.
+  Here at thy feet, before thee kneeling,
+    In heavenly rapture let me rest,
+  And close my eyes, bliss o'er me stealing,
+    Within thine arms, upon thy breast.
+
+  I'll open them but to the glances
+    That from thine own in radiance fall;
+  The look that my whole soul entrances,
+    O thou who art my life, my all!
+  I'll open them but at the flowing
+    Of burning tears that upward swell,
+  And joyously, without my knowing,
+    From under drooping lashes well.
+
+  Thus am I meek, and kind, and lowly,
+    And good and gentle evermore;
+  I have thee--now I'm blessed wholly;
+    I have thee--now my yearning's o'er.
+  By thy sweet love intoxicated,
+    Within thine arms I'm lulled to rest,
+  And every breath of thine is freighted
+    With slumber songs that soothe my breast.
+
+  A life renewed each seems bestowing;
+    Oh, thus to lie day after day,
+  And hearken with a blissful glowing
+    To what each other's heart-beats say!
+  Lost in our love, entranced, enraptured,
+    We disappear from time and space;
+  We rest and dream; our souls lie captured
+    Within oblivion's sweet embrace.
+
+
+
+
+OH, LOVE SO LONG AS LOVE THOU CANST
+
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+  And let thy heart forever glow
+    And throb with love, and hold love's heat,
+  So long on earth another heart
+    Shall echo to its yearning beat.
+
+  And who to thee his heart shall show,
+    Oh raise it up and make it glad!
+  Oh make his every moment blithe,
+    And not a moment make him sad!
+
+  Guard well thy tongue; a bitter word
+    Soon from the mouth of anger leaps.
+  O God! it was not meant to wound,--
+    But ah! the other goes and weeps.
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+  Thou kneelest down upon the grave,
+    And sink'st in agony thine eyes,--
+  They never more the dead shall see,--
+    The silent church-yard hears thy sighs.
+
+  Thou mourn'st:--"Oh, look upon this heart,
+    That here doth weep upon this mound!
+  Forgive me if I caused thee pain,--
+    O God, it was not meant to wound!"
+
+  But he, he sees and hears thee not;
+    He comes not, he can never know:
+  The mouth that kissed thee once says not,
+    "Friend, I forgave thee long ago!"
+
+  He did forgive thee long ago,
+    Though many a hot tear bitter fell
+  For thee and for thy angry word;
+    But still he slumbers soft and well!
+
+  Oh, love so long as love thou canst!
+    Oh, love so long thy soul have need!
+  The hour will come, the hour will come,
+    When by the grave thy heart shall bleed!
+
+                                    Translation of Dr. Edward Breck.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: FREYTAG]
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAV FREYTAG
+
+(1816-1895)
+
+
+Gustav Freytag, one of the foremost of German novelists, was born July
+13th, 1816, in Kreuzburg, Silesia, where his father was a physician.
+He studied alternately at Breslau and Berlin, at which latter
+university he was given the degree of a doctor of philosophy in 1838.
+In 1839 he settled as a _privatdocent_ at the University of Breslau,
+where he lectured on the German language and literature until 1844,
+when he resigned his position to devote himself to literature. He
+removed to Leipzig in 1846, and the following year to Dresden, where
+he married. In 1848 he returned to Leipzig to edit with Julian Schmidt
+the weekly journal Die Grenzboten, which he conducted until 1861, and
+again from 1869 to 1870. In 1867 he became Liberal member for Erfurt
+in the North German Reichstag. In 1870, on the breaking out of the
+Franco-Prussian war, he was attached to the staff of the Crown Prince,
+later the German Emperor Frederick III., and remained in service until
+after the battle of Sedan. Subsequently to 1870 his journalistic work
+was chiefly for the newly established weekly periodical Im Neuen
+Reich. In 1879 he retired from public life and afterward lived in
+Wiesbaden, except for the summer months, which he spent on his estate
+Siebleben near Gotha. He died at Wiesbaden, April 30th, 1895.
+
+All of Freytag's earliest work, with the single exception of a volume
+of poems published in 1845 under the title 'In Breslau,' is dramatic.
+His first production was a comedy, 'Die Brautfahrt' (The Wedding
+Journey), published in 1844, which although it was awarded a prize
+offered by the Royal Theatre in Berlin, found but indifferent popular
+favor, as did its successor, the one-act tragedy 'Die Gelehrte' (The
+Scholar). With his next play, 'Die Valentine' (1846), Freytag however
+was signally successful. This was followed the year after by 'Graf
+Waldemar.' He attained his highest dramatic success with the comedy
+'Die Journalisten' (The Journalists), which appeared in 1853, and
+since its first production in 1854 has maintained its place as one of
+the most popular plays on the German stage. But one other play
+followed, the tragedy 'Die Fabier' (The Fabii), which appeared in
+1859.
+
+He had begun in the mean time his career as a novelist with his most
+famous novel, 'Soll und Haben' (Debit and Credit), which was
+published in 1855 and met with an immediate and unbounded success.
+The appearance of this first novel, furthermore, was most significant,
+for it marked at the same time an era both in German literature and in
+its author's own career, in that it introduced into the one in its
+most recent phase one of the profoundest problems of modern life in
+Germany, and unmistakably pointed out, in the other, the direction
+which he was subsequently to follow. This latter statement has a
+twofold bearing. It is not only that as a writer of novels Freytag did
+his most important and lasting work, but that the whole of this work
+was in a manner the development of a similar tendency. Although as
+different as need be in environment, all of his subsequent novels
+embody inherently the characteristics of 'Debit and Credit,' for like
+it, they are all well-defined attempts to depict the typical social
+conditions of the period in which they move, and their characters are
+the carefully considered types of their time. Freytag, with a
+philosophic seriousness of purpose perhaps characteristically German,
+is writing not only novels but the history of civilization, in his
+early work. Later on, the didactic purpose to a certain extent
+overshadows the rest; and although he never loses his power of telling
+a story, it is the history in the end that is paramount.
+
+'Debit and Credit' is a novel of the century, and it takes up the
+great problem of the century, the position of modern industrialism in
+the social life of the day. Its principal centre of action is the
+business house of the wholesale grocer T.O. Schroeter, who is an
+admirable embodiment of the careful, industrious, and successful
+merchant. In sharp contradistinction to him is the Baron von
+Rothsattel, the representative of earlier conditions in the
+organization of the State, which made the nobleman pre-eminently a
+social force. Freytag's polemic is not only the dignity of labor under
+present conditions, but the absolute effeteness of the old order of
+things that despised it. The real hero of the story is Anton
+Wohlfahrt, who begins his commercial career as a youth in the house of
+T.O. Schroeter, and ends, after some vicissitudes, as a member of the
+firm. Mercantile life has nowhere been better described in its
+monotony, its interests, and its aspirations, as the story is
+developed; and although at first sight no field could be more barren
+in literary interest, there is in reality no lack of incident and
+action, whose inevitable sequence makes the plot. Anton's career in
+the house of Schroeter is interrupted by his connection with the Baron
+von Rothsattel, who has, through his want of a business training and
+his lack of a knowledge of men, fallen into the hands of a Jew
+money-lender; by whom he is persuaded to mortgage his land in order to
+embark in a business undertaking which it is presumed will increase
+his fortune. His mill fails, however, and he is involved in
+difficulties from which he is unable to extricate himself. Anton, the
+intimate friend of the family, is therefore persuaded by the Baroness
+to undertake the management of matters, and after vainly endeavoring
+to induce his principal to interest himself in the affair, sacrifices
+his position to accompany the family to their dilapidated estate in a
+distant province. The Baron will tolerate no interference, however,
+and Anton finally returns to the house of Schroeter and is reinstated
+in the business. Lenore, the Baron's daughter, the first cause of
+Anton's interest, meantime becomes engaged to the young nobleman Fink;
+who has been an associate of Anton's in the office of T. O. Schroeter,
+has but recently returned from the United States, and who first
+advances funds for the improvement of the estate and ultimately
+purchases it.
+
+Fink acts his part in the author's philosophy as a contrast to the
+Baron von Rothsattel. Although a nobleman, he has adapted himself to
+the conditions of the century, and is free from any hallucinations of
+his hereditary rank, even while he is perfectly awake to its
+traditions. He has entered upon a commercial career not from choice,
+but from necessity; but he has accepted his fate and has made
+successful use of his opportunities. Anton marries the sister of T. O.
+Schroeter, and becomes a partner in the business. Fink is however
+really the one who gains the princess in this modern tale, and is
+plainly to have the more important share as an actual social force in
+the future. The old feudal nobility has played its part on the stage
+of the world; and being so picturesque, and full of romantic
+opportunity, its loss is doubtless to be regretted. The tamer
+realities of the modern industrial state have succeeded it. As Freytag
+solves the problem in 'Soll und Haben,' it is the man who works, the
+man of the industrial classes alone, to whom the victory belongs in
+the modern social struggle, be his antecedents bourgeois or
+aristocratic.
+
+Freytag's second great novel, 'Die Verlorene Handschrift' (The Lost
+Manuscript), which appeared in 1864, concerns itself with another
+phase of the same problem. This time, however, instead of the merchant
+and man of affairs, it is the scholar about whom the action centres.
+Felix Werner, professor of philology, has come upon unmistakable
+traces of the lost books of Tacitus, whose recovery is the object of
+his life. In his search for the manuscript in an old house in the
+country he finds his future wife Ilse, one of the finest types in all
+German literature of the true German woman, both while at home a maid
+in her father's house and subsequently as the professor's wife in the
+university town. Werner, in his scholarly absorption, unwittingly
+neglects his wife, whose beauty has attracted the attention of the
+prince; and there is a series of intrigues which threaten seriously to
+involve the innocent Ilse, until the prince's evil intentions become
+evident even to the unsuspecting Werner. The covers of the lost
+manuscript are actually discovered at last, but the book itself has
+vanished. In this second novel Freytag displays a most genial humor,
+unsuspected in the author of 'Debit and Credit,' but apparent enough
+in 'The Journalists.' The professorial life is admirably drawn with
+all its lights and shadows; and its motives and ambitions, its
+peculiar struggles and strivings, have never been more understandingly
+treated. The story, however, even more than 'Debit and Credit,'
+displays the author's weaknesses of construction. The plot is so
+confused by digressions that the main thread is sometimes lost sight
+of, and the tendency to philosophical generalization, which as a
+German is to some extent the author's birthright, reaches in these
+pages an appalling exemplification. What had been an extraordinary
+novel pruned of these defects, is still not an ordinary novel with
+them; and as a picture of German university life from the point of
+view of the professor, 'The Lost Manuscript' stands unrivaled in
+literature. Again the thesis in this second novel is the dignity of
+labor, and the nobleman fares no better at the author's hands than in
+the mercantile environment of the first.
+
+These two novels, which outside of Germany are Freytag's best claim to
+attention, were followed by the four volumes of 'Bilder aus der
+Deutschen Vergangenheit' (Pictures from the German Past: 1859-62), a
+series of studies of German life from different epochs of its history,
+intended to illustrate the evolution of modern conditions through
+their successive stages from the remote past. Freytag's early work as
+a university _docent_ had particularly fitted him for this sort of
+writing, and some of his best is contained in these books.
+
+More important still, however, was his next great work, the long
+series of historical novels 'Die Ahnen' (The Ancestors: 1872-80), an
+ambitious plan, born of the stirring events of the Franco-Prussian War
+and the resultant awakening of the new spirit of nationality, to trace
+the development of the German people from the earliest time down to
+the present day. To carry out this purpose he accordingly selects a
+typical German family, which he describes under the characteristic
+conditions of each period, with the most conscientious attention to
+manners and customs and social environment. The same family thus
+appears from generation to generation under the changing conditions of
+the different epochs of German history, and the whole forms together
+the consecutive _Culturgeschichte_ of the nation.
+
+This whole long series of 'The Ancestors' stands as a monument of
+careful research into the most minute factors of German life in their
+time of action. Freytag's antiquarianism is not of the dilettante kind
+that is content to masquerade modern motives in ancient garb and
+setting. He was fully conscious of all the elements of his problem,
+and he sought to reproduce the intellectual point of view of his
+actors, and to account for their motives of action, as well as to
+picture accurately their material environment. It is in his
+super-conscientiousness in these directions that the inherent
+weakness of the novels of this series lies. They are too palpably
+reconstructions with a purpose. Their didacticism is wrapped around
+them like a garment; and much of the time, that is all that is visible
+upon the surface. As the series advances this fault grows upon them.
+They are in reality of very unequal interest. 'Ingo' and 'Ingraban'
+are the sprightliest in action, and have been as a consequence the
+most widely read of these later works, many of which are, in part at
+least, far too serious of purpose to play their part conspicuously
+well as novels.
+
+The novels of 'The Ancestors' are a culmination of Freytag's literary
+evolution. As a playwright he will no doubt be forgotten except for
+'The Journalists'; in which he has, however, left an imperishable play
+which German critics have not hesitated to call the best comedy of the
+century. The two novels of modern life from his middle period form
+together his greatest work, although here, and particularly in 'The
+Lost Manuscript,' he has overweighted his material with abstract
+discussion, in which his perspective has sometimes all but
+disappeared. Subsequently, both the 'Bilder' and 'Die Ahnen' show his
+decided predilection for historical studies. The struggle in his own
+case was between the scholar and the man of letters, in which the
+scholar eventually won possession of the field.
+
+Freytag's other work includes--'Die Technik des Dramas' (The Technique
+of the Drama: 1863), a consideration of the principles of dramatic
+construction; the life of his friend Karl Malthy, 1870; and 'Der
+Kronprinz und die Deutsche Kaiserkrone' (The Crown Prince and the
+German Imperial Crown: 1889), written after the death of Frederick
+III., with whom Freytag had had personal relations. To accompany
+the collected edition of his works (1887-88), he wrote a short
+autobiography, 'Erinnerungen aus Meinem Leben' (Recollections from
+My Life).
+
+
+
+
+THE GERMAN PROFESSOR
+
+From 'The Lost Manuscript'
+
+
+Professors' wives also have trouble with their husbands. Sometimes
+when Ilse was seated in company with her intimate friends--with Madame
+Raschke, Madame Struvelius, or little Madame Guenther--at one of those
+confidential coffee parties which they did not altogether despise,
+many things would come to light.
+
+The conversation with these intellectual women was certainly very
+interesting. It is true the talk sometimes passed lightly over the
+heads of the servants, and sometimes housekeeping troubles ventured
+out of the pond of pleasant talk like croaking frogs. To Ilse's
+surprise, she found that even Flaminia Struvelius could discourse
+seriously about preserving little gherkins, and that she sought
+closely for the marks of youth in a plucked goose. The merry Madame
+Guenther aroused horror and laughter in more experienced married women,
+when she asserted that she could not endure the crying of little
+children, and that from the very first she would force her child
+(which she had not yet got) to proper silence by chastisement. Thus
+conversation sometimes left greater subjects to stray into this
+domain. And when unimportant subjects were reviewed, it naturally came
+about that the men were honored by a quiet discussion. At such times
+it was evident that although the subject under consideration was men
+in general, each of the wives was thinking of her own husband, and
+that each silently carried about a secret bundle of cares, and
+justified the conclusion of her hearers that that husband too must be
+difficult to manage.
+
+Madame Raschke's troubles could not be concealed; the whole town knew
+them. It was notorious that one market day her husband had gone to the
+university in his dressing-gown--in a brilliant dressing-gown, blue
+and orange, with a Turkish pattern. His students, who loved him dearly
+and were well aware of his habits, could not succeed in suppressing a
+loud laugh; and Raschke had calmly hung the dressing-gown over his
+pulpit, held his lecture in his shirt-sleeves, and returned home in
+one of the students' overcoats. Since that time Madame Raschke never
+let her husband go out without herself inspecting him. It also
+appeared that all these ten years he had not been able to learn his
+way about the town, and she dared not change her residence, because
+she was quite sure that her professor would never remember it, and
+always return to his old home. Struvelius also occasioned much
+anxiety. Ilse knew about the last and greatest cause; but it also came
+to light that he expected his wife to read Latin proof-sheets, as she
+knew something of that language. Besides, he was quite incapable of
+refusing commissions to amiable wine merchants. At her marriage Madame
+Struvelius had found a whole cellar full of large and small wine
+casks, none of which had been drawn off, while he complained bitterly
+that no wine was ever brought into his cellar. Even little Madame
+Guenther related that her husband could not give up night work; and
+that once, when he wandered with a lamp among his books, he came too
+near the curtain, which caught fire. He tore it off, and in so doing
+burnt his hands, and burst into the bedroom with blackened fingers in
+great alarm, and resembling Othello more than a mineralogist....
+
+Raschke was wandering about in the ante-room. Here too was confusion.
+Gabriel had not yet returned from his distant errand; the cook had
+left the remains of the meal standing on a side-table till his return;
+and Raschke had to find his greatcoat by himself. He rummaged among
+the clothes, and seized hold of a coat and a hat. As he was not so
+absent-minded as usual to-day, a glance at the despised supper
+reminded him just in time that he was to eat a fowl; so he seized hold
+of the newspaper which Gabriel had laid ready for his master, hastily
+took one of the chickens out of the dish, wrapped it in the journal,
+and thrust it in his pocket, agreeably surprised at the depth and
+capaciousness it revealed. Then he rushed past the astonished cook,
+and out of the house. When he opened the door of the _etage_ he
+stumbled against something that was crouching on the threshold. He
+heard a horrible growling behind him, and stormed down the stairs and
+out of doors.
+
+The words of the friend whom he had left now came into his mind.
+Werner's whole bearing was very characteristic; and there was
+something fine about it. It was strange that in a moment of anger
+Werner's face had acquired a sudden resemblance to a bull-dog's. Here
+the direct chain of the philosopher's contemplations was crossed by
+the remembrance of the conversation on animals' souls.
+
+"It is really a pity that it is still so difficult to determine an
+animal's expression of soul. If we could succeed in that, science
+would gain. For if we could compare in all their minutiae the
+expression and gestures of human beings and higher animals, we might
+make most interesting deductions from their common peculiarities and
+their particular differences. In this way the natural origin of their
+dramatic movements, and perhaps some new laws, would be discovered."
+
+While the philosopher was pondering thus, he felt a continued pulling
+at his coat-tails. As his wife was in the habit of giving him a gentle
+pull when he was walking next her absorbed in thought and they met
+some acquaintance, he took no further notice of it, but took off his
+hat, and bowing politely towards the railing of the bridge, said
+"Good-evening."
+
+"These common and original elements in the mimic expression of human
+beings and higher animals might, if rightly understood, even open out
+new vistas into the great mystery of life." Another pull. Raschke
+mechanically took off his hat. Another pull. "Thank you, dear Aurelia,
+I did bow." As he spoke, the thought crossed his mind that his wife
+would not pull at his coat so low down. It was not she, but his little
+daughter Bertha who was pulling; for she often walked gravely next
+him, and like her mother, pulled at the bell for bows. "That will do,
+my dear," said he, as Bertha continued to snatch and pull at his
+coat-tails. "Come here, you little rogue!" and he absently put his
+hand behind him to seize the little tease. He seized hold of something
+round and shaggy; he felt sharp teeth on his fingers, and turned with
+a start. There he saw in the lamplight a reddish monster with a big
+head, shaggy hair, and a little tassel that fell back into its hind
+legs in lieu of a tail. His wife and daughter were horribly
+transformed; and he gazed in surprise on this indistinct creature
+which seated itself before him, and glared at him in silence.
+
+"A strange adventure!" exclaimed Raschke. "What are you, unknown
+creature? Presumably a dog. Away with you!" The animal retreated a few
+steps. Raschke continued his meditations: "If we trace back the
+expression and gestures of the affections to their original forms in
+this manner, one of the most active laws would certainly prove to be
+the endeavor to attract or repel the extraneous. It would be
+instructive to distinguish, by means of these involuntary movements of
+men and animals, what is essential and what conventional. Away, dog!
+Do me a favor and go home. What does he want with me? Evidently he
+belongs to Werner's domain. The poor creature will assuredly lose
+itself in the town under the dominion of an _idee fixe_."
+
+Meantime Speihahn's attacks were becoming more violent; and now he was
+marching in a quite unnatural and purely conventional manner on his
+hind legs, while his fore paws were leaning against the professor's
+back, and his teeth were actually biting into the coat.
+
+A belated shoemaker's boy stood still and beat his leathern apron. "Is
+not the master ashamed to let his poor apprentice push him along like
+that?" In truth, the dog behind the man looked like a dwarf pushing a
+giant along the ice.
+
+Raschke's interest in the dog's thoughts increased. He stood still
+near a lantern, examined and felt his coat. This coat had developed a
+velvet collar and very long sleeves, advantages that the philosopher
+had never yet remarked in his greatcoat. Now the matter became clear
+to him: absorbed in thought, he had chosen a wrong coat, and the
+worthy dog insisted on saving his master's garment, and making the
+thief aware that there was something wrong. Raschke was so pleased
+with this sagacity that he turned round, addressed some kind words to
+Speihahn, and made an attempt to stroke his shaggy hair. The dog again
+snapped at his hand. "You are quite right to be angry with me,"
+replied Raschke; "I will prove to you that I acknowledge my fault." He
+took off the coat and hung it over his arm. "Yes, it is much heavier
+than my own." He walked on cheerfully in his thin coat, and observed
+with satisfaction that the dog abandoned the attacks on his back. But
+instead, Speihahn sprang upon his side, and again bit at the coat and
+the hand, and growled unpleasantly.
+
+The professor got angry with the dog, and when he came to a bench on
+the promenade he laid down the coat, intending to face the dog
+seriously and drive him home. In this manner he got rid of the dog,
+but also of the coat. For Speihahn sprang upon the bench with a mighty
+bound, placed himself astride the coat, and met the professor, who
+tried to drive him away, with hideous growling and snarling.
+
+"It is Werner's coat," said the professor, "and it is Werner's dog: it
+would be wrong to beat the poor creature because it is becoming
+violent in its fidelity, and it would be wrong to leave the dog and
+the coat." So he remained standing before the dog and speaking kindly
+to him: but Speihahn no longer took any notice of the professor; he
+turned against the coat itself, which he scratched, rummaged, and bit.
+Raschke saw that the coat could not long endure such rage. "He is
+frantic or mad," said he suspiciously. "I shall have to use force
+against you after all, poor creature;" and he considered whether he
+should also jump upon the seat and push the mad creature by a violent
+kick into the water, or whether it would be better to open the
+inevitable attack from below. He resolved on the latter course, and
+looked round to see whether he could anywhere discover a stone or
+stick to throw at the raging beast. As he looked, he observed the
+trees and the dark sky above him, and the place seemed quite
+unfamiliar. "Has magic been at work here?" he exclaimed, with
+amusement. He turned politely to a solitary wanderer who was passing
+that way: "Would you kindly tell me in what part of the town we are?
+And could you perhaps lend me your stick for a moment?"
+
+"Indeed," angrily replied the person addressed, "those are very
+suspicious questions. I want my stick myself at night. Who are you,
+sir?" The stranger approached the professor menacingly.
+
+"I am peaceable," replied Raschke, "and by no means inclined to
+violent attacks. A quarrel has arisen between me and the animal on
+this seat for the possession of a coat, and I should be much obliged
+to you if you would drive the dog away from the coat. But I beg you
+not to hurt the animal any more than is absolutely necessary."
+
+"Is that your coat there?" asked the man.
+
+"Unfortunately I cannot give you an affirmative answer," replied
+Raschke conscientiously.
+
+"There must be something wrong here," exclaimed the stranger, again
+eyeing the professor suspiciously.
+
+"There is, indeed," replied Raschke. "The dog is out of his mind; the
+coat is exchanged, and I do not know where we are."
+
+"Close to the valley gate, Professor Raschke," answered the voice of
+Gabriel, who hastily joined the group. "Excuse me, but what brings you
+here?"
+
+"Capital!" exclaimed Raschke joyously. "Pray take charge of this coat
+and this dog."
+
+Gabriel gazed in amazement at Speihahn, who was now lying on the coat
+and bending his head before his friend. Gabriel threw down the dog and
+seized the coat. "Why, that is our greatcoat!" exclaimed he.
+
+"Yes, Gabriel," said the professor, "that was my mistake, and the dog
+has shown marvelous fidelity to the coat."
+
+"Fidelity!" exclaimed Gabriel indignantly, as he drew a parcel out of
+the coat pocket. "It was greedy selfishness, sir; there must be some
+food in this pocket."
+
+"Yes, true," exclaimed Raschke; "it is all the chicken's fault. Give
+me the parcel, Gabriel; I must eat the fowl myself; and we might bid
+each other good-night now with mutual satisfaction, if you would just
+show me my way a little among these trees."
+
+"But you must not go home in the night air without an overcoat,"
+said Gabriel considerately. "We are not far from our house; the best
+way would really be for you to come back with me, sir."
+
+Raschke considered and laughed.
+
+"You are right, Gabriel; my departure was awkward; and to-day an
+animal's soul has restored a man's soul to order."
+
+"If you mean this dog," said Gabriel, "it would be the first time he
+ever did anything good. I see he must have followed you from our door;
+for I put little bones there for him of an evening."
+
+"Just now he seemed not to be quite in his right mind," said the
+professor.
+
+"He is cunning enough when he pleases," continued Gabriel
+mysteriously; "but if I were to speak of my experiences with this
+dog--"
+
+"Do speak, Gabriel," eagerly exclaimed the philosopher. "There is
+nothing so valuable concerning animals as a truthful statement from
+those who have carefully observed them."
+
+"I may say that I have done so," confirmed Gabriel, with satisfaction;
+"and if you want to know exactly what he is, I can assure you that he
+is possessed of the devil, he is a thief, he is embittered, and he
+hates all mankind."
+
+"Ah, indeed!" replied the professor, somewhat disconcerted. "I see it
+is much more difficult to look into a dog's heart than into a
+professor's."
+
+Speihahn crept along silent and suppressed, and listened to the
+praises that fell to his lot; while Professor Raschke, conducted by
+Gabriel, returned to the house by the park. Gabriel opened the
+sitting-room door, and announced:--
+
+"Professor Raschke."
+
+Ilse extended both her hands to him.
+
+"Welcome, welcome, dear Professor Raschke!" and led him to her
+husband's study.
+
+"Here I am again," said Raschke cheerfully, "after wandering as in a
+fairy tale. What has brought me back were two animals, who showed me
+the right way,--a roast fowl and an embittered dog."
+
+Felix sprang up; the men greeted one another warmly, shaking hands,
+and after all misadventures, spent a happy evening.
+
+When Raschke had gone home late, Gabriel said sadly to his mistress,
+"This was the new coat; the fowl and the dog have put it in a horrible
+plight."
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH FROEBEL
+
+(1782-1852)
+
+BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH
+
+[Illustration: FRIEDRICH FROEBEL]
+
+
+It was Froebel who said, "The clearer the thread that runs through our
+lives backward to our childhood, the clearer will be our onward glance
+to the goal;" and in the fragment of autobiography he has left us, he
+illustrates forcibly the truth of his own saying. The motherless baby
+who plays alone in the village pastor's quiet house, the dreamy child
+who wanders solitary in the high-walled garden; the thoughtful lad,
+neglected, misunderstood, who forgets the harsh realities of life in
+pondering the mysteries of the flowers, the contradictions of
+existence, and the dogmas of orthodox theology; who decides in early
+boyhood that the pleasures of the senses are without enduring
+influence and therefore on no account to be eagerly pursued;--these
+presentments of himself, which he summons up for us from the past,
+show the vividness of his early recollections and indicate the course
+which the stream of his life is to run.
+
+The coldness and injustice of the new mother who assumed control of
+the household when he was four years old, his isolation from other
+children, the merely casual notice he received from the busy father
+absorbed in his parish work, all tended to turn inward the tide of his
+mental and spiritual life. He studied himself, not only because it was
+the bent of his nature, but because he lacked outside objects of
+interest; and to this early habit of introspection we owe many of the
+valuable features of his educational philosophy. Whoever has learned
+thoroughly to understand one child, has conquered a spot of firm
+ground on which to rest while he studies the world of children; and
+because the great teacher realized this truth, because he longed to
+give to others the means of development denied to himself, he turns
+for us the heart-leaves of his boyhood.
+
+It would appear that Froebel's characteristics were strongly marked
+and unusual from the beginning. Called by every one "a moon-struck
+child" in Oberweissbach, the village of his birth, he was just as
+unanimously considered "an old fool" when, crowned with the experience
+of seventy years, he played with the village children on the green
+hills of Thuringia. The intensity of his inward life, the white heat
+of his convictions, his absolute blindness to any selfish idea or aim,
+his enthusiasm, the exaltation of his spiritual nature, all furnish so
+many cogent reasons why the people of any day or of any community
+should have failed to understand him, and scorned what they could not
+comprehend. It is the old story of the seers and the prophets repeated
+as many times as they appear; for "these colossal souls," as Emerson
+said, "require a long focal distance to be seen."
+
+At ten years old the sensitive boy was fortunately removed from the
+uncongenial atmosphere of the parental household; and in his uncle's
+home he spent five free and happy years, being apprenticed at the end
+of this time to a forester in his native Thuringian woods. Then
+followed a year's course in the University of Jena, and four years
+spent in the study of farming, in clerical work of various kinds, and
+in land-surveying. All these employments, however, Froebel himself
+felt to be merely provisional; for like the hazel wand in the
+diviner's hand, his instinct was blindly seeking through these
+restless years the well-spring of his life.
+
+In Frankfort, where he had gone intending to study architecture,
+Destiny touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and knew her.
+Through a curious combination of circumstances he gained employment in
+Herr Gruner's Model School, and it was found at once that he was what
+the Germans love to call "a teacher by the grace of God." The first
+time he met his class of boys he tells us that he felt inexpressibly
+happy; the hazel wand had found the waters and was fixed at last. From
+this time on, all the events of his life were connected with his
+experience as a teacher. Impelled as soon as he had begun his work by
+a desire for more effective methods, he visited Yverdon, then the
+centre of educational thought, and studied with Pestalozzi. He went
+again in 1808, accompanied by three pupils, and spent two years there,
+alternately studying and teaching.
+
+There was a year of lectures at Goettingen after this, and one at the
+University of Berlin, accompanied by unceasing study and research both
+in literary and scientific lines; but in the fateful year 1813 this
+quiet student life was broken in upon, for impelled by strong moral
+conviction, Froebel joined Baron von Luetzow's famous volunteer corps,
+formed to harass the French by constant skirmishes and to encourage
+the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.
+
+No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of
+the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing
+arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he
+had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils
+to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and
+unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and
+contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon
+the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became
+master of his fate.
+
+After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in
+the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being
+the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus
+by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so
+perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so
+complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look
+into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly
+the purpose it was intended to work out.
+
+In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of
+his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life
+work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a
+"Universal German Educational Institute." He was without money, of
+course, as he had always been and always would be,--his hands were
+made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of
+straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward
+things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the
+spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The
+school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later
+established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all
+were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to
+say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.
+
+Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in
+lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction
+with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for
+the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until
+1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a "definite truth." This definite
+truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten;
+and from this time until the end, all other work was laid aside, and
+his entire strength given to the consummate flower of his educational
+thought.
+
+The first kindergarten was opened in 1837 at Blankenburg (where a
+memorial school is now conducted), and in 1850 the institution at
+Marienthal for the training of kindergartners was founded, Froebel
+remaining at its head until his death two years after.
+
+With the exception of that remarkable book 'The Education of Man'
+(1826), his most important literary work was done after 1836;
+'Pedagogics of the Kindergarten,' the first great European
+contribution to the subject of child-study, appearing from 1837 to
+1840 in the form of separate essays, and the 'Mutter-und-Kose Lieder'
+(Mother-Play) in 1843. Many of his educational aphorisms and
+occasional speeches were preserved by his great disciple the Baroness
+von Marenholtz-Buelow in her 'Reminiscences of Froebel'; and though two
+most interesting volumes of his correspondence have been published,
+there remain a number of letters, as well as essays and educational
+sketches, not yet rendered into English.
+
+Froebel's literary style is often stiff and involved, its phrases
+somewhat labored, and its substance exceedingly difficult to translate
+with spirit and fidelity; yet after all, his mannerisms are of a kind
+to which one easily becomes accustomed, and the kernel of his thought
+when reached is found well worth the trouble of removing a layer of
+husk. He had always an infinitude of things to say, and they were all
+things of purpose and of meaning; but in writing, as well as in formal
+speaking, the language to clothe the thought came to him slowly and
+with difficulty. Yet it appears that in friendly private intercourse
+he spoke fluently, and one of his students reports that in his classes
+he was often "overpowering and sublime, the stream of his words
+pouring forth like fiery rain."
+
+It is probable that in daily life Froebel was not always an agreeable
+house-mate; for he was a genius, a reformer, and an unworldly
+enthusiast, believing in himself and in his mission with all the ardor
+of a heart centred in one fixed purpose. He was quite intolerant of
+those who doubted or disbelieved in his theories, as well as of those
+who, believing, did not carry their faith into works. The people who
+stood nearest him and devoted themselves to the furthering of his
+ideas slept on no bed of roses, certainly; but although he sometimes
+sacrificed their private interests to his cause, it must not be
+forgotten that he first laid himself and all that he had upon the same
+altar. His nature was one that naturally inspired reverence and
+loyalty, and drew from his associates the most extraordinary devotion
+and self-sacrifice. Then, as now, women were peculiarly attracted by
+his burning enthusiasm, his prophetic utterances, and his lofty views
+of their sex and its mission; and then, as now, the almost fanatical
+zeal of his followers is perhaps to be explained by the fact that he
+gives a new world-view to his students,--one that produces much the
+same effect upon the character as the spiritual exaltation called
+"experiencing religion."
+
+He was twice married, in each case to a superior woman of great gifts
+of mind and character, and both helpmates joyfully took up a life of
+privation and care that they might be associated with him and with his
+work. Those memorable words spoken of our Washington,--"Heaven left
+him childless that a nation might call him father," are even more
+applicable to Froebel, for his wise and tender fatherhood extends to
+all the children of the world. When he passed through the village
+streets of his own country, little ones came running from every
+doorstep; the babies clinging to his knees and the older ones hanging
+about his neck and refusing to leave the dear play-master, as they
+called him. So the kindergartners love to think of him to-day,--the
+tall spare figure, the long hair, the wise, plain, strong-featured
+face, the shining eyes, and the little ones clustering about him as
+they clustered about another Teacher in Galilee, centuries ago.
+
+Froebel's educational creed cannot here be cited at length, but some
+of its fundamental articles are:--
+
+The education of the child should begin with its birth, and should be
+threefold, addressing the mental, spiritual, and physical natures.
+
+It should be continued as it has begun, by appealing to the heart and
+the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.
+
+There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous
+purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten
+to university.
+
+Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a
+free, spontaneous growth,--a development from within, never a
+prescription from without.
+
+The training of the child should be conducted by means of the
+activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common
+heritage of childhood.
+
+The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life
+thrills through every manifestation of the universe, and that he is a
+part of all that is.
+
+The object of education is the development of the human being in the
+totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a
+child of God.
+
+These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own
+mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has
+but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they
+have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work
+greater magic in the future. The great teacher's place in history may
+be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he
+gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of
+child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day.
+
+Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful
+one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His
+death-blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens
+in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His
+strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing
+misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne
+to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to
+symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of
+the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of
+mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.
+
+In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens,
+his best memorials, cluster thickly now; and on the face of the cliffs
+that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner mountain may be seen
+in great letters the single word _Froebel_, hewn deep into the solid
+rock.
+
+                                 [Signature: Nora Archibald Smith]
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT OF THE CHILD
+
+From 'Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel,' by Baroness B. von
+Marenholtz-Buelow. Copyright 1877, by Mary Mann. Reprinted by
+permission of Lee & Shepard, publishers, Boston.
+
+
+All that does not grow out of one's inner being, all that is not one's
+own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken
+that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of
+calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we
+never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to
+overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of
+letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of
+life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear
+the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?...
+
+This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of
+human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the
+child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of
+self-seeking _egoism_ is the most important task of education; for
+selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the
+life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education
+is to teach to love, to break up the egoism of the individual, and to
+lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all
+the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the
+highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity....
+
+Women are to recognize that childhood and womanliness (the care of
+childhood and the life of women) are inseparably connected; that they
+form a unit; and that God and nature have placed the protection of the
+human plant in their hands. Hitherto the female sex could take only a
+more or less passive part in human history, because great battles and
+the political organization of nations were not suited to their powers.
+But at the present stage of culture, nothing is more pressingly
+required than the cultivation of every human power for the arts of
+peace and the work of higher civilization. The culture of individuals,
+and therefore of the whole nation, depends in great part upon the
+earliest care of childhood. On that account women, as one half of
+mankind, have to undertake the most important part of the problems of
+the time, problems that men are not able to solve. If but one half of
+the work be accomplished, then our epoch, like all others, will fail
+to reach the appointed goal. As educators of mankind, the women of the
+present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they
+have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings....
+
+But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier
+generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom
+and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time.
+I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may
+grow of itself, out of its own individuality. But where shall I find
+allies and helpers if not in women, who as mothers and teachers may
+put my idea in execution? Only intellectually active women can and
+will do it. But if these are to be loaded with the ballast of dead
+knowledge that can take no root in the unprepared ground, if the
+fountains of their own original life are to be choked up with it, they
+will not follow my direction nor understand the call of the time for
+the new task of their sex, but will seek satisfaction in empty
+superficiality.
+
+To learn to comprehend nature in the child,--is not that to comprehend
+one's own nature and the nature of mankind? And in this comprehension
+is there not involved a certain degree of comprehension of all things
+else? Women cannot learn and take into themselves anything higher and
+more comprehensive. It should therefore at least be the beginning,
+and the love of childhood should be awakened in the mind (and in a
+wider sense, this is the love of humanity), so that a new, free
+generation of men can grow up by right care.
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+From 'The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother-Play.' Copyright 1895, by
+D. Appleton & Co.
+
+
+What shall we learn from our yearning look into the heart of the
+flower and the eye of the child? This truth: Whatever develops, be it
+into flower or tree or man, is from the beginning implicitly that
+which it has the power to become. The possibility of perfect manhood
+is what you read in your child's eye, just as the perfect flower is
+prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A
+presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams,
+stirs in your unconscious infant--this it is, O mother, which
+transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself
+what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely,
+as _your_ child--or in other words, as child of man--he is destined to
+live in the past and future as well as in the present. His earthly
+being implies a past heaven; his birth makes a present heaven; in his
+soul he holds a future heaven. This threefold heaven, which you also
+bear within you, shines out on you through your child's eyes.
+
+The beast lives only in the present. Of past and future he knows
+naught. But to man belong not only the present, but also the future
+and the past. His thought pierces the heaven of the future, and hope
+is born. He learns that all human life is one life; that all human
+joys and sorrows are his joys and sorrows, and through participation
+enters the present heaven--the heaven of love. He turns his mind
+towards the past, and out of retrospection wrests a vigorous faith.
+What soul could fail to conquer an invincible trust in the pure, the
+good, the holy, the ideally human, the truly Divine, if it would look
+with single eye into its own past, into the past of history? Could
+there be a man in whose soul such a contemplation of the past would
+fail to blossom into devout insight, into self-conscious and
+self-comprehending faith? Must not such a retrospect unveil the truth?
+Must not the beauty of the unveiled truth allure him to Divine doing,
+Divine living? All that is high and holy in human life meets in that
+faith which is born of the unveiling of a heaven that has always been;
+in that hope born of a vision of the heaven that shall be; in that
+love which creates a heaven in the eternal Now. These three heavens
+shine out upon you through your child's eye. The presentiment that he
+carries these three heavens within him transfigures your countenance
+as you gaze upon him. Cherish this premonition, for thereby you will
+help him to make his life a musical chord wherein are blended the
+three notes of faith, hope, and love. These celestial virtues will
+link his life with the Divine life through which all life is one--with
+the God who is the supernal fountain of life, light, and love....
+
+Higher and more important than the cultivation of man's outer ear, is
+the culture of that inner sense of harmony whereby the soul learns to
+perceive sweet accord in soundless things, and to discern within
+itself harmonies and discords. The importance of wakening the inner
+ear to this music of the soul can scarcely be exaggerated. Learning to
+hear it within, the child will strive to give it outer form and
+expression; and even if in such effort he is only partially
+successful, he will gain thereby the power to appreciate the more
+successful effort of others. Thus enriching his own life by the life
+of others, he solves the problem of development. How else were it
+possible within the quickly fleeting hours of mortal life to develop
+our being in all directions, to fathom its depths, scale its heights,
+measure its boundaries? What we are, what we would be, we must learn
+to recognize in the mirror of all other lives. By the effort of each,
+and the recognition of all, the Divine man is revealed in humanity....
+
+Against the bright light which shines on the smooth white wall is
+thrust a dark object, and straightway appears the form which so
+delights the child. This is the outward fact; what is the truth which
+through this fact is dimly hinted to the prophetic mind? Is it not the
+creative and transforming power of light, that power which brings form
+and color out of chaos, and makes the beauty which gladdens our
+hearts? Is it not more than this,--a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the
+spiritual fact that our darkest experiences may project themselves in
+forms that will delight and bless, if in our hearts shines the light
+of God? The sternest crags, the most forbidding chasms, are beautiful
+in the mellow sunshine; while the fairest landscape loses all charm,
+and indeed ceases to be, when the light which created it is
+withdrawn. Is it not thus also with our lives? Yesterday, touched by
+the light of enthusiastic emotion, all our relationships seemed
+beautiful and blessed; to-day, when the glow of enthusiasm has faded,
+they oppress and repulse us. Only the conviction that it is the
+darkness within us which makes the darkness without, can restore the
+lost peace of our souls. Be it therefore, O mother, your sacred duty
+to make your darling early feel the working both of the outer and
+inner light. Let him see in one the symbol of the other, and tracing
+light and color to their source in the sun, may he learn to trace the
+beauty and meaning of his life to their source in God.
+
+                                       Translation of Susan E. Blow.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAWS OF THE MIND
+
+From 'The Letters of Froebel'
+
+
+I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child-world, those
+which delight us as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed
+laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system, and the
+operations of nature; and it is therefore possible to discover them
+and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws,
+we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty
+tendencies in the children, and to encourage, at the same time, all
+that is good and virtuous.
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE CHILDREN
+
+From 'The Letters of Froebel'
+
+
+I wish you could have been here this evening, and seen the many
+beautiful and varied forms and lovely patterns which freely and
+spontaneously developed themselves from some systematic variations of
+a simple ground form, in stick-playing. No one would believe, without
+seeing it, how the child soul, the child life, develops when treated
+as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected
+life of the world, by some skilled kindergarten teacher--nay, even by
+one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it
+blooms into delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh,
+if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth
+that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a
+hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what
+a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what
+dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what
+calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children!
+
+How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be
+so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their
+children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has
+passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for
+educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay,
+and showed how it could be satisfied.
+
+If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped
+lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and
+cry aloud to all men:--"Set to work at once for your children's sake
+on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose,
+and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A
+Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it
+their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly
+corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say
+I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so
+silly as I,--amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a
+right to enjoy life,--I who perpetually call to these parents in tones
+of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children!'" (Kommt,
+laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!)
+
+
+
+
+MOTIVES
+
+From 'The Education of Man.' By permission of Josephine Jarvis, the
+translator, and A. Lovell & Co., publishers
+
+
+Only in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure,
+spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in
+the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge
+and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do
+we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning
+of our whole being is thereby satisfied,--at least receives its whole
+meaning, and is changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an
+immediately rewarded effort....
+
+How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how
+we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an
+inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in
+another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the
+most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the
+inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure
+humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature.
+
+But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in
+boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on
+his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner,
+spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied
+condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this
+observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of
+man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes
+into his life.
+
+
+
+
+APHORISMS
+
+
+I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.
+
+The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.
+
+The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.
+
+Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.
+
+From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.
+
+Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.
+
+The first groundwork of religious life is love--love to God and
+man--in the bosom of the family.
+
+Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man
+and of humanity.
+
+Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.
+
+Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create
+life.
+
+Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no
+union with God is possible for men.
+
+The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the
+human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not
+therefore humanity born anew in each child?
+
+In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.
+
+The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed
+human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like
+one.
+
+In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things
+proceeds from one God.
+
+Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and
+joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.
+
+What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a
+beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and
+lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to
+verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.
+
+This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the
+beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national
+order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must
+first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of
+freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not
+even in that of the nursling.
+
+The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.
+
+A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,--what is it but a
+true sense of our close filial union with God?
+
+Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he
+must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.
+
+My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their
+innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I
+follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.
+
+A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.
+
+I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in
+God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose
+hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the
+purity and peace of heaven,--God's earth and God's heaven.
+
+    [Illustration: _THE MENAGERIE._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland.
+
+    "What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become
+    by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they
+    expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on
+    every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of
+    their inmost souls."--_Froebel._]
+
+
+
+
+FROISSART
+
+(1337-1410?)
+
+BY GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER
+
+[Illustration: FROISSART]
+
+
+Froissart is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with
+immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings,
+tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French
+knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he
+says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history
+and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and
+noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the
+wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in
+perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage
+them in well-doing."
+
+Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of
+feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was
+artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human
+qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no
+less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of
+fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding
+large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, and
+over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. The works of
+civilized communities--agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning,
+religion--were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad
+barbarians.
+
+This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years'
+War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the
+real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing
+efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in
+England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly admits,
+and not the knights, who won the battle of Poitiers. Gunpowder and
+cannon, a few years later, doomed the man-at-arms, and the rise of
+strong monarchies crowded out the feudal system. The thunder of
+artillery which echoes faintly in the last pages of Froissart is like
+a parting salvo to all the pageantry the volume holds. From
+cannon-ball and musket-shot the glittering procession has found refuge
+there. Into the safe retreat of these illuminated parchments, all the
+banners and pennons, lances, crests, and tapestries, knights and
+horses under clanking mail, had time--and but just time--to withdraw.
+We find them there, fresh as when they hurried in, the colors bright,
+the trumpets blowing.
+
+Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes in Hainault, in 1337, the year
+of his birth almost coinciding with Chaucer's. He tells us in his long
+autobiographical poem, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' that he was fond of
+play when a boy, and delighted in dances, carols, and poems, and had a
+liking for all those who loved dogs and birds. In the school where he
+was sent, he says, there were little girls whom he tried to please by
+giving them rings of glass, and pins, and apples, and pears. It seemed
+to him a most worthy thing to acquire their favor, and he wondered
+when it would be his turn to fall really in love. Much of this poem,
+which narrates tediously the love affair that was not long in coming,
+is probably fictitious; but there is no doubt of the accuracy of his
+description of himself in the opening lines, as fond of pleasure,
+prone to gallantry, and susceptible to all the bright faces of
+romance. From love and arms, he says, we are often told that all joy
+and every honor flow. He informs us elsewhere that he was no sooner
+out of school than he began to write, putting into verse the wars of
+his time.
+
+In 1361 he went to England, where Edward III was reigning with
+Philippa his queen, a daughter of the Count of Hainault. His passport
+to the favor of his great countrywoman was a book, the result of these
+rhymings, covering the period from the battle of Poitiers, 1356, to
+the time of his voyage. This volume is not known to exist, nor any
+copy of it. The Queen made him a clerk of her chamber. He had abundant
+opportunity in England to gratify his curiosity and fill his
+note-book, for the court was full of French noblemen, lately come over
+as hostages for King Jean of France, who was captured at the battle of
+Poitiers.
+
+In 1365 he took letters of recommendation from the Queen to David
+Bruce, King of Scotland, whom he followed for three months in his
+progress through that realm; spending a fortnight at the castle of
+William Douglas and making everywhere diligent inquiry about the
+recent war of 1345. In his delightful little poem 'The Debate between
+the Horse and the Greyhound,' beginning, "Froissart from Scotland was
+returning," we have a lifelike figure of the inquisitive young
+chronicler, pushing unweariedly from inn to inn on a tired horse and
+leading a footsore dog.
+
+Between his thirtieth and his thirty-fourth year he was sometimes in
+England and sometimes in various parts of the Continent. In August
+1369, while he was abroad, his patroness Queen Philippa died. She had
+encouraged him to continue his researches and writings, and he had
+presented her with a second volume, in prose, which has come down to
+us as a part of the chronicle. He admits that his work was an
+expansion of the chronicle of Jean le Bel, Canon of Saint Lambert at
+Liege, for he says:--"As all great rivers are made by the gathering
+together of many streams and springs, so the sciences also are
+extracted and compiled by many clerks: what one knows, the other does
+not."
+
+On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country
+of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by
+giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By
+the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a
+living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and
+correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A
+little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his
+chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been
+favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable
+to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his
+writings are all in the French language, which was of course his
+native tongue.
+
+About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at
+Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he
+observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them
+immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were
+however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388,
+hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man
+likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and
+Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book
+of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to
+travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of
+the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various
+towns upon their route had suffered.
+
+    "At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they
+    pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as
+    soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road
+    which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as
+    in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to
+    come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing."
+
+Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months'
+sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many
+towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much
+of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except
+with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which
+enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last
+in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than
+1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.
+
+It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat
+worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest
+of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and
+at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person
+dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the
+castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He
+is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his
+own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not
+regret the time thus spent, nor the money,--several fortunes, by his
+own count,--for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is
+always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of
+trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill
+sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from
+province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize
+the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local
+customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two
+French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each
+other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.
+
+    "And I tell you for a truth," we read, "that to make these
+    chronicles I have gone in my time much through the world,
+    both to fulfill my pleasure by seeing the wonders of the
+    earth, and to inquire about the arms and adventures that are
+    written in this book."
+
+So to horse, good Canon of Chimay! Throw aside books; there is news of
+fighting in the South; after the battle, soldiers will talk. There
+have been deeds of courage and romance. Hasten thither, while the tale
+of them is new!
+
+If he were not so celebrated as a chronicler, Froissart would be known
+as one of the last of the wandering minstrels. He had the roving foot;
+he lived by charming the rich into generosity with his recitals. And
+he wrote much poetry, which is little read, except where it has some
+autobiographical interest. We possess the long poems, 'L'Espinette
+Amoureuse,' 'Le Buisson de Jeunesse,' 'Le Dit du Florin,' and several
+shorter pieces, with fragments of his once famous versified romance
+'Meliador.'
+
+His great prose work, while professing to be a history, in distinction
+from the chronicles of previous writers, is however not an orderly
+narration, nor is it a philosophical treatment of political causes and
+effects. It is a collection of pictures and stories, without much
+unity except the constant purpose of exhibiting the prowess of
+knighthood. There is not much indication even of partisanship or
+patriotic feeling. Froissart generally gives due meed of praise to the
+best knight in every bout, the best battalion in every encounter,
+regardless of sides.
+
+The subjects treated are so numerous and disparate that no general
+idea of them can be given. They cover the time from 1326 to 1394, and
+lead us through England, Scotland, Flanders, Hainault, France, Italy,
+Spain, and Northern Africa. Among the most interesting passages are
+the story of King Edward's campaign against the Scots; his march
+through France; the battle of Crecy; the siege of Calais; Wat Tyler's
+Rebellion, which Froissart the well-fed parasite treats with an odd
+and inconsistent mingling of horror and contempt; the Jacquerie, which
+he says was the work of peasant dogs, the scum of the earth; the
+battle of Poitiers, with a fine description of the Black Prince
+waiting at table on poor captured King Jean; and the rise and fall of
+Philip van Artevelde.
+
+Froissart's chronicle used to be regarded as authoritative history.
+But as might have been expected from his mode of inquiry, it is full
+of geographical, chronological, and other errors. Getting his
+information by ear, he wrote proper names phonetically, or turned them
+into something resembling French. Thus Worcester becomes "Vaucestre,"
+Seymour "Simon," Sutherland "Surlant," Walter Tyler "Vautre Tuilier,"
+Edinburgh "Hedaimbourch," Stirling "Eturmelin." The persons from whom
+he got his material were generally partisans either of France or of
+England, and often told him their stories years after the events; so
+that although he tried to be impartial himself, and to offset one
+witness by another, he seldom heard a judicial account of a battle or
+a quarrel. He seems to have consulted few written records, though he
+might easily have seen the State papers of England and Hainault.
+
+It is useless to blame him, however; for the writing of mere history
+was not his purpose. With all his fine devotion to his life work,--a
+devotion which is the more admirable when we consider his
+pleasure-loving nature,--with all his attention to fairness, his great
+concern was not so much to instruct as to delight, first himself,
+secondly the great people of his age, and lastly posterity, on whom he
+ever and anon cast a shrewd and longing glance. To please his
+contemporaries, he several times revised his work. Posterity has
+nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which
+is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.
+
+But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian
+which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great
+authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century.
+Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt
+correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed
+virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely
+professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully
+practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck,
+for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which
+permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on
+prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled
+with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes
+himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by
+his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his
+unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet,
+and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it
+is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and
+squires and men-at-arms about him.
+
+There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to
+remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age.
+It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned
+village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved
+children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and
+agonizing foot-soldiers,--all these consequences of war he sees and
+occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever
+mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss.
+Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find
+ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune
+by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was
+a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.
+
+Froissart's merit, then, is not that he is a great political
+historian, nor even a great historian of the culture of his time. He
+did not see accurately enough to be the first, nor broadly and deeply
+and independently enough to be the second. But kindly Nature made him
+something else, and enabled him to win that name "which honoreth most
+and most endureth." She gave him the painter's eye, the poet's fancy,
+and it is as the artist of chivalry he lives to-day. His chronicle may
+be often false to historical fact, it may not display a broad and
+sympathetic intelligence or a generous impatience of conventionality,
+but it does please, it does enthrall. It is one of those books without
+moral intent, like the Arabian Nights, which the boys of all ages will
+persist in reading, and which men delight in if they love good
+pictures and good story-telling. No more lasting colors have come down
+to us from Venetian painters than those which rush out from the words
+on his pages. His scenes do not take shape in our minds as etchings or
+engravings, but smile themselves into being, like oil-paintings.
+Sunlight, the glint of steel, red and yellow banners waving, white
+horses galloping over the sand, flashing armor, glittering spurs, the
+shining faces of eager men, fill with glory this great pictorial
+wonder-book of the Middle Ages.
+
+                                    [Signature: Geo McLean Harper]
+
+
+
+
+THE INVASION OF FRANCE BY KING EDWARD III., AND THE BATTLE OF CRECY
+
+From the 'Chronicles': Translation of John Bourchier, Lord Berners
+
+
+HOW THE KING OF ENGLAND RODE THROUGH NORMANDY
+
+When the King of England arrived in the Hogue Saint-Vaast, the King
+issued out of his ship, and the first foot that he set on the ground
+he fell so rudely that the blood brast out of his nose. The knights
+that were about him took him up and said, "Sir, for God's sake enter
+again into your ship, and come not aland this day, for this is but an
+evil sign for us." Then the King answered quickly and said,
+"Wherefore? This is a good token for me, for the land desireth to have
+me." Of the which answer all his men were right joyful. So that day
+and night the King lodged on the sands, and in the mean time
+discharged the ships of their horses and other baggages; there the
+King made two marshals of his host, the one the Lord Godfrey of
+Harcourt and the other the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Arundel
+constable. And he ordained that the Earl of Huntingdon should keep the
+fleet of ships with a hundred men of arms and four hundred archers;
+and also he ordained three battles, one to go on his right hand,
+closing to the seaside, and the other on his left hand, and the King
+himself in the midst, and every night to lodge all in one field.
+
+Thus they set forth as they were ordained, and they that went by the
+sea took all the ships that they found in their ways; and so long they
+went forth, what by sea and what by land, that they came to a good
+port and to a good town called Barfleur, the which incontinent was
+won, for they within gave up for fear of death. Howbeit, for all that,
+the town was robbed, and much gold and silver there found, and rich
+jewels; there was found so much riches, that the boys and villains of
+the host set nothing by good furred gowns; they made all the men of
+the town to issue out and to go into the ships, because they would not
+suffer them to be behind them for fear of rebelling again. After the
+town of Barfleur was thus taken and robbed without brenning, then they
+spread abroad in the country and did what they list, for there was not
+to resist them. At last they came to a great and a rich town called
+Cherbourg; the town they won and robbed it, and brent part thereof,
+but into the castle they could not come, it was so strong and well
+furnished with men of war.
+
+
+OF THE GREAT ASSEMBLY THAT THE FRENCH KING MADE TO RESIST THE KING OF
+ENGLAND
+
+Thus by the Englishmen was brent, exiled, robbed, wasted, and pilled
+the good plentiful country of Normandy. Then the French King sent for
+the Lord John of Hainault, who came to him with a great number; also
+the King sent for other men of arms, dukes, earls, barons, knights,
+and squires, and assembled together the greatest number of people that
+had been seen in France a hundred year before. He sent for men into so
+far countries, that it was long or they came together, wherefore the
+King of England did what him list in the mean season. The French King
+heard well what he did, and sware and said how they should never
+return again unfought withal, and that such hurts and damages as they
+had done should be dearly revenged; wherefore he had sent letters to
+his friends in the Empire, to such as were farthest off, and also to
+the gentle King of Bohemia and to the Lord Charles his son, who from
+thenceforth was called King of Almaine; he was made King by the aid of
+his father and the French King, and had taken on him the arms of the
+Empire: the French King desired them to come to him with all their
+powers, to the intent to fight with the King of England, who brent and
+wasted his country. These Princes and Lords made them ready with great
+number of men of arms, of Almains, Bohemians, and Luxemburgers, and so
+came to the French King. Also King Philip sent to the Duke of
+Lorraine, who came to serve him with three hundred spears; also there
+came the Earl [of] Salm in Saumois, the Earl of Sarrebruck, the Earl
+of Flanders, the Earl William of Namur, every man with a fair company.
+
+Ye have heard herebefore of the order of the Englishmen; how they went
+in three battles, the marshals on the right hand and on the left, the
+King and the Prince of Wales his son in the midst. They rode but small
+journeys, and every day took their lodgings between noon and three of
+the clock, and found the country so fruitful that they needed not to
+make no provision for their host, but all only for wine; and yet they
+found reasonably sufficient thereof. It was no marvel, though, they of
+the country were afraid; for before that time they had never seen men
+of war, nor they wist not what war or battle meant. They fled away as
+far as they might hear speaking of the Englishmen, and left their
+houses well stuffed, and granges full of corn; they wist not how to
+save and keep it. The King of England and the Prince had in their
+battle a three thousand men of arms and six thousand archers, and a
+ten thousand men afoot, beside them that rode with the marshals....
+
+Then the King went toward Caen, the which was a greater town and full
+of drapery and other merchandise, and rich burgesses, noble ladies and
+damosels, and fair churches, and specially two great and rich abbeys,
+one of the Trinity, another of Saint Stephen; and on the one side of
+the town one of the fairest castles of all Normandy, and captain
+therein was Robert of Wargny, with three hundred Genoways, and in the
+town was the Earl of Eu and of Guines, Constable of France, and the
+Earl of Tancarville, with a good number of men of war. The King of
+England rode that day in good order and lodged all his battles
+together that night, a two leagues from Caen, in a town with a little
+haven called Austrehem, and thither came also all his navy of ships
+with the Earl of Huntingdon, who was governour of them.
+
+The constable and other lords of France that night watched well the
+town of Caen, and in the morning armed them with all them of the town:
+then the constable ordained that none should issue out, but keep their
+defenses on the walls, gate, bridge, and river; and left the suburbs
+void, because they were not closed; for they thought they should have
+enough to do to defend the town, because it was not closed but with
+the river. They of the town said how they would issue out, for they
+were strong enough to fight with the King of England. When the
+constable saw their good wills, he said, "In the name of God be it,
+ye shall not fight without me." Then they issued out in good order,
+and made good face to fight and to defend them and to put their lives
+in adventure.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF CAEN, AND HOW THE ENGLISHMEN TOOK THE TOWN
+
+The same day the Englishmen rose early and appareled them ready to go
+to Caen.[A] The King heard mass before the sun-rising, and then took
+his horse, and the Prince his son, with Sir Godfrey of Harcourt,
+marshal and leader of the host, whose counsel the King much followed.
+Then they drew toward Caen with their battles in good array, and so
+approached the good town of Caen. When they of the town, who were
+ready in the field, saw these three battles coming in good order, with
+their banners and standards waving in the wind, and the archers, the
+which they had not been accustomed to see, they were sore afraid and
+fled away toward the town without any order or good array, for all
+that the constable could do; then the Englishmen pursued them eagerly.
+When the constable and the Earl Tancarville saw that, they took a gate
+at the entry and saved themselves and certain with them, for the
+Englishmen were entered into the town. Some of the knights and squires
+of France, such as knew the way to the castle, went thither, and the
+captain there received them all, for the castle was large. The
+Englishmen in the chase slew many, for they took none to mercy.
+
+Then the constable and the Earl of Tancarville, being in the little
+tower at the bridge foot, looked along the street and saw their men
+slain without mercy; they doubted to fall in their hands. At last they
+saw an English knight with one eye, called Sir Thomas Holland, and a
+five or six other knights with him; they knew them, for they had seen
+them before in Pruce, in Granade, and in other viages. Then they
+called to Sir Thomas and said how they would yield themselves
+prisoners. Then Sir Thomas came thither with his company and mounted
+up into the gate, and there found the said lords with twenty-five
+knights with them, who yielded them to Sir Thomas; and he took them
+for his prisoners and left company to keep them, and then mounted
+again on his horse and rode into the streets, and saved many lives of
+ladies, damosels, and cloisterers from defoiling,--for the soldiers
+were without mercy. It fell so well the same season for the
+Englishmen, that the river, which was able to bear ships, at that time
+was so low that men went in and out beside the bridge. They of the
+town were entered into their houses, and cast down into the street
+stones, timber, and iron, and slew and hurt more than five hundred
+Englishmen; wherewith the King was sore displeased. At night when he
+heard thereof, he commanded that the next day all should be put to the
+sword and the town brent; but then Sir Godfrey of Harcourt
+said:--"Dear sir, for God's sake assuage somewhat your courage, and
+let it suffice you that ye have done. Ye have yet a great voyage to do
+or ye come before Calais, whither ye purpose to go: and sir, in this
+town there is much people who will defend their houses, and it will
+cost many of your men their lives, or ye have all at your will;
+whereby peradventure ye shall not keep your purpose to Calais, the
+which should redound to your rack. Sir, save your people, for ye shall
+have need of them or this month pass; for I think verily your
+adversary King Philip will meet with you to fight, and ye shall find
+many strait passages and rencounters; wherefore your men, an ye had
+more, shall stand you in good stead: and sir, without any further
+slaying ye shall be lord of this town; men and women will put all that
+they have to your pleasure." Then the King said, "Sir Godfrey, you are
+our marshal; ordain everything as ye will." Then Sir Godfrey with his
+banner rode from street to street, and commanded in the King's name
+none to be so hardy to put fire in any house, to slay any person, nor
+to violate any woman. When they of the town heard that cry, they
+received the Englishmen into their houses and made them good cheer,
+and some opened their coffers and bade them take what them list, so
+they might be assured of their lives; howbeit there were done in the
+town many evil deeds, murders, and robberies. Thus the Englishmen were
+lords of the town three days and won great riches, the which they sent
+by barks and barges to Saint-Saviour by the river of Austrehem, a two
+leagues thence, whereas all their navy lay. Then the King sent the
+Earl of Huntingdon with two hundred men of arms and four hundred
+archers, with his navy and prisoners and riches that they had got,
+back again into England. And the King bought of Sir Thomas Holland
+the Constable of France and the Earl of Tancarville, and paid for
+them twenty thousand nobles....
+
+The next day the King departed, brenning and wasting all before him,
+and at night lodged in a good village called Grandvilliers. The next
+day the King passed by Dargies; there was none to defend the castle,
+wherefore it was soon taken and brent. Then they went forth destroying
+the country all about, and so came to the castle of Poix, where there
+was a good town and two castles. There was nobody in them but two fair
+damosels, daughters to the Lord of Poix; they were soon taken, and had
+been violated, an two English knights had not been, Sir John Chandos
+and Sir Basset; they defended them and brought them to the King, who
+for his honor made them good cheer and demanded of them whither they
+would fainest go. They said, "To Corbie," and the King caused them to
+be brought thither without peril. That night the King lodged in the
+town of Poix. They of the town and of the castles spake that night
+with the marshals of the host, to save them and their town from
+brenning, and they to pay a certain sum of florins the next day as
+soon as the host was departed. This was granted them, and in the
+morning the King departed with all his host, except a certain that
+were left there to receive the money that they of the town had
+promised to pay. When they of the town saw the host depart and but a
+few left behind, then they said they would pay never a penny, and so
+ran out and set on the Englishmen, who defended themselves as well as
+they might and sent after the host for succor. When Sir Raynold Cobham
+and Sir Thomas Holland, who had the rule of the rear guard, heard
+thereof, they returned and cried, "Treason, treason!" and so came
+again to Poix-ward and found their companions still fighting with them
+of the town. Then anon they of the town were nigh all slain, and the
+town brent, and the two castles beaten down. Then they returned to the
+King's host, who was as then at Airaines and there lodged, and had
+commanded all manner of men on pain of death to do no hurt to no town
+of Arsyn,[B] for there the King was minded to lie a day or two to take
+advice how he might pass the river of Somme; for it was necessary for
+him to pass the river, as ye shall hear after.
+
+    [A] This was 26th July, 1346. Edward arrived at Poissy on
+    12th August; Philip of Valois left Paris on the 14th; the
+    English crossed the Seine at Poissy on the 16th, and the
+    Somme at Blanche-taque on the 24th.
+
+    [B] Probably a misunderstanding by Froissart of the English
+    word "arson": the king's command being not to burn the towns
+    on the Somme, as he wanted them for shelter.
+
+
+HOW THE FRENCH KING FOLLOWED THE KING OF ENGLAND IN BEAUVOISINOIS
+
+Now let us speak of King Philip, who was at Saint-Denis and his people
+about him, and daily increased. Then on a day he departed and rode so
+long that he came to Coppegueule, a three leagues from Amiens, and
+there he tarried. The King of England, being at Airaines, wist not
+where for to pass the river of Somme, the which was large and deep,
+and all bridges were broken and the passages well kept. Then at the
+King's commandment his two marshals with a thousand men of arms and
+two thousand archers went along the river to find some passage, and
+passed by Longpre, and came to the bridge of Remy, the which was well
+kept with a great number of knights and squires and men of the
+country. The Englishmen alighted afoot and assailed the Frenchmen from
+the morning till it was noon; but the bridge was so well fortified and
+defended that the Englishmen departed without winning of anything.
+Then they went to a great town called Fountains, on the river of
+Somme, the which was clean robbed and brent, for it was not closed.
+Then they went to another town called Long-en-Ponthieu; they could not
+win the bridge, it was so well kept and defended. Then they departed
+and went to Picquigny, and found the town, the bridge, and the castle
+so well fortified that it was not likely to pass there; the French
+King had so well defended the passages, to the intent that the King of
+England should not pass the river of Somme, to fight with him at his
+advantage or else to famish him there.
+
+When these two marshals had assayed in all places to find passage and
+could find none, they returned again to the King, and shewed how they
+could find no passage in no place. The same night the French King came
+to Amiens with more than a hundred thousand men. The King of England
+was right pensive, and the next morning heard mass before the
+sun-rising and then dislodged; and every man followed the marshals'
+banners, and so rode in the country of Vimeu approaching to the good
+town of Abbeville, and found a town thereby, whereunto was come much
+people of the country in trust of a little defense that was there; but
+the Englishmen anon won it, and all they that were within slain, and
+many taken of the town and of the country. The King took his lodging
+in a great hospital[C] that was there. The same day the French King
+departed from Amiens and came to Airaines about noon; and the
+Englishmen were departed thence in the morning. The Frenchmen found
+there great provision that the Englishmen had left behind them,
+because they departed in haste. There they found flesh ready on the
+broaches, bread and pasties in the ovens, wine in tuns and barrels,
+and the tables ready laid. There the French King lodged and tarried
+for his lords.
+
+That night the King of England was lodged at Oisemont. At night when
+the two marshals were returned, who had that day overrun the country
+to the gates of Abbeville and to Saint-Valery and made a great
+skirmish there, then the King assembled together his council and made
+to be brought before him certain prisoners of the country of Ponthieu
+and of Vimeu. The King right courteously demanded of them if there
+were any among them that knew any passage beneath Abbeville, that he
+and his host might pass over the river of Somme: if he would shew him
+thereof, he should be quit of his ransom, and twenty of his company
+for his love. There was a varlet called Gobin Agace, who stepped forth
+and said to the King:--"Sir, I promise you on the jeopardy of my head
+I shall bring you to such a place, whereas ye and all your host shall
+pass the river of Somme without peril. There be certain places in the
+passage that ye shall pass twelve men afront two times between day and
+night; ye shall not go in the water to the knees. But when the flood
+cometh, the river then waxeth so great that no man can pass; but when
+the flood is gone, the which is two times between day and night, then
+the river is so low that it may be passed without danger both
+a-horseback and afoot. The passage is hard in the bottom, with white
+stones, so that all your carriage may go surely; therefore the passage
+is called Blanche-Taque. An ye make ready to depart betimes, ye may be
+there by the sun-rising." The King said, "If this be true that ye
+say, I quit thee thy ransom and all thy company, and moreover shall
+give thee a hundred nobles." Then the King commanded every man to be
+ready at the sound of the trumpet to depart.
+
+    [C] That is, a house of the Knights of St. John.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF BLANCHE-TAQUE
+
+The King of England slept not much that night, for at midnight he
+arose and sowned his trumpet; then incontinent they made ready
+carriages and all things, and at the breaking of the day they departed
+from the town of Oisemont and rode after the guiding of Gobin Agace,
+so that they came by the sun-rising to Blanche-Taque: but as then the
+flood was up, so that they might not pass, so the King tarried there
+till it was prime; then the ebb came.
+
+The French King had his currours in the country, who brought him word
+of the demeanor of the Englishmen. Then he thought to close the King
+of England between Abbeville and the river of Somme, and so to fight
+with him at his pleasure. And when he was at Amiens he had ordained a
+great baron of Normandy, called Sir Godemar du Fay, to go and keep the
+passage of Blanche-Taque, where the Englishmen must pass or else in
+none other place. He had with him a thousand men of arms and six
+thousand afoot, with the Genoways; so they went by Saint-Riquier in
+Ponthieu and from thence to Crotoy, whereas the passage lay: and also
+he had with him a great number of men of the country, and also a great
+number of them of Montreuil, so that they were a twelve thousand men
+one and other.
+
+When the English host was come thither, Sir Godemar du Fay arranged
+all his company to defend the passage. The King of England let not for
+all that; but when the flood was gone, he commanded his marshals to
+enter into the water in the name of God and St. George. Then they that
+were hardy and courageous entered on both parties, and many a man
+reversed. There were some of the Frenchmen of Artois and Picardy that
+were as glad to joust in the water as on the dry land.
+
+The Frenchmen defended so well the passage at the issuing out of the
+water, that they had much to do. The Genoways did them great trouble
+with their cross-bows; on the other side the archers of England shot
+so wholly together, that the Frenchmen were fain to give place to the
+Englishmen. There was a sore battle, and many a noble feat of arms
+done on both sides. Finally the Englishmen passed over and assembled
+together in the field. The King and the Prince passed, and all the
+lords; then the Frenchmen kept none array, but departed, he that
+might best. When Sir Godemar saw that discomfiture, he fled and saved
+himself; some fled to Abbeville and some to Saint-Riquiers. They that
+were there afoot could not flee, so that there were slain a great
+number of them of Abbeville, Montreuil, Rue, and of Saint-Riquiers;
+the chase endured more than a great league. And as yet all the
+Englishmen were not passed the river, and certain currours of the King
+of Bohemia and of Sir John of Hainault came on them that were behind,
+and took certain horses and carriages and slew divers, or they could
+take the passage.
+
+The French King the same morning was departed from Airaines, trusting
+to have found the Englishmen between him and the river of Somme; but
+when he heard how that Sir Godemar du Fay and his company were
+discomfited, he tarried in the field and demanded of his marshals what
+was best to do. They said, "Sir, ye cannot pass the river but at the
+bridge of Abbeville, for the flood is come in at Blanche-Taque;" then
+he returned and lodged at Abbeville.
+
+The King of England, when he was past the river, he thanked God, and
+so rode forth in like manner as he did before. Then he called Gobin
+Agace and did quit him his ransom and all his company, and gave him a
+hundred nobles and a good horse. And so the King rode forth fair and
+easily, and thought to have lodged in a great town called Noyelles;
+but when he knew that the town pertained to the Countess d'Aumale,
+sister to the Lord Robert of Artois,[D] the King assured the town and
+country as much as pertained to her, and so went forth: and his
+marshals rode to Crotoy on the seaside and brent the town, and found
+in the haven many ships and barks charged with wines of Poitou,
+pertaining to the merchants of Saintonge and of Rochelle; they brought
+the best thereof to the King's host. Then one of the marshals rode to
+the gates of Abbeville and from thence to Saint-Riquiers, and after to
+the town of Rue-Saint-Esprit. This was on a Friday, and both battles
+of the marshals returned to the King's host about noon and so lodged
+all together near to Cressy in Ponthieu.
+
+The King of England was well informed how the French King followed
+after him to fight. Then he said to his company, "Let us take here
+some plot of ground, for we will go no farther till we have seen our
+enemies. I have good cause here to abide them, for I am on the right
+heritage of the Queen my mother, the which land was given at her
+marriage: I will challenge it of mine adversary Philip of Valois." And
+because that he had not the eighth part in number of men as the French
+King had, therefore he commanded his marshals to chose a plot of
+ground somewhat for his advantage; and so they did, and thither the
+King and his host went. Then he sent his currours to Abbeville, to see
+if the French King drew that day into the field or not. They went
+forth and returned again, and said how they could see none appearance
+of his coming; then every man took their lodging for that day, and to
+be ready in the morning at the sound of the trumpet in the same place.
+This Friday the French King tarried still in Abbeville abiding for his
+company, and sent his two marshals to ride out to see the dealing of
+the Englishmen; and at night they returned, and said how the
+Englishmen were lodged in the fields. That night the French King made
+a supper to all the chief lords that were there with him, and after
+supper the King desired them to be friends each to other. The King
+looked for the Earl of Savoy, who should come to him with a thousand
+spears, for he had received wages for a three months of them at Troyes
+in Champagne.
+
+    [D] She was in fact his daughter.
+
+
+OF THE ORDER OF THE ENGLISHMEN AT CRESSY
+
+On the Friday, as I said before, the King of England lay in the
+fields, for the country was plentiful of wines and other victual, and
+if need had been, they had provision following in carts and other
+carriages. That night the King made a supper to all his chief lords of
+his host and made them good cheer; and when they were all departed to
+take their rest, then the King entered into his oratory and kneeled
+down before the altar, praying God devoutly that if he fought the next
+day, that he might achieve the journey to His honor; then about
+midnight he laid him down to rest, and in the morning he rose betimes
+and heard mass, and the Prince his son with him, and the most part of
+his company, were confessed and houseled; and after the mass said, he
+commanded every man to be armed and to draw to the field to the same
+place before appointed. Then the King caused a park to be made by the
+wood-side behind his host, and there was set all carts and carriages,
+and within the park were all their horses, for every man was afoot;
+and into this park there was but one entry. Then he ordained three
+battles: In the first was the young Prince of Wales, with him the Earl
+of Warwick and Oxford, the Lord Godfrey of Harcourt, Sir Raynold
+Cobham, Sir Thomas Holland, the Lord Stafford, the Lord of Mohun, the
+Lord Delaware, Sir John Chandos, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, Sir
+Robert Nevill, the Lord Thomas Clifford, the Lord Bourchier, the Lord
+de Latimer, and divers other knights and squires that I cannot name;
+they were an eight hundred men of arms and two thousand archers, and a
+thousand of other with the Welshmen; every lord drew to the field
+appointed under his own banner and pennon. In the second battle was
+the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Ros, the Lord
+Lucy, the Lord Willoughby, the Lord Basset, the Lord of Saint-Aubin,
+Sir Louis Tufton, the Lord of Multon, the Lord Lascelles and divers
+other, about an eight hundred men of arms and twelve hundred archers.
+The third battle had the King; he had seven hundred men of arms and
+two thousand archers. Then the King leapt on a hobby, with a white rod
+in his hand, one of his marshals on the one hand and the other on the
+other hand: he rode from rank to rank desiring every man to take heed
+that day to his right and honor. He spake it so sweetly and with so
+good countenance and merry cheer, that all such as were discomfited
+took courage in the seeing and hearing of him. And when he had thus
+visited all his battles, it was then nine of the day; then he caused
+every man to eat and drink a little, and so they did at their leisure.
+And afterward they ordered again their battles; then every man lay
+down on the earth and by him his salet and bow, to be the more fresher
+when their enemies should come.
+
+
+THE ORDER OF THE FRENCHMEN AT CRESSY, AND HOW THEY BEHELD THE DEMEANOR
+OF THE ENGLISHMEN
+
+This Saturday the French King rose betimes and heard mass in Abbeville
+in his lodging in the abbey of St. Peter, and he departed after the
+sun-rising. When he was out of the town two leagues, approaching
+towards his enemies, some of his lords said to him, "Sir, it were good
+that ye ordered your battles, and let all your footmen pass somewhat
+on before, that they be not troubled with the horsemen." Then the King
+sent four knights, the Moine [of] Bazeilles, the Lord of Noyers, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, and the Lord d'Aubigny, to ride to aview the English
+host; and so they rode so near that they might well see part of their
+dealing. The Englishmen saw them well and knew well how they were come
+thither to aview them; they let them alone and made no countenance
+toward them, and let them return as they came. And when the French
+King saw these four knights return again, he tarried till they came to
+him and said, "Sirs, what tidings?" These four knights each of them
+looked on other, for there was none would speak before his companion;
+finally the King said to [the] Moine, who pertained to the King of
+Bohemia and had done in his days so much that he was reputed for one
+of the valiantest knights of the world, "Sir, speak you." Then he
+said:--"Sir, I shall speak, sith it pleaseth you, under the correction
+of my fellows. Sir, we have ridden and seen the behaving of your
+enemies: know ye for truth they are rested in three battles abiding
+for you. Sir, I will counsel you as for my part, saving your
+displeasure, that you and all your company rest here and lodge for
+this night; for or they that be behind of your company be come hither,
+and or your battles be set in good order, it will be very late, and
+your people be weary and out of array, and ye shall find your enemies
+fresh and ready to receive you. Early in the morning ye may order your
+battles at more leisure and advise your enemies at more deliberation,
+and to regard well what way ye will assail them; for, sir, surely they
+will abide you."
+
+Then the King commanded that it should be so done. Then his two
+marshals one rode before, another behind, saying to every banner,
+"Tarry and abide here in the name of God and St. Denis." They that
+were foremost tarried, but they that were behind would not tarry, but
+rode forth, and said how they would in no wise abide till they were as
+far forward as the foremost; and when they before saw them come on
+behind, then they rode forward again, so that the King nor his
+marshals could not rule them. So they rode without order or good
+array, till they came in sight of their enemies; and as soon as the
+foremost saw them they reculed then aback without good array, whereof
+they behind had marvel and were abashed, and thought that the foremost
+company had been fighting. Then they might have had leisure and room
+to have gone forward, if they had list; some went forth, and some
+abode still. The commons, of whom all the ways between Abbeville and
+Cressy were full, when they saw that they were near to their enemies,
+they took their swords and cried, "Down with them! let us slay them
+all." There is no man, though he were present at the journey, that
+could imagine or shew the truth of the evil order that was among the
+French party, and yet they were a marvelous great number. That I write
+in this book I learned it specially of the Englishmen, who well beheld
+their dealing; and also certain knights of Sir John of Hainault's, who
+was always about King Philip, shewed me as they knew.
+
+
+OF THE BATTLE OF CRESSY, AUGUST 26TH, 1346
+
+The Englishmen, who were in three battles lying on the ground to rest
+them, as soon as they saw the Frenchmen approach, they rose upon their
+feet fair and easily without any haste, and arranged their battles.
+The first, which was the Prince's battle, the archers there stood in
+manner of a herse and the men of arms in the bottom of the battle. The
+Earl of Northampton and the Earl of Arundel with the second battle
+were on a wing in good order, ready to comfort the Prince's battle, if
+need were.
+
+The lords and knights of France came not to the assembly together in
+good order, for some came before and some came after, in such haste
+and evil order that one of them did trouble another. When the French
+King saw the Englishmen his blood changed, and said to his marshals,
+"Make the Genoways go on before, and begin the battle, in the name of
+God and St. Denis." There were of the Genoways' cross-bows about a
+fifteen thousand, but they were so weary of going afoot that day a six
+leagues armed with their cross-bows, that they said to their
+constables, "We be not well ordered to fight this day, for we be not
+in the case to do any great deed of arms: we have more need of rest."
+These words came to the Earl of Alencon, who said, "A man is well at
+ease to be charged with such a sort of rascals, to be faint and fail
+now at most need." Also the same season there fell a great rain and a
+clipse with a terrible thunder, and before the rain there came flying
+over both battles a great number of crows for fear of the tempest
+coming. Then anon the air began to wax clear, and the sun to shine
+fair and bright, the which was right in the Frenchmen's eyen and on
+the Englishmen's backs. When the Genoways were assembled together and
+began to approach, they made a great leap and cry to abash the
+Englishmen, but they stood still and stirred not for all that; then
+the Genoways again the second time made another leap and a fell cry,
+and stept forward a little, and the Englishmen removed not one foot;
+thirdly, again they leapt and cried, and went forth till they came
+within shot; then they shot fiercely with their cross-bows. Then the
+English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so
+wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow. When the Genoways
+felt the arrows piercing through heads, arms, and breasts, many of
+them cast down their cross-bows, and did cut their strings and
+returned discomfited. When the French King saw them fly away, he said,
+"Slay these rascals, for they shall let and trouble us without
+reason." Then ye should have seen the men of arms dash in among them
+and killed a great number of them; and ever still the Englishmen shot
+whereas they saw thickest press: the sharp arrows ran into the men of
+arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men, among the
+Genoways, and when they were down, they could not relieve again; the
+press was so thick that one overthrew another. And also among the
+Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great
+knives, and they went in among the men of arms and slew and murdered
+many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights, and
+squires; whereof the King of England was after displeased, for he had
+rather they had been taken prisoners.
+
+The valiant King of Bohemia called Charles of Luxembourg, son to the
+noble Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, for all that he was nigh blind,
+when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him,
+"Where is the Lord Charles my son?" His men said, "Sir, we cannot
+tell; we think he be fighting." Then he said, "Sirs, ye are my men, my
+companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far
+forward that I may strike one stroke with my sword." They said they
+would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose
+him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to
+other and set the King before to accomplish his desire, and so they
+went on their enemies. The Lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote
+himself King of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to
+the battle; but when he saw that the matter went awry on their party,
+he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The King his father was so
+far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea, and more than
+four, and fought valiantly, and so did his company; and they
+adventured themselves so forward that they were there all slain, and
+the next day they were found in the place about the King, and all
+their horses tied each to other.
+
+The Earl of Alencon came to the battle right ordinately and fought
+with the Englishmen, and the Earl of Flanders also on his part. These
+two lords with their companies coasted the English archers and came to
+the Prince's battle, and there fought valiantly long. The French King
+would fain have come thither, when he saw their banners, but there was
+a great hedge of archers before him. The same day the French King had
+given a great black courser to Sir John of Hainault, and he made the
+Lord Thierry of Senzeille to ride on him and to bear his banner. The
+same horse took the bridle in the teeth and brought him through all
+the currours of the Englishmen, and as he would have returned again,
+he fell in a great dike and was sore hurt, and had been there dead, an
+his page had not been, who followed him through all the battles and
+saw where his master lay in the dike, and had none other let but for
+his horse; for the Englishmen would not issue out of their battle for
+taking of any prisoner. Then the page alighted and relieved his
+master: then he went not back again the same way that they came; there
+was too many in his way.
+
+This battle between Broye and Cressy this Saturday was right cruel and
+fell, and many a feat of arms done that came not to my knowledge. In
+the night divers knights and squires lost their masters, and sometime
+came on the Englishmen, who received them in such wise that they were
+ever nigh slain; for there was none taken to mercy nor to ransom, for
+so the Englishmen were determined.
+
+In the morning the day of the battle certain Frenchmen and Almains
+perforce opened the archers of the Prince's battle, and came and
+fought with the men of arms hand to hand. Then the second battle of
+the Englishmen came to succor the Prince's battle, the which was time,
+for they had as then much ado; and they with the Prince sent a
+messenger to the King, who was on a little windmill hill. Then the
+knight said to the King, "Sir, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of
+Oxford, Sir Raynold Cobham and other, such as be about the Prince
+your son, are fiercely fought withal and are sore handled; wherefore
+they desire you that you and your battle will come and aid them; for
+if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will, your son and they
+shall have much ado." Then the King said, "Is my son dead, or hurt, or
+on the earth felled?" "No, sir," quoth the knight, "but he is hardly
+matched; wherefore he hath need of your aid." "Well," said the King,
+"return to him and to them that sent you hither, and say to them that
+they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my
+son is alive: and also say to them that they suffer him this day to
+win his spurs; for if God be pleased, I will this journey be his and
+the honor thereof, and to them that be about him." Then the knight
+returned again to them and shewed the King's words, the which greatly
+encouraged them, and repoined in that they had sent to the King as
+they did.
+
+Sir Godfrey of Harcourt would gladly that the Earl of Harcourt, his
+brother, might have been saved; for he heard say by them that saw his
+banner how that he was there in the field on the French party: but Sir
+Godfrey could not come to him betimes, for he was slain or he could
+come at him, and so was also the Earl of Aumale his nephew. In another
+place the Earl of Alencon and the Earl of Flanders fought valiantly,
+every lord under his own banner; but finally they could not resist
+against the puissance of the Englishmen, and so there they were also
+slain, and divers other knights and squires. Also the Earl Louis of
+Blois, nephew to the French King, and the Duke of Lorraine, fought
+under their banners; but at last they were closed in among a company
+of Englishmen and Welshmen, and there were slain for all their
+prowess. Also there was slain the Earl of Auxerre, the Earl of
+Saint-Pol, and many other.
+
+In the evening the French King, who had left about him no more than a
+threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Hainault was
+one, who had remounted once the King, for his horse was slain with an
+arrow, then he said to the King, "Sir, depart hence, for it is time;
+lose not yourself willfully: if ye have loss at this time, ye shall
+recover it again another season." And so he took the King's horse by
+the bridle and led him away in a manner perforce. Then the King rode
+till he came to the castle of Broye. The gate was closed, because it
+was by that time dark: then the King called the captain, who came to
+the walls and said, "Who is that calleth there this time of night?"
+Then the King said, "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune
+of France." The captain knew then it was the King, and opened the gate
+and let down the bridge. Then the King entered, and he had with him
+but five barons, Sir John of Hainault, Sir Charles of Montmorency, the
+Lord of Beaujeu, the Lord d'Aubigny, and the Lord of Montsault. The
+King would not tarry there, but drank and departed thence about
+midnight, and so rode by such guides as knew the country till he came
+in the morning to Amiens, and there he rested.
+
+This Saturday the Englishmen never departed from their battles for
+chasing of any man, but kept still their field, and ever defended
+themselves against all such as came to assail them. This battle ended
+about evensong time.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+
+(1818-1894)
+
+BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON
+
+[Illustration: J. A. FROUDE]
+
+
+James Anthony Froude, English historian and essayist, was born April
+23d, 1818, and died October 20th, 1894. His father was a clergyman,
+and the son was sent to Westminster School and to Oriel College,
+Oxford. In 1842 he became a fellow of Exeter, and two years later he
+was ordained a deacon; an office which he did not formally lay down
+until many years later, although his earliest publications, 'Shadows
+of the Clouds' and 'Nemesis of Faith,' showed that he had come to
+hold--and what perhaps is more to the point, dared to express,--views
+hardly compatible with the character of a docile and unreasoning
+neophyte.
+
+These books were severely censured by the authorities, and cost
+him--to the great benefit of the world--an appointment he had received
+of teacher in Tasmania. He resigned his fellowship and took up the
+profession of letters, writing much for Fraser and the Westminster,
+and becoming for a short period the editor of the former. His _magnum
+opus_ is his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat
+of the Spanish Armada,' in twelve volumes, from 1856 to 1870. His
+other principal publications are--'The English in Ireland in the
+Eighteenth Century' (1874); 'Caesar' (1879); 'Bunyan' (1880); 'Thomas
+Carlyle (first forty years of his life)' (1882); 'Life in London'
+(1884); 'Short Studies on Great Subjects' (1882, four series); 'The
+Two Chiefs of Dunboy' (1889); 'The English in the West Indies' (1889);
+'The Divorce of Catharine of Aragon' (1892); 'The Life and Letters of
+Erasmus' (1892); 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century' (1892); and
+'The Council of Trent.' 'Shadows of the Clouds,' 'The Nemesis of
+Faith,' and 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy' are in the form of fiction; and
+though they--especially the last--contain some charming descriptive
+passages, and evince some of Froude's power of character sketching,
+they serve on the whole to prove that he was not a novelist. The
+fortunes of his group of people are of less absorbing interest to him
+than questions of social and racial ethics. There is nothing more
+annoying than to have an essayist stand behind a story-teller and
+interrupt him from time to time with acute philosophical comments on
+ultimate causes. The characters of Morty and Sylvester Sullivan are
+admirably contrasted Celtic types, but both they and the English
+Colonel Goring are a trifle stagy and stiff in their joints. The
+murders of the two chiefs, Morty Sullivan and Colonel Goring, are
+dramatically told; but Froude's deficient sense of humor, at least of
+that quality of humor which gives a subtle sense of congruity, results
+in an attempt to combine the elements of the tale and the didactic
+society in impossible proportions. He is an essayist and historian,
+not a novel-writer.
+
+Froude stands before the English-reading public prominent in three
+characteristics: First, as a technical prose artist, in which regard
+he is entitled to be classed with Ruskin, Newman, and Pater; less
+enthusiastic and elaborately ornamental than the first, less musically
+and delicately fallacious than the second, and less self-conscious and
+phrase-caressing than the third, but carrying a solider burden of
+thought than all three. Second, as a historian of the modern school,
+which aims by reading the original records to produce an independent
+view of historical periods. Third, as the most clear-sighted and
+broad-minded of those whose position near the centre of the Oxford
+movement and intimacy with the principal actors gave them an insight
+into its inner nature.
+
+There can be but one opinion of Froude as a master of English. In some
+of his early work there are traces of the manner of Macaulay in the
+succession of short assertive sentences, most of which an ordinary
+writer would group as limiting clauses about the main assertion. This
+method gives a false appearance of vigor and definiteness; it makes
+easy reading by relieving the mind from the necessity of weighing the
+modifying propositions: but it is entirely unadapted to nice
+modulations of thought. Froude very soon avoided the vices of
+Macaulayism, and attained a narrative style which must be regarded as
+the best in an age which has paid more attention than any other to the
+art of telling a story. In descriptive historical narrative he is
+unrivaled, because he is profoundly impressed not only with the
+dramatic qualities but with the real significance of a scene; unlike
+Macaulay, to whom the superficial theatrical elements appeal. A
+reading of Macaulay's description of the trial of Warren Hastings, and
+Froude's narrative of the killing of Thomas Becket or of the execution
+of Mary Queen of Scots, will bring out at once Froude's radical
+superiority in both conception and execution.
+
+This is not the place to debate the question of Froude's historical
+accuracy, further than to remark that he was an industrious reader of
+historical documents, and by nature a seeker after the truth. If a
+profound conviction of the harmfulness of ecclesiasticism colored the
+light with which he illuminated the records of the past, we must
+remember that history is at best largely the impressions of
+historians; and that if it be true that Froude does present one side,
+it is the side on which the warnings to posterity are most distinctly
+inscribed. A reading of the controversy between Froude and Freeman in
+the calmer light of the present leads to the conclusion that the
+_suppressio veri_ with which Froude was charged is not a _suggestio
+falsi_, but an artistic selection of the characteristic. He felt a
+certain contempt for the minute and meaningless fidelity to the
+record, which is not writing history but editing documents. He
+possessed, too, among his other literary powers, the rare one of being
+able to individualize the man whose life he studies and of presenting
+the character so as to be consistent and human. This power fills his
+history and sketch with rare personalities. Thomas Becket, Henry III.,
+Henry VIII., Queen Catharine, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, are
+more than historical portraits in the ordinary sense: they are
+conceptions of individuals, vivified by the artistic sense. Whether or
+not they are true to the originals as reflected in the contemporary
+documents, they are at least human possibilities, and therefore truer
+than the distorted automata that lie in state on the pages of some
+historians. A human character is so exceedingly complex and so
+delicately balanced with contradictory elements, that it is probable
+that no two persons ever estimate it exactly alike. Besides, prominent
+historical personages become in the popular imagination invested with
+exaggerated attributes, and it is not likely that men will ever agree
+even as to which of them was the hero and which the villain of the
+drama. It was to be expected that Froude should be violently assailed
+by those who accepted a traditional view of Henry VIII. and of Mary.
+It was inevitable that he should differ from them, because he had more
+than a view: he had a conception. His historical personages are
+certainly possibilities, because they are human, and the traditional
+figures are either monsters or saints; and humanity--at least Teutonic
+humanity--does not produce unadulterated saints nor unrelieved
+monsters.
+
+While Froude's historical work has been criticized for lack of minute
+accuracy in details, his books on Carlyle have been criticized for the
+opposite fault of quoting too fully and literally; from letters and
+journals, matter never intended for the public, and of a nature not
+only to wound living persons but to create an erroneous impression of
+the writer. The habit of expressing himself in pithy and pungent
+personalities seems to have been with Carlyle a sort of intellectual
+exercise, and should not necessarily be taken as an index of morose
+ill-temper. A very delicate literary tact was necessary to his
+literary executor, in selecting from the matter put in his hands that
+which would combine to make a true picture of a crude and powerful
+genius without making him appear to the ordinary reader a selfish,
+willful man. Froude's idea of the duty of an editor of contemporary
+biography seems to have been that it was limited to careful
+publication of all the available material as _memoires pour servir_.
+Such miscellaneous printing may in the end serve truth, but at the
+time it arouses resentment. It resulted, however, in the production of
+a book far preferable to the non-committal, evasive, destructively
+laudatory biography of a public man, of which every year brings a new
+specimen. It is at least honest, if not tactful.
+
+Froude's early connection with the Oxford movement and his work on the
+Lives of the Saints first called his attention to the study of
+historical documents, and to the large amount of fiction with which
+truth is diluted in them. His further researches among the authorities
+recently made accessible, for the history of the destruction of the
+monasteries, impressed on him the fact that an assumption of spiritual
+authority is as dangerous to those who assume it as to those over whom
+it is assumed, exactly as physical slavery is in the end as harmful to
+the masters as it is to the slaves. He saw that ecclesiasticism had
+been profoundly hostile to morals, and he judged the present by the
+past till he really believed that the precious fruits of the
+Reformation would be lost if the ritualists obtained control of the
+Church. He persuaded himself that under such influence--
+
+  "Civilization would ebb, the great moral lights be extinguished,
+  Over the world would creep an unintelligent darkness
+  Under which men would be portioned anew 'twixt the priest and the
+          soldier."
+
+It is perhaps too much to expect of a man of the imaginative
+temperament of Froude, to whom the abominations of the Church from the
+twelfth to the sixteenth century were as real as if he had witnessed
+them, to retain judicial calmness under the vituperation with which he
+was assailed; but his profound distrust of the mediaeval Church
+certainly does give an air of partisanship to his strictures on its
+modern ineffectual revival. He forgot that great principles of justice
+and toleration are now so embodied in law and fixed in the hearts of
+the English-speaking people that society is protected, and the evils
+of spiritual tyranny are restricted to the few who are willing to
+abase their intellects to it; that the corroding evil of conventual
+life is minimized by healthy outside influences; and that the most
+advanced modern ritualist would prove too good a Christian to light an
+_auto da fe_. It was but natural that he should forget this, for he
+was a strong man in the centre of the conflict, and independence was
+the core of his being.
+
+This strength of independence is shown by the fact that though young,
+and profoundly sensitive to the attraction of a character like
+Newman's, he was from the first able to resist the fascination which
+that remarkable man exerted over all with whom he came in contact. The
+pure spiritual nature possesses a mysterious power over young men, so
+great that they often yield to its counterfeit. Newman was the true
+priest, and Froude recognized his genius and that his soul was "an
+adumbration of the Divine." But he felt instinctively the radical
+unsoundness of Newman's thought, and "would not follow, though an
+angel led." Others fell off for prudential reasons; but Froude was
+indifferent to these, and obedient to a conviction the strength of
+which must be estimated by the depth of his feeling for character.
+
+Froude was sometimes criticized for writing history under the
+influence of personal feeling. It is difficult to see how a readable
+history can be written except by one who at least takes an interest in
+the story; but whether capacity for feeling makes a man a less
+trustworthy historian, depends upon how far this emotional
+susceptibility is controlled by intellectual insight and just views of
+the laws under which society develops. That Froude was an absolutely
+perfect historian, no one would claim: he was too intensely human to
+be perfect. It is safe to say that the perfect historian will not
+exist until Shakespeare and Bacon reappear combined in one man. For
+the great historian must be both scholar and artist. As scholar he
+must possess, too, both the acquisitive and the organizing intellect.
+He must both gather facts and interpret them. He must have the
+artistic sense which selects from the vast mass of fact that which is
+significant. This power of artistic selection is of course influenced
+by his unconscious ideals, by his conception of the relative
+importance of the forces which move mankind, and of the ultimate goal
+of progress. His philosophy directs his art, and his art interprets in
+the light of his philosophy.
+
+It may be admitted that Froude possesses a larger share of the
+artistic than of the philosophic qualities necessary to the great
+historian. At times his hatred of ecclesiasticism becomes almost a
+prejudice. In his writings on Irish and colonial questions he evinces
+the Englishman's love of the right, but sometimes, unfortunately, the
+Englishman's inability to do justice to other races in points which
+distinguish them from his own. In some expressions he seems to
+distrust democracy in much the same unreasoning way in which Mr.
+Ruskin distrusts machinery. He had imbibed something of Mr. Carlyle's
+belief in the "strong man"; though he, no more than Carlyle, can show
+how the strong, just ruler can be produced or selected. But a more
+serious deficiency in Froude's philosophy arises from his imperfect
+conception of the method of evolution which governs all organizations,
+civil and religious, so that they continually throw off short-lived
+varieties and history becomes a continual giving way of the old order
+to the new. To fear, as Froude seems to, lest a survival may become a
+governing type, is as unreasonable as to fear that old men will live
+forever. Certainly he would have taken a juster, saner view of the
+English Reformation, had he been convinced that all the collisions
+between the moral laws and the rebellious wills of men, which are the
+burden of the years, are in the end obliterated in the slow onward
+movement of the race; but then perhaps his history would have lost in
+interest what it might have gained in philosophic breadth and balance.
+For it cannot be denied that feeling has given his narrative that most
+valuable quality--life.
+
+The general recognition of Froude's power, and the growing conviction
+that he was far nearer right than the theological school he so
+cordially detested, was vindicated by his appointment as Professor of
+History at Oxford to succeed Freeman, one of the severest critics of
+his historical fairness. He lived to deliver but three courses of
+lectures, one of which has been published in that delightful volume
+'The Life and Letters of Erasmus.' The others, 'English Seamen of the
+XVIth Century,' 'Lectures on the Council of Trent,' and the very able
+paper on Job in 'Short Studies on Great Subjects,' even if taken by
+themselves, would cause us to form a high opinion of the scope and
+range of Froude's powers. Those to whom brilliancy is synonymous with
+unsoundness may perhaps continue to call him merely a "brilliant
+writer"; but the general verdict will be that his brilliancy is the
+structural adornment of a well-fitted framework of thought.
+
+                                   [Signature: Charles F. Johnson]
+
+
+
+
+THE GROWTH OF ENGLAND'S NAVY
+
+From 'English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century'
+
+
+Jean Paul the German poet said that God had given to France the empire
+of the land, to England the empire of the sea, and to his own country
+the empire of the air. The world has changed since Jean Paul's days.
+The wings of France have been clipped: the German Empire has become a
+solid thing: but England still holds her watery dominion; Britannia
+does still rule the waves, and in this proud position she has spread
+the English race over the globe; she is peopling new Englands at the
+Antipodes; she has made her Queen Empress of India; and is in fact the
+very considerable phenomenon in the social and political world which
+all acknowledge her to be. And all this she has achieved in the course
+of three centuries, entirely in consequence of her predominance as an
+ocean power. Take away her merchant fleets, take away the navy that
+guards them,--her empire will come to an end, her colonies will fall
+off like leaves from a withered tree, and Britain will become once
+more an insignificant island in the North Sea, for the future students
+in Australian and New Zealand universities to discuss the fate of in
+their debating societies.
+
+How the English navy came to hold so extraordinary a position is worth
+reflecting on. Much has been written on it, but little, as it seems to
+me, which touches the heart of the matter. We are shown the power of
+our country growing and expanding. But how it grew; why, after a sleep
+of so many hundred years, the genius of our Scandinavian forefathers
+suddenly sprang again into life,--of this we are left without
+explanation.
+
+The beginning was undoubtedly the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
+1588. Down to that time the sea sovereignty belonged to the Spaniards,
+and had been fairly won by them. The conquest of Granada had
+stimulated and elevated the Spanish character. The subjects of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and Philip II., were
+extraordinary men and accomplished extraordinary things. They
+stretched the limits of the known world; they conquered Mexico and
+Peru; they planted their colonies over the South-American continent;
+they took possession of the great West-Indian islands, and with so
+firm a grasp that Cuba at least will never lose the mark of the hand
+which seized it. They built their cities as if for eternity. They
+spread to the Indian Ocean, and gave their monarch's name to the
+Philippines. All this they accomplished in half a century, and as it
+were, they did it with a single hand; with the other they were
+fighting Moors and Turks, and protecting the coasts of the
+Mediterranean from the corsairs of Tunis and Constantinople.
+
+They had risen on the crest of the wave, and with their proud _Non
+Sufficit Orbis_ were looking for new worlds to conquer, at a time when
+the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond
+their own fishing grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing
+from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting
+collier. And yet within the space of a single ordinary life these
+insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards'
+grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign.
+How did it come about? What Cadmus had sown dragons' teeth in the
+furrows of the sea, for the race to spring from who manned the ships
+of Queen Elizabeth, who carried the flag of their own country round
+the globe, and challenged and fought the Spaniards on their own coasts
+and in their own harbors?
+
+The English sea power was the legitimate child of the Reformation. It
+grew, as I shall show you, directly out of the new despised
+Protestantism. Matthew Parker and Bishop Jewell, the judicious Hooker
+himself, excellent men as they were, would have written and preached
+to small purpose without Sir Francis Drake's cannon to play an
+accompaniment to their teaching. And again, Drake's cannon would not
+have roared so loudly and so widely, without seamen already trained in
+heart and hand to work his ships and level his artillery. It was to
+the superior seamanship, the superior quality of English ships and
+crews, that the Spaniards attributed their defeat. Where did these
+ships come from? Where and how did these mariners learn their trade?
+Historians talk enthusiastically of the national spirit of a people
+rising with a united heart to repel the invader, and so on. But
+national spirit could not extemporize a fleet, or produce trained
+officers and sailors to match the conquerors of Lepanto. One slight
+observation I must make here at starting, and certainly with no
+invidious purpose. It has been said confidently,--it has been
+repeated, I believe, by all modern writers,--that the Spanish invasion
+suspended in England the quarrels of creed, and united Protestants and
+Roman Catholics in defense of their Queen and country. They remind us
+especially that Lord Howard of Effingham, who was Elizabeth's admiral,
+was himself a Roman Catholic. But was it so? The Earl of Arundel, the
+head of the House of Howard, was a Roman Catholic, and he was in the
+Tower praying for the success of Medina Sidonia. Lord Howard of
+Effingham was no more a Roman Catholic than--I hope I am not taking
+away their character--than the present Archbishop of Canterbury or the
+Bishop of London. He was a Catholic, but an English Catholic, as those
+reverend prelates are. Roman Catholic he could not possibly have been,
+nor any one who on that great occasion was found on the side of
+Elizabeth. A Roman Catholic is one who acknowledges the Roman Bishop's
+authority. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, had pronounced her
+deposed, had absolved her subjects from their allegiance and forbidden
+them to fight for her. No Englishman who fought on that great occasion
+for English liberty was, or could have been, in communion with Rome.
+Loose statements of this kind, lightly made, fall in with the modern
+humor. They are caught up, applauded, repeated, and pass unquestioned
+into history. It is time to correct them a little.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF COLONEL GORING
+
+From 'Two Chiefs of Dunboy'
+
+
+Fatally mistaking what was intended for a friendly warning, the
+colonel conceived that there was some one in the forge whom the smith
+wanted to conceal.
+
+"I may return or not," he said; "but I must first have a word with
+these strangers of yours. We can meet as friends for once, with
+nothing to dispute over."
+
+Minahan made no further attempt to prevent him from going in. If
+gentlemen chose to have their quarrels, he muttered between his teeth,
+it was no business of his.
+
+Goring pushed open the door and entered. By the dim light--for the
+shutter that had been thrown back had been closed again, and the only
+light came from a window in the roof--he made out three figures
+standing together at the further end of the forge, in one of whom,
+though he tried to conceal himself, he instantly recognized his
+visitor of the previous evening.
+
+"You here, my man?" he said. "You left my house two hours ago. Why are
+you not on your way home?"
+
+Sylvester, seeing he was discovered, turned his face full round, and
+in a voice quietly insolent, replied, "I fell in with some friends of
+mine on the road. We had a little business together, and it is good
+luck that has brought your honor to us while we are talking, for the
+jintlemen here have a word or two they would like to be saying to ye,
+colonel, before ye leave them."
+
+"To me!" said Goring, turning from Sylvester to the two figures, whose
+faces were still covered by their cloaks. "If these gentlemen are what
+I suppose them to be, I am glad to meet them, and will hear willingly
+what they may have to say."
+
+"Perhaps less willingly than you think, Colonel Goring," said the
+taller of the two, who rose and stepped behind him to the door, which
+he closed and barred. Goring, looking at him with some surprise, saw
+that he was the person whom he had met on the mountains, and had
+afterwards seen at the funeral at Derreen. The third man rose from a
+bench on which he had been leaning, lifted his cap, and said:--
+
+"There is an old proverb, sir, that short accounts make long friends.
+There can be no friendship between you and me, but the account between
+us is of very old standing. I have returned to Ireland, only for a
+short stay; I am about to leave it, never to come back. A gentleman
+and a soldier, like yourself, cannot wish that I should go while that
+account is still unsettled. Our fortunate meeting here this morning
+provides us with an opportunity."
+
+It was Morty's voice that he heard, and Morty's face that he saw as he
+became accustomed to the gloom. He looked again at the pretended
+messenger from the carded curate, and he then remembered the old
+Sylvester who had brought the note from Lord Fitzmaurice to the agent
+from Kenmare. In an instant the meaning of the whole situation flashed
+across him. It was no casual re-encounter. He had been enticed into
+the place where he found himself, with some sinister and perhaps
+deadly purpose. A strange fatality had forced him again and again into
+collision with the man of whose ancestral lands he had come into
+possession. Once more, by a deliberate and treacherous contrivance, he
+and the chief of the O'Sullivans had been brought face to face
+together, and he was alone, without a friend within call of him;
+unless his tenant, who as he could now see had intended to give him
+warning, would interfere further in his defense. And of this he knew
+Ireland well enough to be aware that there was little hope.
+
+He supposed that they intended to murder him. The door, at which he
+involuntarily glanced, was fastened by this time with iron bolts. He
+was a man of great personal strength and activity, but in such a
+situation neither would be likely to avail him. Long inured to danger,
+and ready at all moments to meet whatever peril might threaten him, he
+calmly faced his adversary and said:--
+
+"This meeting is not accidental, as you would have me believe. You
+have contrived it. Explain yourself further."
+
+"Colonel Goring," said Morty Sullivan, "you will recall the
+circumstances under which we last parted. Enemy as you are and always
+have been to me and mine, I will do you the justice to say that on
+that occasion you behaved like a gentleman and a man of courage. But
+our quarrel was not fought out. Persons present interfered between us.
+We are now alone, and can complete what was then left unfinished."
+
+"Whether I did well or ill, sir," the colonel answered, "in giving you
+the satisfaction which you demanded of me at the time you speak of, I
+will not now say. But I tell you that the only relations which can
+exist between us at present are those between a magistrate and a
+criminal who has forfeited his life. If you mean to murder me, you can
+do it; you have me at advantage. You can thus add one more to the list
+of villainies with which you have stained an honorable name. If you
+mean that I owe you a reparation for personal injuries, such as the
+customs of Ireland allow one gentleman to require from another, this,
+as you well know, is not the way to ask for it. But I acknowledge no
+such right. When I last encountered you I but partly knew you. I now
+know you altogether. You have been a pirate on the high seas. Your
+letters of marque do not cover you, for you are a subject of the King,
+and have broken your allegiance. Such as you are, you stand outside
+the pale of honorable men, and I should degrade the uniform I wear if
+I were to stoop to measure arms with you."
+
+The sallow olive of Morty's cheek turned livid. He clutched the bench
+before him, till the muscles of his hands stood out like knots of
+rope.
+
+"You are in my power, colonel," he said: "do not tempt me too far. If
+my sins have been many, my wrongs are more. It must be this or worse.
+One word from me, and you are a dead man."
+
+He laid four pistols on the smith's tool-chest. "Take a pair of them,"
+he said. "They are loaded alike. Take which you please. Let us stand
+on the opposite sides of this hovel, and so make an end. If I fall, I
+swear on my soul you shall have no hurt from any of my people. My
+friend Connell is an officer of mine, but he holds a commission
+besides in the Irish Brigade. There is no better-born gentleman in
+Kerry. His presence here is your sufficient security. You shall return
+to Dunboy as safe from harm as if you had the Viceroy's body-guard
+about you, or your own boat's crew that shot down my poor fellows at
+Glengariff. To this I pledge you my honor."
+
+"Your honor!" said Goring; "your honor! And you tempted me here by a
+lying tale, sent by the lips of yonder skulking rascal. That alone,
+sir, were there nothing else, would have sufficed to show what you
+are."
+
+A significant click caught the ear of both the speakers. Looking
+round, they saw Sylvester had cocked a pistol.
+
+"Drop that," said Morty, "or by God! kinsman of mine though you be, I
+will drive a bullet through the brain of you. Enough of this, sir," he
+said, turning to Goring. "Time passes, and this scene must end. I
+would have arranged it otherwise, but you yourself know that by this
+way alone I could have brought you to the meeting. Take the pistols, I
+say, or by the bones of my ancestors that lie buried under Dunboy
+Castle yonder, I will call in my men from outside, and they shall
+strip you bare, and score such marks on you as the quartermaster
+leaves on the slaves that you hire to fight your battles. Prince
+Charles will laugh when I tell him in Paris how I served one at least
+of the hounds that chased him at Culloden."
+
+The forge in which this scene was going on was perfectly familiar to
+Goring, for he had himself designed it and built it. There was the
+ordinary broad open front to the road, constructed of timber, which
+was completely shut. The rest of the building was of stone, and in the
+wall at the back there was a small door leading into a field, and
+thence into the country. Could this door be opened, there was a
+chance, though but a faint one, of escape. A bar lay across, but of no
+great thickness. The staple into which it ran was slight. A vigorous
+blow might shatter both.
+
+Sylvester caught the direction of Goring's eye, caught its meaning,
+and threw himself in the way. The colonel snatched a heavy hammer
+which stood against the wall. With the suddenness of an electric flash
+he struck Sylvester on the shoulder, broke his collar-bone, and hurled
+him back senseless, doubled over the anvil. A second stroke, catching
+the bar in the middle, shattered it in two, and the door hung upon the
+latch. Morty and Connell, neither of whom had intended foul play,
+hesitated, and in another moment Goring would have been free and away.
+Connell, recovering himself, sprang forward and closed with him. The
+colonel, who had been the most accomplished wrestler of his regiment,
+whirled him round, flung him with a heavy fall on the floor, and had
+his hand on the latch when, half stunned as he was, Connell recovered
+his feet, drew a skene, and rushed at Colonel Goring again. So sudden
+it all was, so swift the struggle, and so dim the light, that from the
+other end it was hard to see what was happening. Wrenching the skene
+out of Connell's hands, and with the hot spirit of battle in him,
+Colonel Goring was on the point of driving it into his assailant's
+side.
+
+"Shoot, Morty! shoot, or I am a dead man!" Connell cried.
+
+Morty, startled and uncertain what to do, had mechanically snatched up
+a pistol when Sylvester was struck down. He raised his hand at
+Connell's cry. It shook from excitement, and locked together as the
+two figures were, he was as likely to hit friend as foe. Again Connell
+called, and Morty fired and missed; and the mark of the bullet is
+still shown in the wall of the smithy as a sacred reminiscence of a
+fight for Irish liberty. The second shot went true to its mark.
+Connell had been beaten down, though unwounded, and Goring's tall form
+stood out above him in clear view. This time Morty's hand did not fail
+him. A shiver passed through Goring's limbs. His arms dropped. He
+staggered back against the door, and the door yielded, and he fell
+upon the ground outside. But it was not to rise and fly. The ball had
+struck him clean above the ear, and buried itself in the brain. He was
+dead.
+
+
+
+
+SCIENTIFIC METHOD APPLIED TO HISTORY
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+Historical facts can only be verified by the skeptical and the
+inquiring, and skepticism and inquiry nip like a black frost the eager
+credulity in which legendary biographies took their rise. You can
+watch such stories as they grew in the congenial soil of belief. The
+great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted
+Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true,
+genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for
+themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their
+fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural
+powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them
+personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and
+portents vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St.
+Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He
+told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel
+to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor
+becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the
+county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely
+the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was
+feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us
+that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his
+message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august
+visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are
+imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid
+enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus
+and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and
+we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St.
+Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he
+comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope
+Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a
+wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen
+him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty
+times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate
+towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of
+them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick
+which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least
+as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very
+little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith
+and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of
+probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a
+story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of
+carelessness, credulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which
+we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that
+evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or
+superstition. To the mediaeval writer, the more stupendous the miracle
+the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he
+could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but
+inherent fitness.
+
+So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the
+first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the
+next or heroic we have accounts of real persons, but handed down to
+us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight
+was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old
+times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the
+figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as
+apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in
+stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental
+condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real
+life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring
+imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with
+certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain,
+prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation;
+they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or
+transferred from owner to owner,--manipulated to suit or decorate a
+preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry,
+where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles,
+and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no
+less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship,
+though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they
+resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one
+another.
+
+At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper.
+The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape
+out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is
+a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological
+string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is
+not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he
+means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that
+ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what part
+of the world we please,--take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in
+Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,--he is but a step in advance
+of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never
+bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never
+speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He
+takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his
+hand,--the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He
+transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more
+picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down,
+though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic.
+Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf; Curtius jumping into the gulf;
+our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of
+the spider,--stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity
+with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish
+village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the
+sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however
+charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated
+into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth
+of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into
+the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of
+historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy,
+Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own
+departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet
+entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as
+our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest.
+The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,--a people so
+pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character
+indelibly into the constitution of Europe,--these Romans, at the very
+time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed
+themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by
+a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the
+entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is
+likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things
+which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato
+tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face
+without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the
+world betray sometimes analogous misgivings.
+
+In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably
+harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first
+great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers.
+Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time,
+he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis
+and Plataea. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time
+thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was
+not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager,
+cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were
+qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most
+delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot;
+and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy
+was like Shakespeare's,--a calm, intelligent insight into human
+things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or
+other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he
+saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world;
+and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard
+and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather
+believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be
+critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what
+he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his
+judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain
+evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same
+space so much important truth,--truth which survives the sharpest test
+that modern discoveries can apply to it.
+
+The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best
+of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the
+same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what
+philosophers call subjectivity,--the projection into the narrative of
+the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories.
+Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the
+representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps
+consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a
+statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate
+supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account
+of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome.
+The boldest fabricator would not venture to introduce an entire and
+complete invention. This was not the case with the older authors.
+Thucydides tells us frankly that the speeches which he interweaves
+with his narrative were his own composition. They were intended as
+dramatic representations of the opinions of the factions and parties
+with which Greece was divided, and they were assigned to this person
+or to that, as he supposed them to be internally suitable. Herodotus
+had set Thucydides the example, and it was universally followed. No
+speech given by any old historian can be accepted as literally true
+unless there is a specific intimation to that effect. Deception was
+neither practiced nor pretended. It was a convenient method of
+exhibiting characters and situations, and it was therefore adopted
+without hesitation or reserve.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEATH OF THOMAS BECKET
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+The knights were introduced. They advanced. The archbishop neither
+spoke nor looked at them, but continued talking to a monk who was next
+him. He himself was sitting on a bed. The rest of the party present
+were on the floor. The knights seated themselves in the same manner,
+and for a few moments there was silence. Then Becket's black, restless
+eye glanced from one to the other. He slightly noticed Tracy; and
+Fitzurse said a few unrecorded sentences to him, which ended with "God
+help you!" To Becket's friends the words sounded like insolence. They
+may have meant no more than pity for the deliberate fool who was
+forcing destruction upon himself.
+
+Becket's face flushed. Fitzurse went on, "We bring you the commands of
+the King beyond the sea; will you hear us in public or in private?"
+Becket said he cared not. "In private, then," said Fitzurse. The monks
+thought afterwards that Fitzurse had meant to kill the archbishop
+where he sat. If the knights had entered the palace, thronged as it
+was with men, with any such intention, they would scarcely have left
+their swords behind them. The room was cleared, and a short
+altercation followed, of which nothing is known save that it ended
+speedily in high words on both sides. Becket called in his clergy
+again, his lay servants being excluded, and bade Fitzurse go on. "Be
+it so," Sir Reginald said. "Listen, then, to what the King says. When
+the peace was made, he put aside all his complaints against you. He
+allowed you to return, as you desired, free to your see. You have now
+added contempt to your other offenses. You have broken the treaty. You
+have allowed your pride to tempt you to defy your lord and master to
+your own sorrow. You have censured the bishops by whose administration
+the Prince was crowned. You have pronounced an anathema against the
+King's ministers, by whose advice he is guided in the management of
+the empire. You have made it plain that if you could you would take
+the Prince's crown from him. Your plots and contrivances to attain
+your ends are notorious to all men. Say, then, will you attend us to
+the King's presence, and there answer for yourself? For this we are
+sent."
+
+The archbishop declared that he had never wished any hurt to the
+Prince. The King had no occasion to be displeased if crowds came
+about him in the towns and cities, after having been so long deprived
+of his presence. If he had done any wrong he would make satisfaction,
+but he protested against being suspected of intentions which had never
+entered his mind.
+
+Fitzurse did not enter into an altercation with him, but
+continued:--"The King commands further that you and your clerks repair
+without delay to the young King's presence, and swear allegiance, and
+promise to amend your faults."
+
+The archbishop's temper was fast rising. "I will do whatever may be
+reasonable," he said, "but I tell you plainly, the King shall have no
+oaths from me, nor from any one of my clergy. There has been too much
+perjury already. I have absolved many, with God's help, who had
+perjured themselves. I will absolve the rest when he permits."
+
+"I understand you to say that you will not obey," said Fitzurse, and
+went on in the same tone:--"The King commands you to absolve the
+bishops whom you have excommunicated without his permission" (_absque
+licentia sua_).
+
+"The Pope sentenced the bishops," the archbishop said. "If you are not
+pleased, you must go to him. The affair is none of mine."
+
+Fitzurse said it had been done at his instigation, which he did not
+deny; but he proceeded to reassert that the King had given his
+permission. He had complained at the time of the peace of the injury
+which he had suffered in the coronation, and the King had told him
+that he might obtain from the Pope any satisfaction for which he liked
+to ask.
+
+If this was all the consent which the King had given, the pretense of
+his authority was inexcusable. Fitzurse could scarce hear the
+archbishop out with patience. "Ay, ay!" said he; "will you make the
+King out to be a traitor, then? The King gave you leave to
+excommunicate the bishops when they were acting by his own order! It
+is more than we can bear to listen to such monstrous accusations."
+
+John of Salisbury tried to check the archbishop's imprudent tongue,
+and whispered to him to speak to the knights in private; but when the
+passion was on him, no mule was more ungovernable than Becket. Drawing
+to a conclusion, Fitzurse said to him:--"Since you refuse to do any
+one of those things which the King requires of you, his final commands
+are that you and your clergy shall forthwith depart out of this realm
+and out of his dominions, never more to return. You have broken the
+peace, and the King cannot trust you again."
+
+Becket answered wildly that he would not go--never again would he
+leave England. Nothing but death should now part him from his church.
+Stung by the reproach of ill-faith, he poured out the catalogue of his
+own injuries. He had been promised restoration, and instead of
+restoration he had been robbed and insulted. Ranulf de Broc had laid
+an embargo on his wine. Robert de Broc had cut off his mule's tail;
+and now the knights had come to menace him.
+
+De Morville said that if he had suffered any wrong he had only to
+appeal to the Council, and justice would be done.
+
+Becket did not wish for the Council's justice. "I have complained
+enough," he said; "so many wrongs are daily heaped upon me that I
+could not find messengers to carry the tale of them. I am refused
+access to the court. Neither one king nor the other will do me right.
+I will endure it no more. I will use my own powers as archbishop, and
+no child of man shall prevent me."
+
+"You will lay the realm under interdict, then, and excommunicate the
+whole of us?" said Fitzurse.
+
+"So God help me," said one of the others, "he shall not do that. He
+has excommunicated over-many already. We have borne too long with
+him."
+
+The knights sprang to their feet, twisting their gloves and swinging
+their arms. The archbishop rose. In the general noise words could no
+longer be accurately heard. At length the knights moved to leave the
+room, and addressing the archbishop's attendants, said, "In the King's
+name we command you to see that this man does not escape."
+
+"Do you think I shall fly, then?" cried the archbishop. "Neither for
+the King nor for any living man will I fly. You cannot be more ready
+to kill me than I am to die.... Here you will find me," he shouted,
+following them to the door as they went out, and calling after them.
+Some of his friends thought that he had asked De Morville to come back
+and speak quietly with him, but it was not so. He returned to his
+seat, still excited and complaining.
+
+"My lord," said John of Salisbury to him, "it is strange that you will
+never be advised. What occasion was there for you to go after these
+men and exasperate them with your bitter speeches? You would have
+done better, surely, by being quiet and giving them a milder answer.
+They mean no good, and you only commit yourself."
+
+The archbishop sighed, and said, "I have done with advice. I know what
+I have before me."
+
+It was four o'clock when the knights entered. It was now nearly five;
+and unless there were lights the room must have been almost dark.
+Beyond the archbishop's chamber was an ante-room, beyond the ante-room
+the hall. The knights, passing through the hall into the quadrangle,
+and thence to the lodge, called their men to arms. The great gate was
+closed. A mounted guard was stationed outside, with orders to allow no
+one to go out or in. The knights threw off their cloaks and buckled on
+their swords. This was the work of a few minutes. From the cathedral
+tower the vesper bell was beginning to sound. The archbishop had
+seated himself to recover from the agitation of the preceding scene,
+when a breathless monk rushed in to say that the knights were arming.
+"Who cares? Let them arm," was all that the archbishop said. His
+clergy was less indifferent. If the archbishop was ready for death,
+they were not. The door from the hall into the court was closed and
+barred, and a short respite was thus secured. The intention of the
+knights, it may be presumed, was to seize the archbishop and carry him
+off to Saltwood or to De Morville's castle at Knaresborough, or
+perhaps to Normandy. Coming back to execute their purpose, they found
+themselves stopped by the hall door. To burst it open would require
+time; the ante-room between the hall and the archbishop's apartments
+opened by an oriel window and an outside stair into a garden. Robert
+de Broc, who knew the house well, led the way to it in the dark. The
+steps were broken, but a ladder was standing against the window, by
+which the knights mounted, and the crash of the falling casement told
+the fluttered group about the archbishop that their enemies were upon
+them. There was still a moment. The party who entered by the window,
+instead of turning into the archbishop's room, first went into the
+hall to open the door and admit their comrades. From the archbishop's
+room a second passage, little used, opened into the northwest corner
+of the cloister, and from the cloister there was a way into the north
+transept of the cathedral. The cry was "To the church! To the church!"
+There at least there would be immediate safety.
+
+The archbishop had told the knights that they would find him where
+they left him. He did not choose to show fear; or he was afraid, as
+some thought, of losing his martyrdom. He would not move. The bell had
+ceased. They reminded him that vespers had begun, and that he ought to
+be in the cathedral. Half yielding, half resisting, his friends swept
+him down the passage into the cloister. His cross had been forgotten
+in the haste. He refused to stir till it was fetched and carried
+before him as usual. Then only, himself incapable of fear, and
+rebuking the terror of the rest, he advanced deliberately to the door
+into the south transept. His train was scattered behind him, all along
+the cloister from the passage leading out of the palace. As he entered
+the church, cries were heard, from which it became plain that the
+knights had broken into the archbishop's room, had found the passage,
+and were following him. Almost immediately Fitzurse, Tracy, De
+Morville, and Le Breton were discerned in the dim light, coming
+through the cloister in their armor, with drawn swords, and axes in
+their left hands. A company of men-at-arms was behind them. In front
+they were driving before them a frightened flock of monks.
+
+From the middle of the transept in which the archbishop was standing,
+a single pillar rose into the roof. On the eastern side of it opened a
+chapel of St. Benedict, in which were the tombs of several of the old
+primates. On the west, running of course parallel to the nave, was a
+Lady chapel. Behind the pillar, steps led up into the choir, where
+voices were already singing vespers. A faint light may have been
+reflected into the transept from the choir tapers, and candles may
+perhaps have been burning before the altars in the two chapels; of
+light from without through the windows at that hour there could have
+been none. Seeing the knights coming on, the clergy who had entered
+with the archbishop closed the door and barred it. "What do you fear?"
+he cried in a clear, loud voice. "Out of the way, you coward! the
+Church of God must not be made a fortress." He stepped back and
+reopened the door with his own hands, to let in the trembling wretches
+who had been shut out among the wolves. They rushed past him, and
+scattered in the hiding-places of the vast sanctuary, in the crypt, in
+the galleries, or behind the tombs. All, or almost all, even of his
+closest friends,--William of Canterbury, Benedict, John of Salisbury
+himself,--forsook him to shift for themselves, admitting frankly that
+they were unworthy of martyrdom. The archbishop was left alone with
+his chaplain Fitzstephen, Robert of Merton his old master, and Edward
+Grim, the stranger from Cambridge,--or perhaps with Grim only, who
+says that he was the only one who stayed, and was the only one
+certainly who showed any sign of courage. A cry had been raised in the
+choir that armed men were breaking into the cathedral. The vespers
+ceased; the few monks assembled left their seats and rushed to the
+edge of the transept, looking wildly into the darkness.
+
+The archbishop was on the fourth step beyond the central pillar
+ascending into the choir, when the knights came in. The outline of his
+figure may have been just visible to them, if light fell upon it from
+candles in the Lady chapel. Fitzurse passed to the right of the
+pillar, De Morville, Tracy, and Le Breton to the left. Robert de Broc,
+and Hugh Mauclerc, another apostate priest, remained at the door by
+which they entered. A voice cried, "Where is the traitor? Where is
+Thomas Becket?" There was silence; such a name could not be
+acknowledged. "Where is the archbishop?" Fitzurse shouted. "I am
+here," the archbishop replied, descending the steps, and meeting the
+knights full in the face. "What do you want with me? I am not afraid
+of your swords. I will not do what is unjust." The knights closed
+round him. "Absolve the persons whom you have excommunicated,"
+they said, "and take off the suspensions." "They have made no
+satisfaction," he answered; "I will not." "Then you shall die as
+you have deserved," they said.
+
+They had not meant to kill him--certainly not at that time and in that
+place. One of them touched him on the shoulder with the flat of his
+sword, and hissed in his ears, "Fly, or you are a dead man." There was
+still time; with a few steps he would have been lost in the gloom of
+the cathedral, and could have concealed him in any one of a hundred
+hiding-places. But he was careless of life, and he felt that his time
+was come. "I am ready to die," he said. "May the Church through my
+blood obtain peace and liberty! I charge you in the name of God that
+you hurt no one here but me."
+
+The people from the town were now pouring into the cathedral; De
+Morville was keeping them back with difficulty at the head of the
+steps from the choir, and there was danger of a rescue. Fitzurse
+seized him, meaning to drag him off as a prisoner. He had been calm so
+far; his pride rose at the indignity of an arrest. "Touch me not,
+thou abominable wretch!" he said, wrenching his cloak out of
+Fitzurse's grasp. "Off, thou pander, thou!" Le Breton and Fitzurse
+grasped him again, and tried to force him upon Tracy's back. He
+grappled with Tracy and flung him to the ground, and then stood with
+his back against the pillar, Edward Grim supporting him. Fitzurse,
+stung by the foul epithet which Becket had thrown at him, swept his
+sword over him and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the
+pavement, struck direct at his head. Grim raised his arm and caught
+the blow. The arm fell broken, and the one friend found faithful sank
+back disabled against the wall. The sword with its remaining force
+wounded the archbishop above the forehead, and the blood trickled down
+his face. Standing firmly, with his hands clasped, he bent his neck
+for the death-stroke, saying in a low voice, "I am prepared to die for
+Christ and for his Church." These were his last words. Tracy again
+struck him. He fell forward upon his knees and hands. In that position
+Le Breton dealt him a blow which severed the scalp from the head and
+broke the sword against the stone, saying, "Take that for my Lord
+William." De Broc or Mauclerc--the needless ferocity was attributed to
+both of them--strode forward from the cloister door, set his foot on
+the neck of the dead lion, and spread the brains upon the pavement
+with his sword's point. "We may go," he said; "the traitor is dead,
+and will trouble us no more."
+
+Such was the murder of Becket, the echoes of which are still heard
+across seven centuries of time, and which, be the final judgment upon
+it what it may, has its place among the most enduring incidents of
+English history. Was Becket a martyr, or was he justly executed as a
+traitor to his sovereign? Even in that supreme moment of terror and
+wonder, opinions were divided among his own monks. That very night
+Grim heard one of them say, "He is no martyr, he is justly served."
+Another said--scarcely feeling, perhaps, the meaning of the
+words,--"He wished to be king and more than king. Let him be king, let
+him be king." Whether the cause for which he died was to prevail, or
+whether the sacrifice had been in vain, hung on the answer which would
+be given to this momentous question. In a few days or weeks an answer
+came in a form to which in that age no rejoinder was possible; and the
+only uncertainty which remained at Canterbury was whether it was
+lawful to use the ordinary prayers for the repose of the dead man's
+soul, or whether, in consequence of the astounding miracles which
+were instantly worked by his remains, the Pope's judgment ought not to
+be anticipated, and the archbishop ought not to be at once adored as a
+saint in heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII.
+
+From the 'History of England'
+
+
+Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which
+both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was
+assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records,
+I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither
+any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found
+that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other
+fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to
+deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy,
+statesmen whose beneficent legislature survives among the most valued
+of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the
+English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable
+atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the
+Roman Senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.
+
+Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the
+narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of
+unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the
+conditions, internal and external, under which his task was allotted
+to him, he, like every other man, ought to be judged. He was
+inconsistent: he can bear the reproach of it. He ended by accepting
+and approving what he had commenced with persecuting; yet it was with
+the honest inconsistency which distinguishes the conduct of most men
+of practical ability in times of change, and even by virtue of which
+they obtain their success. If at the commencement of the movement he
+had regarded the eucharist as a "remembrance," he must either have
+concealed his convictions or he would have forfeited his throne; if he
+had been a stationary bigot, the Reformation might have waited for a
+century, and would have been conquered only by an internecine war.
+
+But as the nation moved the King moved, leading it, but not outrunning
+it; checking those who went too fast, dragging forward those who
+lagged behind. The conservatives, all that was sound and good among
+them, trusted him because he so long continued to share their
+conservatism; when he threw it aside he was not reproached with breach
+of confidence, because his own advance had accompanied theirs.
+
+Protestants have exclaimed against the Six Articles Bill; Romanists
+against the Act of Supremacy. Philosophers complain that the
+prejudices of the people were needlessly violated, that opinions
+should have been allowed to be free, and the reform of religion have
+been left to be accomplished by reason. Yet, however cruel was the Six
+Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were
+unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden
+miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his
+eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably,
+had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles
+of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was
+itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared
+Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of
+enforcing it by violence. His personal exertions were ever to mitigate
+the action of the law, while its letter was sustained; and England at
+its worst was a harbor of refuge to the Protestants, compared to the
+Netherlands, to France, to Spain, or even to Scotland.
+
+That the Romanists should have regarded him as a tyrant is natural;
+and were it true that English subjects owed fealty to the Pope, their
+feeling was just. But however desirable it may be to leave religious
+opinion unfettered, it is certain that if England was legitimately
+free, she could tolerate no difference of opinion on a question of
+allegiance, so long as Europe was conspiring to bring her back into
+slavery. So long as the English Romanists refused to admit without
+mental reservation that, if foreign enemies invaded this country in
+the Pope's name, their place must be at the side of their own
+sovereign, "religion" might palliate the moral guilt of their treason,
+but it could not exempt them from its punishment.
+
+But these matters have been discussed in the details of this history,
+where alone they can be understood.
+
+Beyond and besides the Reformation, the constitution of these islands
+now rests in large measure on foundations laid in this reign. Henry
+brought Ireland within the reach of English civilization. He absorbed
+Wales and the Palatinates into the general English system. He it was
+who raised the House of Commons from the narrow duty of voting
+supplies, and of passing without discussion the measures of the Privy
+Council, and converted them into the first power in the State under
+the Crown. When he ascended the throne, so little did the Commons care
+for their privileges that their attendance at the sessions of
+Parliament was enforced by a law. They woke into life in 1529, and
+they became the right hand of the King to subdue the resistance of the
+House of Lords, and to force upon them a course of legislation which
+from their hearts they detested. Other kings in times of difficulty
+summoned their "great councils," composed of peers, or prelates, or
+municipal officials, or any persons whom they pleased to nominate.
+Henry VIII. broke through the ancient practice, and ever threw himself
+on the representatives of the people. By the Reformation and by the
+power which he forced upon them, he had so interwoven the House of
+Commons with the highest business of the State that the peers
+thenceforward sunk to be their shadow.
+
+Something, too, ought to be said of his individual exertions in the
+details of State administration. In his earlier life, though active
+and assiduous, he found leisure for elegant accomplishments, for
+splendid amusements, for relaxations careless, extravagant, sometimes
+questionable. As his life drew onwards, his lighter tastes
+disappeared, and the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into
+the business of the commonwealth. Those who have examined the printed
+State papers may form some impression of his industry from the
+documents which are his own composition, and the letters which he
+wrote and received: but only persons who have seen the original
+manuscripts, who have observed the traces of his pen in side-notes and
+corrections, and the handwritings of his secretaries in diplomatic
+commissions, in drafts of Acts of Parliament, in expositions and
+formularies, in articles of faith, in proclamations, in the countless
+multitude of documents of all sorts, secular or ecclesiastical, which
+contain the real history of this extraordinary reign,--only they can
+realize the extent of labor to which he sacrificed himself, and which
+brought his life to a premature close. His personal faults were great,
+and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper
+blemishes would be but as scars upon the features of a sovereign who
+in trying times sustained nobly the honor of the English name, and
+carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its
+history.
+
+
+
+
+ON A SIDING AT A RAILWAY STATION
+
+From 'Short Studies on Great Subjects'
+
+
+Some years ago I was traveling by railway, no matter whence or
+whither. I was in a second-class carriage. We had been long on the
+road, and had still some distance before us, when one evening our
+journey was brought unexpectedly to an end by the train running into a
+siding. The guards opened the doors, we were told that we could
+proceed no further, and were required to alight. The passengers were
+numerous, and of all ranks and sorts. There were third class, second,
+first, with saloon carriages for several great persons of high
+distinction. We had ministers of State, judges on circuit, directors,
+leading men of business, idle young men of family who were out amusing
+themselves, an archbishop, several ladies, and a duke and duchess with
+their suite. These favored travelers had Pullman cars to themselves,
+and occupied as much room as was allotted to scores of plebeians. I
+had amused myself for several days in observing the luxurious
+appurtenances by which they were protected against discomfort,--the
+piles of cushions and cloaks, the baskets of dainties, the novels and
+magazines to pass away the time, and the profound attention which they
+met with from the conductors and station-masters on the line. The rest
+of us were a miscellaneous crowd,--commercial people, lawyers,
+artists, men of letters, tourists moving about for pleasure or because
+they had nothing to do; and in third-class carriages, artisans and
+laborers in search of work, women looking for husbands or for service,
+or beggars flying from starvation in one part of the world to find it
+follow them like their shadows, let them go where they pleased. All
+these were huddled together, feeding hardly on such poor provisions as
+they carried with them or could pick up at the stopping-places. No
+more consideration was shown them than if they had been so many
+cattle. But they were merry enough: songs and sounds of laughter came
+from their windows, and notwithstanding all their conveniences, the
+languid-looking fine people in the large compartments seemed to me to
+get through their journey with less enjoyment after all than their
+poor fellow travelers. These last appeared to be of tougher texture,
+to care less for being jolted and shaken, to be better humored and
+kinder to one another. They had found life go hard with them wherever
+they had been, and not being accustomed to have everything which they
+wished for, they were less selfish and more considerate.
+
+The intimation that our journey was for the present at an end came on
+most of us as an unpleasant surprise. The grandees got out in a high
+state of indignation. They called for their servants, but their
+servants did not hear them, or laughed and passed on. The conductors
+had forgotten to be obsequious. All classes on the platform were
+suddenly on a level. A beggar woman hustled the duchess, as she was
+standing astonished because her maid had left her to carry her own
+bag. The patricians were pushed about among the crowd with no more
+concern than if they had been common mortals. They demanded loudly to
+see the station-master. The minister complained angrily of the delay;
+an important negotiation would be imperiled by his detention, and he
+threatened the company with the displeasure of his department. A
+consequential youth who had just heard of the death of his elder
+brother was flying home to take his inheritance. A great lady had
+secured, as she had hoped, a brilliant match for her daughter; her
+work over, she had been at the baths to recover from the dissipation
+of the season; difficulty had arisen unlooked for, and unless she was
+at hand to remove it the worst consequences might be feared. A banker
+declared that the credit of a leading commercial house might fail,
+unless he could be at home on the day fixed for his return; he alone
+could save it. A solicitor had the evidence in his portmanteau which
+would determine the succession to the lands and title of an ancient
+family. An elderly gentleman was in despair about his young wife, whom
+he had left at home; he had made a will by which she was to lose his
+fortune if she married again after his death, but the will was lying
+in his desk unsigned. The archbishop was on his way to a synod, where
+the great question was to be discussed whether gas might be used at
+the altar instead of candles. The altar candles were blessed before
+they were used, and the doubt was whether gas could be blessed. The
+right reverend prelate conceived that if the gas tubes were made in
+the shape of candles the difficulty could be got over, but he feared
+that without his moderating influence the majority might come to a
+rash decision.
+
+All these persons were clamoring over their various anxieties with the
+most naive frankness, the truth coming freely out, whatever it might
+be. One distinguished-looking lady in deep mourning, with a sad,
+gentle face, alone was resigned and hopeful. It seemed that her
+husband had been stopped not long before at the same station. She
+thought it possible that she might meet him again.
+
+The station-master listened to the complaints with composed
+indifference. He told the loudest that they need not alarm themselves.
+The State would survive the absence of the minister. The minister, in
+fact, was not thinking of the State at all, but of the party triumph
+which he expected; and the peerage which was to be his reward, the
+station-master said, would now be of no use to him. The youth had a
+second brother who would succeed instead of him, and the tenants would
+not be inconvenienced by the change. The fine lady's daughter would
+marry to her own liking instead of her mother's, and would be all the
+happier for it. The commercial house was already insolvent, and the
+longer it lasted the more innocent people would be ruined by it. The
+boy whom the lawyer intended to make into a rich baronet was now
+working industriously at school, and would grow up a useful man. If a
+great estate fell in to him he would be idle and dissolute. The old
+man might congratulate himself that he had escaped so soon from the
+scrape into which he had fallen. His wife would marry an adventurer,
+and would suffer worse from inheriting his fortune. The archbishop was
+commended for his anxiety. His solution of the candle problem was no
+doubt an excellent one; but his clergy were now provided with a
+harmless subject to quarrel over, and if it was adopted they might
+fall out over something else which might be seriously mischievous.
+
+"Do you mean, then, that you are not going to send us forward at all?"
+the minister inquired sternly.
+
+"You will see," the station-master answered with a curious short
+laugh. I observed that he looked more gently at the lady in mourning.
+She had said nothing, but he knew what was in her mind, and though he
+held out no hope in words that her wish would be gratified, he smiled
+sadly, and the irony passed out of his face.
+
+The crowd meanwhile were standing about the platform, whistling tunes
+or amusing themselves, not ill-naturedly at the distress of their
+grand companions. Something considerable was happening. But they had
+so long experienced the ups and downs of things that they were
+prepared for what fortune might send. They had not expected to find a
+Paradise where they were going, and one place might be as good as
+another. They had nothing belonging to them except the clothes they
+stood in and their bits of skill in their different trades. Wherever
+men were, there would be need of cobblers, and tailors, and smiths,
+and carpenters. If not, they might fall on their feet somehow, if
+there was work to be done of any sort.
+
+Presently a bell rang, a door was flung open, and we were ordered into
+a waiting-room, where we were told that our luggage was to be
+examined. It was a large, barely furnished apartment, like the _salle
+d'attente_ at the Northern Railway Station at Paris. A rail ran
+across, behind which we were all penned; opposite to us was the usual
+long table, on which were piled boxes, bags, and portmanteaus, and
+behind them stood a row of officials, in a plain uniform with gold
+bands round their caps, and the dry peremptory manner which passengers
+accustomed to deference so particularly dislike. At their backs was a
+screen extending across the room, reaching half-way to the ceiling; in
+the rear of it there was apparently an office.
+
+We each looked to see that our particular belongings were safe, but we
+were surprised to find that we could recognize none of them. Packages
+there were in plenty, alleged to be the property of the passengers who
+had come in by the train. They were arranged in the three
+classes,--first, second, and third,--but the proportions were
+inverted: most of it was labeled as the luggage of the travelers in
+fustian, who had brought nothing with them but what they carried in
+their hands; a moderate heap stood where the second-class luggage
+should have been, and some of superior quality; but none of us could
+make out the shapes of our own trunks. As to the grand ladies and
+gentlemen, the innumerable articles which I had seen put as theirs
+into the van were nowhere to be found. A few shawls and cloaks lay
+upon the planks, and that was all. There was a loud outcry; but the
+officials were accustomed to it, and took no notice. The
+station-master, who was still in charge of us, said briefly that the
+saloon luggage would be sent forward in the next train. The late
+owners would have no more use for it, and it would be delivered to
+their friends.
+
+The late owners! Were we no longer actual owners, then? My individual
+loss was not great, and besides, it might be made up to me; for I saw
+my name on a strange box on the table, and being of curious
+disposition, the singularity of the adventure made it interesting to
+me. The consternation of the rest was indescribable. The minister
+supposed that he had fallen among communists, who disbelieved in
+property, and was beginning a speech on the elementary conditions of
+society; when silence was called, and the third-class passengers were
+ordered to advance, that their boxes might be opened. Each man had his
+own carefully docketed. The lids flew off, and within, instead of
+clothes, and shoes, and dressing apparatus, and money, and jewels, and
+such-like, were simply samples of the work which he had done in his
+life. There was an account-book also, in which were entered the number
+of days which he had worked, the number and size of the fields, etc.,
+which he had drained and inclosed and plowed, the crops which he had
+reaped, the walls which he had built, the metal which he had dug out
+and smelted and fashioned into articles of use to mankind, the leather
+which he had tanned, the clothes which he had woven,--all entered with
+punctual exactness; and on the opposite page, the wages which he had
+received, and the share which had been allotted to him of the good
+things which he had helped to create.
+
+Besides his work, so specifically called, there were his actions,--his
+affection for his parents or his wife and children, his self-denials,
+his charities, his purity, his truth, his honesty; or it might be ugly
+catalogues of sins and oaths and drunkenness and brutality. But
+inquiry into action was reserved for a second investigation before a
+higher commissioner. The first examination was confined to the literal
+work done by each man for the general good,--how much he had
+contributed, and how much society had done for him in return; and no
+one, it seemed, could be allowed to go any further without a
+certificate of having passed this test satisfactorily. With the
+workmen, the balance in most instances was found enormously in their
+favor. The state of the case was so clear that the scrutiny was
+rapidly got over, and they and their luggage were passed in to the
+higher court. A few were found whose boxes were empty, who had done
+nothing useful all their lives, and had subsisted by begging and
+stealing. These were ordered to stand aside till the rest of us had
+been disposed of.
+
+The saloon passengers were taken next. Most of them, who had nothing
+at all to show, were called up together and were asked what they had
+to say for themselves. A well-dressed gentleman, who spoke for the
+rest, said that the whole investigation was a mystery to him. He and
+his friends had been born to good fortunes, and had found themselves,
+on entering upon life, amply provided for. They had never been told
+that work was required of them, either work with their hands or work
+with their heads,--in fact, work of any kind. It was right of course
+for the poor to work, because they could not honestly live otherwise.
+For themselves, they had spent their time in amusements, generally
+innocent. They had paid for everything which they had consumed. They
+had stolen nothing, taken nothing from any man by violence or fraud.
+They had kept the Commandments, all ten of them, from the time when
+they were old enough to understand them. The speaker, at least,
+declared that he had no breach of any Commandment on his own
+conscience, and he believed that he might say as much of his
+companions. They were superior people, who had been always looked up
+to and well spoken of; and to call upon them to show what they had
+done was against reason and equity.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the chief official, "we have heard this many times;
+yet as often as it is repeated we feel fresh astonishment. You have
+been in a world where work is the condition of life. Not a meal can be
+had by any man that some one has not worked to produce. Those who work
+deserve to eat; those who do not work deserve to starve. There are but
+three ways of living: by working, by stealing, or by begging. Those
+who have not lived by the first have lived by one of the other two.
+And no matter how superior you think yourselves, you will not pass
+here till you have something of your own to produce. You have had your
+wages beforehand--ample wages, as you acknowledge yourselves. What
+have you to show?"
+
+"Wages!" the speaker said: "we are not hired servants; we received no
+wages. What we spent was our own. All the orders we received were that
+we were not to do wrong. We have done no wrong. I appeal to the higher
+court."
+
+But the appeal could not be received. To all who presented themselves
+with empty boxes, no matter who they were, or how excellent their
+characters appeared to one another, there was the irrevocable
+answer--"No admittance, till you come better furnished." All who were
+in this condition, the duke and duchess among them, were ordered to
+stand aside with the thieves. The duchess declared that she had given
+the finest parties in the season, and as it was universally agreed
+that they had been the most tedious, and that no one had found any
+pleasure there, a momentary doubt rose whether they might not have
+answered some useful purpose in disgusting people with such modes of
+entertainment; but no evidence of this was forthcoming: the world had
+attended them because the world had nothing else to do, and she and
+her guests had been alike unprofitable. Thus the large majority of the
+saloon passengers was disposed of. The minister, the archbishop, the
+lawyer, the banker, and others who although they had no material work
+credited to them had yet been active and laborious in their different
+callings, were passed to the superior judges.
+
+Our turn came next,--ours of the second class,--and a motley gathering
+we were. Busy we must all have been, from the multitude of articles
+which we found assigned to us: manufacturers with their wares,
+solicitors with their law-suits, doctors and clergymen with the bodies
+and souls which they had saved or lost, authors with their books,
+painters and sculptors with their pictures and statues. But the hard
+test was applied to all that we had produced,--the wages which we had
+received on one side, and the value of our exertions to mankind on the
+other,--and imposing as our performances looked when laid out to be
+examined, we had been paid, most of us, out of all proportion to what
+we were found to have deserved. I was reminded of a large compartment
+in the Paris Exhibition, where an active gentleman, wishing to show
+the state of English literature, had collected copies of every book,
+review, pamphlet, or newspaper which had been published in a single
+year. The bulk was overwhelming, but the figures were only decimal
+points, and the worth of the whole was a fraction above zero. A few of
+us were turned back summarily among the thieves and the fine gentlemen
+and ladies: speculators who had done nothing but handle money which
+had clung to their fingers in passing through them, divines who had
+preached a morality which they did not practice, and fluent orators
+who had made speeches which they knew to be nonsense; philosophers who
+had spun out of moonshine systems of the universe, distinguished
+pleaders who had defeated justice while they established points of
+law, writers of books upon subjects of which they knew enough to
+mislead their readers, purveyors of luxuries which had added nothing
+to human health or strength, physicians and apothecaries who had
+pretended to knowledge which they knew that they did not
+possess,--these all, as the contents of their boxes bore witness
+against them, were thrust back into the rejected herd.
+
+There were some whose account stood better, as having at least
+produced something of real merit, but they were cast on the point of
+wages: modest excellence had come badly off; the plausible and
+unscrupulous had thriven and grown rich. It was tragical, and
+evidently a surprise to most of us, to see how mendacious we had been:
+how we had sanded our sugar, watered our milk, scamped our
+carpentering and mason's work, literally and metaphorically; how in
+all things we had been thinking less of producing good work than of
+the profit which we could make out of it; how we had sold ourselves to
+tell lies and act them, because the public found lies pleasant and
+truth expensive and troublesome. Some of us were manifest rogues, who
+had bought cheap and sold dear, had used false measures and weights,
+had made cotton pass for wool, and hemp for silk, and tin for silver.
+The American peddler happened to be in the party, who had put a rind
+upon a grindstone and had sold it as a cheese. These were promptly
+sifted out and placed with their fellows; only persons whose services
+were on the whole greater than the pay which they had received were
+allowed their certificates. When my own box was opened, I perceived
+that though the wages had been small, the work done seemed smaller
+still; and I was surprised to find myself among those who had passed.
+
+The whistle of a train was heard at this moment, coming in upon the
+main line. It was to go in half an hour, and those who had been turned
+back were told that they were to proceed by it to the place where they
+had been originally going. They looked infinitely relieved at the
+news; but before they started, a few questions had to be put to them,
+and a few alterations made which were to affect their future. They
+were asked to explain how they had come to be such worthless
+creatures. They gave many answers, which came mainly to the same
+thing. Circumstances had been against them. It was all owing to
+circumstances. They had been badly brought up. They had been placed in
+situations where it had been impossible for them to do better. The
+rich people repeated that they had never been informed that any work
+was expected of them. Their wants had all been provided for, and it
+was unfair to expect that they should have exerted themselves of their
+own accord when they had no motive for working. If they had only been
+born poor, all would have gone well with them. The cheating tradesman
+declared that the first duty of a shopkeeper, according to all
+received principles, was to make money and better his condition. It
+was the buyer's business to see to the quality of the articles which
+he purchased; the shopkeeper was entitled to sell his wares at the
+highest price which he could get for them. So, at least, it was
+believed and taught by the recognized authorities on the subject. The
+orators, preachers, newspaper writers, novel-writers, etc., etc., of
+whom there were a great many, appealed to the crowds who came to
+listen to them, or bought and read their productions. _Tout le monde_,
+it was said, was wiser than the wisest single sage. They had given the
+world what the world wished for and approved; they had worked at
+supplying it with all their might, and it was extremely hard to blame
+them for guiding themselves by the world's judgment. The thieves and
+vagabonds argued that they had been brought into existence without
+their consent being asked: they had not wished for it; although they
+had not been without their pleasures, they regarded existence on the
+whole as a nuisance which they would gladly have been spared. Being
+alive, however, they had to keep alive; and for all that they could
+see, they had as full a right to the good things which the world
+contained as anybody else, provided they could get them. They were
+called thieves. Law and language were made by the property-owners, who
+were their natural enemies. If society had given them the means of
+living honestly they would have found it easy to be honest. Society
+had done nothing for them--why should they do anything for society?
+
+So, in their various ways, those who had been "plucked" defended
+themselves. They were all delighted to hear that they were to have
+another chance; and I was amused to observe that though some of them
+had pretended that they had not wished to be born, and had rather not
+have been born, not one of them protested against being sent back. All
+they asked was that they should be put in a new position, and that the
+adverse influences should be taken off. I expected that among these
+adverse influences they would have mentioned the faults of their
+own dispositions. My own opinion had been that half the misdoings
+of men came from congenital defects of character which they had
+brought with them into the world, and that constitutional courage,
+right-mindedness, and practical ability were as much gifts of nature
+or circumstance as the accidents of fortune. A change in this respect
+was of more consequence than in any other. But with themselves they
+were all apparently satisfied, and they required only an improvement
+in their surroundings. The alterations were rapidly made. The duchess
+was sent to begin her life again in a laborer's cottage. She was to
+attend the village school and rise thence into a housemaid. The fine
+gentleman was made a plowboy. The authors and preachers were to become
+mechanics, and bound apprentices to carpenters and blacksmiths. A
+philosopher who, having had a good fortune and unbroken health, had
+insisted that the world was as good as it could be made, was to be
+born blind and paralytic, and to find his way through life under the
+new conditions. The thieves and cheats, who pretended that their
+misdemeanors were due to poverty, were to find themselves, when they
+arrived in the world again, in palaces surrounded with luxury. The cup
+of Lethe was sent round. The past became a blank. They were hurried
+into the train; the engine screamed and flew away with them.
+
+"They will be all here again in a few years," the station-master said,
+"and it will be the same story over again. I have had these very
+people in my hands a dozen times. They have been tried in all
+positions, and there is still nothing to show, and nothing but
+complaints of circumstances. For my part, I would put them out
+altogether." "How long is it to last?" I asked. "Well," he said, "it
+does not depend on me. No one passes here who cannot prove that he has
+lived to some purpose. Some of the worst I have known made at last
+into pigs and geese, to be fatted up and eaten, and made of use that
+way. Others have become asses, condemned to carry burdens, to be
+beaten with sticks, and to breed asses like themselves for a hundred
+generations. All animated creatures tend to take the shape at last
+which suits their character."
+
+The train was scarcely out of sight when again the bell rang. The
+scene changed as at a theatre. The screen was rolled back, and we who
+were left found ourselves in the presence of four grave-looking
+persons, like the board of examiners whom we remembered at college. We
+were called up one by one. The work which had passed the first ordeal
+was again looked into, and the quality of it compared with the talent
+or faculty of the producer, to see how far he had done his
+best,--whether anywhere he had done worse than he might have done and
+knew how to have done; while besides, in a separate collection, were
+the vices, the sins, the selfishnesses and ill-humors, with--in the
+other scale--the acts of personal duty, of love and kindness and
+charity, which had increased the happiness or lightened the sorrows of
+those connected with him. These last, I observed, had generally been
+forgotten by the owner, who saw them appear with surprise, and even
+repudiated them with protest. In the work, of course, both material
+and moral, there was every gradation both of kind and merit. But while
+nothing was absolutely worthless, everything, even the highest
+achievements of the greatest artist or the greatest saint, fell short
+of absolute perfection. Each of us saw our own performances, from our
+first ignorant beginnings to what we regarded as our greatest triumph;
+and it was easy to trace how much of our faults were due to natural
+deficiencies and the necessary failures of inexperience, and how much
+to self-will or vanity or idleness. Some taint of mean motives,
+too,--some desire of reward, desire of praise or honor or wealth, some
+foolish self-satisfaction, when satisfaction ought not to have been
+felt,--was to be seen infecting everything, even the very best which
+was presented for scrutiny.
+
+So plain was this that one of us, an earnest, impressive-looking
+person, whose own work bore inspection better than that of most of us,
+exclaimed passionately that so far as he was concerned the examiners
+might spare their labor. From his earliest years he had known what he
+ought to do, and in no instance had he ever completely done it. He had
+struggled; he had conquered his grosser faults: but the farther he had
+gone, and the better he had been able to do, his knowledge had still
+grown faster than his power of acting upon it; and every additional
+day that he had lived, his shortcomings had become more miserably
+plain to him. Even if he could have reached perfection at last, he
+could not undo the past, and the faults of his youth would bear
+witness against him and call for his condemnation. Therefore, he said,
+he abhorred himself. He had no merit which could entitle him to look
+for favor. He had labored on to the end, but he had labored with a
+full knowledge that the best which he could offer would be unworthy of
+acceptance. He had been told, and he believed, that a high Spirit not
+subject to infirmity had done his work for him, and done it perfectly,
+and that if he abandoned all claim on his own account, he might be
+accepted for the sake of what another had done. This, he trusted, was
+true, and it was his sole dependence. In the so-called good actions
+with which he seemed to be credited, there was nothing that was really
+good; there was not one which was altogether what it ought to have
+been.
+
+He was evidently sincere, and what he said was undoubtedly true--true
+of him and true of every one. Even in the vehemence of his
+self-abandonment a trace lingered of the taint which he was
+confessing, for he was a polemical divine; he had spent his life and
+gained a reputation in maintaining this particular doctrine. He
+believed it, but he had not forgotten that he had been himself its
+champion.
+
+The examiner looked kindly at him, but answered:--
+
+"We do not expect impossibilities; and we do not blame you when you
+have not accomplished what is beyond your strength. Only those who are
+themselves perfect can do anything perfectly. Human beings are born
+ignorant and helpless. They bring into the world with them a
+disposition to seek what is pleasant to themselves, and what is
+pleasant is not always right. They learn to live as they learn
+everything else. At first they cannot do rightly at all. They improve
+under teaching and practice. The best only arrive at excellence. We do
+not find fault with the painter on account of his first bad copies, if
+they were as good as could be looked for at his age. Every craftsman
+acquires his art by degrees. He begins badly; he cannot help it; and
+it is the same with life. You learn to walk by falling down. You learn
+to live by going wrong and experiencing the consequences of it. We do
+not record against a man 'the sins of his youth' if he has been
+honestly trying to improve himself. We do not require the same
+self-control in a child as in a man. We do not require the same
+attainments from all. Some are well taught, some are ill taught, some
+are not taught at all. Some have naturally good dispositions, some
+have naturally bad dispositions. Not one has had power 'to fulfill the
+law,' as you call it, completely. Therefore it is no crime in him if
+he fails. We reckon as faults those only which arise from idleness,
+willfulness, selfishness, and deliberate preference of evil to good.
+Each is judged according to what he has received."
+
+I was amused to observe how pleased the archbishop looked while the
+examiner was speaking. He had himself been engaged in controversy with
+this gentleman on the share of "good works" in justifying a man; and
+if the examiner had not taken his side in the discussion, he had at
+least demolished his adversary. The archbishop had been the more
+disinterested in the line which he had taken, as his own "works,"
+though in several large folios, weighed extremely little; and indeed,
+had it not been for passages in his early life,--he had starved
+himself at college that he might not be a burden upon his widowed
+mother,--I do not know but that he might have been sent back into the
+world to serve as a parish clerk.
+
+For myself, there were questions which I was longing to ask, and I was
+trying to collect my courage to speak. I wanted chiefly to know what
+the examiner meant by "natural disposition." Was it that a man might
+be born with a natural capacity for becoming a saint, as another man
+with a capacity to become a great artist or musician, and that each of
+us could only grow to the limits of his natural powers? And again,
+were idleness, willfulness, selfishness, etc., etc., natural
+dispositions? for in that case--
+
+But at the moment the bell rang again, and my own name was called.
+There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity
+of the person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said
+or done, was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need
+for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably
+impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, the few good
+actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In
+the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and
+other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was
+poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely
+every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition
+grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it.
+Alas! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as
+if no compositor had ever labored in setting type for it. Pale and
+illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly
+prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at
+long intervals. They were those on which I had labored least, and had
+almost forgotten; or those, as I observed in one or two instances,
+which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly
+journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge, of
+willfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be
+true, was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness;
+sins of infirmity,--culpable indeed, but not culpable in the last
+degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual
+sentiments--these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my
+heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I
+should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was
+reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was
+flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance
+would be in my favor: so many years of labor--such and such cheques
+received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I
+was in good hope that I might scrape through.
+
+The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been
+listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when
+suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there
+appeared an interminable vista of creatures--creatures of all kinds
+from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They
+were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in
+part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood
+in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,--oxen and calves, sheep
+and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants,
+grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds
+which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them
+had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and
+river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling
+and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the
+oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally
+to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These
+had been my wages. At this enormous cost had my existence been
+maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were
+sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to
+produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has
+to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in
+air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the
+pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We
+were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the
+person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value
+in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were
+sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so
+pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the
+judgment, though we shall withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves
+we say freely that we have long watched him,--him and his
+fellows,--and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the
+human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most
+destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous
+beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied,
+he kills us for his mere amusement."
+
+The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the
+fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and
+self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on
+the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of
+condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became
+indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound
+of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the
+railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take
+our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus
+for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were
+waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and
+duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously
+bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right
+honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with
+which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop
+before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a
+very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me."
+The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the
+honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have
+dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this
+world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of
+imagination."
+
+
+
+
+HENRY B. FULLER
+
+(1859-)
+
+
+New England blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago
+even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of
+prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret
+Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind
+of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking
+for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the
+Great West.
+
+Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited
+place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for
+predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a
+musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he
+was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged
+at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted
+little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor
+Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This
+fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the
+book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and
+widely read. 'The Chatelaine of La Trinite,' his next venture,
+appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year.
+Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain
+remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in
+common with this workaday world.
+
+To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book--published as a
+serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and
+called 'The Cliff-Dwellers'--pictured Chicago in its most sordid and
+utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole
+community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence,
+the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the
+book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain
+whether to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his
+mercilessness.
+
+In 1895 appeared 'With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago
+social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still
+delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more
+sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is
+carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This
+theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an
+old-fashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience
+to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process
+is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic
+lightness of touch. 'With the Procession' is such a story as might
+happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis
+are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's
+Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking
+himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of
+the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his
+readers that they too shall fall to thinking.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE HEAD OF THE MARCH
+
+From 'With the Procession.' Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and
+reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers, New York
+
+
+"Well, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest
+of the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous
+pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a
+sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter
+of a vast and variegated facade; and higher still, the morning sun
+shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering
+chimneys.
+
+"It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the
+wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the
+inner ones.
+
+"Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
+searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo
+in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
+splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in
+for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most
+fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the
+beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.
+
+"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
+further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"
+
+The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates--" she began.
+
+The door opened half-way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his
+chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of
+those conscientious portraits of the olden time.
+
+"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself.
+
+She dropped her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that
+the man wore knee-breeches and black-silk stockings.
+
+"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
+I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
+never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
+town!"
+
+She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
+began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.
+
+The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as
+it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
+master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but
+there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all.
+Some of these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought
+polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in
+appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy;
+few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at
+the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.
+
+"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
+eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will: she
+acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him
+into the concession that she herself was nothing less.
+
+The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
+discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that
+he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
+permitted to pass the gate.
+
+She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
+partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of
+forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted
+upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow
+door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with
+the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led
+with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.
+
+"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
+speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse of all this
+luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
+eight hundred feet from the Monument!"
+
+Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
+she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected
+in an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity
+of the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more
+amply, than she could have imagined possible through the passage of
+one person merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow
+and somewhat ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning-gown
+with a broad plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous
+material in the sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and
+her voluminous gray hair was tossed and fretted about the temples
+after the fashion of a marquise of the old regime. Jane set her jaw
+and clamped her knotty fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable
+chair.
+
+"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous, and
+so fashionable, and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."
+
+The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
+carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps
+was silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide
+and roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she
+was to deal: with one of the big, the broad, the great, the
+triumphant; with one of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian
+keenness and sagacity, an American ambition and determination; with
+one who baffles circumstance and almost masters fate--with one of the
+conquerors, in short.
+
+"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
+"but all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
+door before--yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"
+
+Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
+Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
+She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on
+Jane with an expression of rather cold questioning.
+
+"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
+advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing
+there....
+
+"My father," Jane began again, in the same tone, "is David Marshall.
+He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have lived here a
+great many years. It seems to me that there ought to--"
+
+"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I _do_ know David
+Marshall--yes," she said; "or did--a good many years ago." She looked
+up into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her
+glance was curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are
+David Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst
+of spunk. "Really--David Marshall's daughter?"
+
+"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to
+be placated yet.
+
+"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so
+in the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else
+you could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is
+he, anyway? I haven't seen him--to really speak to him--for fifteen
+years. It may be even more."
+
+She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
+its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be
+inviting Jane to advance without let or hindrance.
+
+But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
+laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants
+to; she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."
+
+All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
+citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
+memory. The portcullis was dropped, and the late enemy was invited to
+advance as a friend.
+
+Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
+gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
+within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and
+looked into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that
+temper once myself," she said.
+
+The sluice gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams
+of tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their
+course.
+
+"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place?
+Oh, this terrible town! You can't keep your old friends; you can
+hardly know your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it
+is the same as if it were a hundred."
+
+Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
+herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
+permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place.
+And in the same old way," she added--in the spirit of concession.
+
+Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him--like your
+father?"
+
+"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of
+the family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And
+another drop fell.
+
+"Don't slander yourself." She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.
+
+Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
+seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't
+meaning to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also
+shrugged her shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and
+patted.
+
+"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially.
+She motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the
+roomier sofa. "Or no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day;
+it's so hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should.
+Come, it ought to be warmer in the music-room."
+
+"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
+have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
+music teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You
+shall have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your
+plans; I dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane
+Marshall."
+
+"Her music teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor
+so far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from
+searching out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of
+fifty-five want to be taking music lessons for?"
+
+The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
+hard-woods; its paneled walls and ceilings rang with a magnificent
+sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like
+marquetry of the floor.
+
+To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
+luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by
+special order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall
+music-stand in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound
+scores of all the German classics and the usual operas of the French
+and Italian schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing
+there seemed to have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it
+grand!" sighed Jane. She already felt herself succumbing beneath these
+accumulated splendors.
+
+Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano stool, with her back
+to the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I
+have sat down here for a month."
+
+"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this
+I should play in it every day."
+
+"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
+practicing in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
+you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
+thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover
+of the keyboard.
+
+"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
+don't believe she can play a single note."
+
+"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on.
+"I had the greatest set-back of my life. I asked to join the Amateur
+Musical Club. They wouldn't let me in."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote
+me a note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it
+meant. I see now well enough that my fingers _were_ rather stiffer
+than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering
+Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and
+Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under.
+I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practiced scales
+an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was crazy. I
+tackled Grieg and Lassen and Chopin,--yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm
+going to play for that committee next month. Let me see if they'll
+dare to vote me out again!"
+
+"Oh, _that's_ it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous of
+meting out exact and even-handed justice. She found it impossible to
+withhold respect from so much grit and determination.
+
+"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
+young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
+sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
+evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
+'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.
+
+"Your father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she
+went on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father
+was one of my old beaux--at least, I always counted him with the rest.
+I was a gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I
+could; so I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your
+father was one of the quiet ones."
+
+"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
+shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.
+
+"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a
+word. My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'--a new
+thing here; I was the first one in town to have it. There were
+thirteen pages, and there was always a rush to see who should turn
+them. Your father didn't often enter the rush, but I really liked his
+way of turning the best of any. He never turned too soon or too late;
+he never bothered me by shifting his feet every second or two, nor by
+talking to me at the hard places. In fact, he was the only one who
+could do it right."
+
+"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa--all over."
+
+Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently
+she shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that
+this place is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."
+
+In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
+yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
+latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre
+and solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the
+walls, around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases,
+constructed with the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's
+art. In the centre of the room a wide and substantial table was set
+with all the paraphernalia of correspondence, and the leathery abysses
+of three or four vast easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish
+self-abandonment.
+
+"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows
+of formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after
+that poor sole book-case of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing
+like a wardrobe, and with a couple of drawers at the bottom,
+receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes.
+"How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole
+being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and
+Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets', and--"
+
+"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in genially;
+"and enough Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach around the corner and
+back again. Sets--sets--sets."
+
+"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all
+abashed by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and
+write papers at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
+towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But
+really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it
+was put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the
+keys are to get at them with. _I_ can't do anything with them; why,
+some of them weigh five or six pounds!"
+
+Jane shriveled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
+had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
+interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her
+head to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the
+cord; doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved
+to admire openly nothing more whatever.
+
+Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane
+towards another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with
+a resumption of her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of
+books--especially poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I
+was likely to be alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe
+I could give you even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the
+Romans. Yes; and almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."
+
+Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman; and here
+apparently was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she
+inquired, with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my
+father_--was ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that
+sort of thing?"
+
+"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young
+man, with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above
+the average. And that Shakespeare of his--I recall it perfectly. It
+was a chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed
+stamp, and print a great deal too fine for _my_ eyes. He always had to
+do the reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane
+closely. "Perhaps you have never done your father justice."
+
+Jane felt herself driven to defense--even to apology. "The fact is,"
+she said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about
+the only one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess _I_
+don't know him any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no
+right to defend her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.
+
+"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates slowly. She crossed over to the
+radiator and began working at the valve. "I _told_ Granger I knew he'd
+be sorry if he didn't put in furnace flues too. I really can't ask you
+to take your things off down here; let's go up-stairs--that's the only
+warm place I can think of."
+
+She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the
+rooms before you go up?"
+
+"Yes--I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage
+no ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as
+she felt good manners would allow.
+
+Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
+she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
+the--well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
+decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"
+
+Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering
+apartment; it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of
+the eighteenth century--an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking.
+Grilles, panels, mirror frames, all glimmered in green and gold, and a
+row of lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty
+ceiling.
+
+Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
+general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of
+guide-post, had rather baffled her.
+
+"Hem!" she observed critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
+splendor of the place; "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period;
+done, too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a
+real _jardin d'hiver_, in fact. Very handsome indeed."
+
+Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
+response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"
+
+"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
+periods in architecture and decoration."
+
+"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself--and to three or four
+others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
+still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music lessons. It _is_ a
+little singular, I admit--my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
+pupil. You know, of course, that I _was_ a school-teacher? Yes, I had
+a little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
+basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a
+little bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know
+those old-fashioned frame cottages--one of them. In the early days pa
+was a carpenter--a boss carpenter, to do him full justice; the town
+was growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
+beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted,
+and wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own
+hats till long after I was married."
+
+Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
+tapestried _causeuse_. The light from the lofty windows shattered on
+the prisms of her glittering chandeliers, and diffused itself over the
+paneled Loves and Graces around her.
+
+"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out
+and do something for myself--I've always tried to hold up my own end.
+My little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback--another
+school next door, full of great rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
+and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
+stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught
+book-keeping. Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I
+used to lie awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival
+institution. Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or
+three children who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to
+work on single entry. I don't know whether they learned anything, but
+_I_ did--enough to keep Granger's books for the first year after we
+started out."
+
+Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
+confidences as these.
+
+"We were married at the most fashionable church in town--right there
+in Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like
+it, in her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves,
+but we had some awfully stylish neighbors--all those Terrace Row
+people, just around the corner. 'We'll get there too, sometime,' I
+said to Granger. 'This is going to be a big town, and we have a good
+show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars
+going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the
+front steps and ring the bell _like_ somebody.' So, as I say, we were
+married at the best church in town; we thought it safe enough to
+discount the future."
+
+"Good for you," said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick
+of these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."
+
+"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
+Granger:--'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
+those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out
+some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--'
+The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this
+room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people.
+You ought to have been here at the _bal poudre_ I gave last
+season--lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on
+their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this."
+Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor.
+"The next thing will be something else."
+
+Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
+"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
+distinguished guests."
+
+"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it
+isn't Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example."
+
+The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
+each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
+half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
+fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment,
+broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
+Baroque all over."
+
+"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read
+about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last
+Fortnightly?"
+
+"I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly.
+
+"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
+awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind
+that day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or
+so we thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made
+me blue. You didn't notice it?"
+
+"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."
+
+"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to
+it; it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you
+think them corrupt and degraded?"
+
+"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
+forms are interesting from a historical and sociological point of
+view. And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter."
+Jane slid over these big words with a practiced ease.
+
+"They impressed my notables, any way," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
+entertained a good deal during the Fair--it was expected, of course,
+from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
+without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince--a
+Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
+blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
+English too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
+summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea
+that he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the
+English, isn't it? How can people who are so clever and capable in
+practical things ever be such insolent tom-fools in social things?
+Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture gallery for a
+minute.
+
+"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
+she stood beside Jane in the centre of the room under the coldly
+diffused glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt
+and De Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon
+as I began to hear about the Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw
+there was. Well, I set to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I
+_want_ to learn. I want to move; I want to keep right up with the
+times and the people. I got books and photographs, and I went to all
+the galleries. I read the artists' biographies and took in all the
+loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too. Some of these things are going
+to the Art Institute next week--that Daubigny, for one. It's little,
+but it's good: there couldn't be anything more like him, could there?
+
+"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
+Corot--at least we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
+commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
+minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
+ahead; for after all, people of our position would naturally be
+expected to have a Corot. I don't care to tell you what he paid for
+it."...
+
+"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
+towards the opposite wall. "Carolus Duran; fifty thousand francs; and
+he wouldn't let me pick out my own costume either....
+
+"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too
+dazed to speak or even to smile.
+
+Mrs. Bates hastened forward light-footedly. "Conservatory--_that's_
+Moorish," she indicated casually; "nothing in it but orchids and
+things. Come along." Jane followed--dumbly, humbly.
+
+Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase
+of Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern
+depended above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over
+the balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted
+window on the landing-stage.
+
+"There!" she said, "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
+impassioned splendor, her jeweled fingers shut tightly, and her fists
+thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
+"_We_ did it, we two--just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands
+and hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight--a fair
+field and no favor--and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay
+there too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you
+can. I _do_ head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't
+foot it with the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have
+me. But they'll never get me--never! There's ten more good years in me
+yet; and if we were to slip to the bottom to-morrow we should work
+back to the top again before we finish. When I led the grand march at
+the Charity Ball I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a
+vainglorious show. Well, who would look better in such a role than I,
+or who has earned a better right to play it? There, child! ain't that
+success? ain't that glory? ain't that poetry?--h'm," she broke off
+suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't by to hear that! He's always taking
+up his poor mother."
+
+"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded, do you mean?"
+
+"Humble-minded? one of my boys humble-minded? No indeed; he's
+grammatical, that's all: he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."
+
+Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several
+halls and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and
+spacious room done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier
+wires mingled with pipes, and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a
+massive brass bedstead full-panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases,
+and the mirror of the dressing-case reflected a formal row of
+silver-backed brushes and combs.
+
+"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"
+
+"Why," stammered Jane, "it's all very fine, but--"
+
+"Oh, yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen
+times: 'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like.
+_I_ shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"
+
+"About," said Jane.
+
+"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon
+think of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in;
+it's for the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there
+now."
+
+Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
+it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her
+mussy little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman,"
+she murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano;
+she doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any
+sleep out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the
+next stage of her adventure.
+
+"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side door....
+"This is my office." She traversed the "office," passed into a room
+beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door....
+
+The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
+great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she
+understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what
+footing she had been placed.
+
+She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was
+filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old
+mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to
+correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid
+was lined with faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was
+an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare
+as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose
+plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with
+narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose
+top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung
+a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and
+loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal
+fire.
+
+Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed, and motioned Jane to a
+small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.
+
+"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at
+your service."
+
+"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
+was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."
+
+"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a
+charity. You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond."
+Her eyes were twinkling, but immensely kind.
+
+"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt too
+that not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber.
+"How good you are to me!"
+
+Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
+small plan. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
+Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of club-room in
+some convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and
+others employed in business. There was to be a room where they could
+get lunch, or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor
+where they could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or
+music; it was the expectation to have a piano and a few books and
+magazines.
+
+"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down
+on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
+mother," concluded Jane.
+
+"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
+Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
+hair-brush."
+
+Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?"
+she asked, "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
+see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords,
+but simple catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
+anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use
+a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."...
+
+She dropped her voice.
+
+"Did you ever have a private secretary?"
+
+"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."
+
+"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever
+change--no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters
+and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards.
+Tutors are bad enough--but thank goodness, my boys are past that age.
+And men-servants are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own
+house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my
+train; however, people in our position--well, Granger insists, you
+know."...
+
+"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?"
+She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row
+of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft.
+
+"Asters?"
+
+"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're
+chrysanthemums--you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're
+the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and
+American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass?
+How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of
+gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the
+steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what
+I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up
+strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford
+it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and
+bachelor's-buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls can run
+their clothes-lines somewhere else."
+
+"It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane.
+
+"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in
+the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
+yellow brier roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And
+it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
+child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"
+
+"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.
+
+"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket
+and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of
+yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all
+I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the
+wall-paper."
+
+"The wall-paper?"
+
+"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
+when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
+match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second street. Then I went
+down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West
+Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of
+the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville,
+and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"
+
+"Well, what--finally?"
+
+"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
+chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
+than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"
+
+She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
+cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too
+quaintly ugly for anything?"
+
+"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can
+be! I only wish mine was like it."
+
+
+
+
+SARAH MARGARET FULLER
+
+(MARCHIONESS OSSOLI)
+
+(1810-1850)
+
+[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]
+
+
+"Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art,
+and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote
+Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should
+always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under
+the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so
+live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not
+regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her....
+It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right
+to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any
+other." In the coolest way she said to her friends:--
+
+    "I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the
+    more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or
+    guards, still a queen....In near eight years' experience I
+    have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great
+    talent at explanation.... But in truth I have not much to
+    say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find
+    that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet
+    learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have
+    done in life has been to form my character to a certain
+    consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth
+    with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look
+    at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was
+    worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on
+    talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
+    know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact
+    and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in
+    conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts.
+    They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they
+    tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart
+    hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak
+    points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
+    when we come to write, and without suggestion from another
+    mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in
+    us.... Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better,
+    because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship
+    to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but
+    never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel
+    inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow within me, I
+    am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought
+    into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
+    seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible
+    for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force
+    to be either a genius or a character. One should be either
+    private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood
+    is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At
+    hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle."
+
+All these naive confessions were made, it must be remembered,
+either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
+fear of misinterpretation.
+
+This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport,
+Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
+Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
+lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
+never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
+which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.
+
+    "He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as
+    early as possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical
+    sketch. "Thus I had tasks given me, as many and as various as
+    the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with
+    the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening
+    after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many
+    interruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he
+    was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his
+    ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till
+    the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
+    bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally
+    stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of
+    the brain that made me a 'youthful prodigy' by day, and by
+    night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
+    somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious
+    development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while
+    later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous
+    affections of all kinds.... I was taught Latin and English
+    grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six
+    years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily....
+    Of the Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the
+    sounds told the same story as the mythology; that the law of
+    life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern
+    composure.... With these books I passed my days. The great
+    amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
+    reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling
+    which under other circumstances might have ripened thought,
+    was turned to learn the thoughts of others."
+
+By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
+herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
+Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the
+great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
+1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.
+
+    "I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first
+    half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six
+    years old. She had a face and a frame that would indicate
+    fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the
+    middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair
+    hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
+    dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her
+    appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme
+    plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her
+    eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice,--all repelled; and I
+    said to myself, 'We shall never get far.' It is to be said
+    that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most
+    persons, including those who became afterwards her best
+    friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in
+    the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her
+    manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and
+    slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her
+    fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
+    to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
+    many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."
+
+In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston,
+continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
+but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
+on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
+women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
+reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
+this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
+a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she
+published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
+and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fraeulein Guenerode and Bettine
+von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
+England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
+and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling
+of the spirit in each soul,--an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
+pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
+the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
+to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
+Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
+two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.
+
+Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
+of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment
+which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
+found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
+classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder,
+nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
+'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
+being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia."
+
+Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844)led Horace Greeley to
+offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Tribune.
+It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
+interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment
+authoritative. The best of her contributions to that journal were
+published, with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under
+the title of 'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).
+
+In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed and
+written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps, the
+most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy in
+1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republican
+ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her
+husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while he
+was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their baby
+in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the siege
+of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hospital of the
+Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when Lowell was
+satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,'" says Mr. Higginson, "she
+was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century
+before." Her Southern nature and her longing for action and love had
+found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and son from
+Leghorn for America. But the vessel was wrecked off Fire Island within
+a day's sail of home and friends, and, save the body of her child and
+a trunk of water-soaked papers, the sea swallowed up all remnants of
+the happiness of her later life.
+
+The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of letters
+about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to have
+possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
+intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
+so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
+self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
+as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in
+which she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
+egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life and
+movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and husband,
+and their child. And then she died.
+
+The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has found
+expression in three notable biographies: 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
+Ossoli,' by her brother; 'Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson ('American Men of Letters Series'); and 'Margaret Fuller
+(Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe ('Eminent Women Series').
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+TO ELIZABETH HOAR
+
+From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1847
+
+
+You wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris, "Madame
+Sand." I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I
+had supposed it might be exaggerated....
+
+It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters,
+and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant
+whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by
+the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only
+lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my
+natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who
+am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my
+thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.
+
+The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a
+peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her goddaughter, whom
+she had brought from her province. She announced me as "Madame
+Salere," and returned into the ante-room to tell me, "Madame says she
+does not know you." I began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the
+crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if
+she has received a letter from me." As I spoke Madame Sand opened the
+door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall
+forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her
+figure; she is large but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of
+dark-violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful
+hair dressed with the greatest taste; her whole appearance and
+attitude, in its simple and ladylike dignity, presented an almost
+ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her
+face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper
+part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and
+masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but
+not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the
+whole head Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on
+one side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what fixed
+my attention was the expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power
+that pervaded the whole,--the truly human heart and nature that shone
+in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est vous," and held out her
+hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment;
+then I said, "Il me fait de bien de vous voir," and I am sure I said
+it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman,
+so large and so developed in character, and everything that _is_ good
+in it so _really_ good. I loved, shall always love her.
+
+She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez ecrit une lettre
+charmante." This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went
+on as if we had always known one another.... Her way of talking is
+just like her writing,--lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep
+feeling, and the same happiness in striking the nail on the head every
+now and then with a blow.... I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich,
+so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very
+much; I never liked a woman better.... For the rest, she holds her
+place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems
+full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but
+she has also enjoyed and done much.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE
+
+From 'At Home and Abroad'
+
+
+The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more
+American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although
+we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe
+as to literature and the arts is still that of a colony, and one feels
+the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to
+the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote
+allusions and derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the
+stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing
+up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
+dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through
+the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant _valets
+de place_, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country,
+and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no
+more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,--lifts some mists
+from his horizon.
+
+There are three species: First, the servile American,--a being utterly
+shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money
+and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable
+clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and
+furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among
+those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance
+at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,--a class
+which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive
+classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric
+feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However,
+though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and
+cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our
+country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws
+develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
+
+Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and
+proud of--he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history
+of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it
+requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.
+With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he
+seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his
+grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came,
+and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old
+things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they
+are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
+ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,--and no wonder, profoundly
+ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends
+which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are
+represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed,
+such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the
+Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite
+sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the
+rules of connoisseurs,--not feeling that to see such objects mental
+vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed
+at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This
+is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
+enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a meaning;
+add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of
+might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy
+of the class first specified.
+
+The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking
+special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of
+these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to
+speak.
+
+This is that of the thinking American,--a man who, recognizing the
+immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil,
+yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to
+gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new
+climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom
+and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from
+noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And
+that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in
+that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.
+
+The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and
+little,--such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some
+brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of men beneath the
+feet of a few, and these too often the least worthy; such a small drop
+of honey to each cup of gall, and in many cases so mingled that it is
+never one moment in life purely tasted; above all, so little achieved
+for humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening
+to blot out the traces of each triumph,--that no wonder if the
+strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many
+indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes.
+Yes! those men _are_ worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
+faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
+agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul
+worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next
+sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous
+love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened
+the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some
+such there are; and feeling that, with all the excuses for failure,
+still only the sight of those who triumph gives a meaning to life or
+makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.
+
+
+
+
+A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE
+
+LETTER TO R. W. EMERSON
+
+From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1846
+
+
+I enjoyed the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much in my
+element in European society. It does not indeed come up to my ideal,
+but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me
+in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not
+like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water....
+
+Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the
+Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and appointed an evening
+to be passed at their house. That first time I was delighted with him.
+He was in a very sweet humor,--full of wit and pathos, without being
+overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow
+of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal
+being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I
+wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full
+sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad.
+He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my
+position, so that I did not get tired. That evening he talked of the
+present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of
+the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely
+stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you
+he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a
+story of some poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday
+lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits
+reading the 'Essays' and looking upon the sea....
+
+The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which was a witty,
+French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author of a 'History of
+Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe, a task for which he
+must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him.
+But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt
+Carlyle a little,--of which one was glad, for that night he was in his
+acrid mood; and though much more brilliant than on the former evening,
+grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he
+said....
+
+Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings,
+his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced
+with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the
+usual misfortune of such marked men,--happily not one invariable or
+inevitable,--that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and
+show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and
+instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience
+of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all
+opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in
+their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical
+superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a
+torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow
+freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly
+resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed
+to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows
+not how to stop in the chase.
+
+Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there
+is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old
+Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse
+that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than
+talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem,
+with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning,
+some singular epithet which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is
+full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the
+stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the
+higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject
+is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to
+laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the
+spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact,
+if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to
+others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of
+pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view,
+and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak
+more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to
+blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful,
+if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than
+legislate for good.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS FULLER
+
+(1608-1661)
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER]
+
+
+The fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller seems
+blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet and happy
+spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of Shakespeare and his
+brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine. In Fuller the
+world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes urbanity, the
+mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well satisfied with the
+kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity and the eternal
+problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of England clergyman,
+was no less a cavalier at heart than the most jaunty follower of King
+Charles. He had not the intensity of nature which characterizes the
+theologian by the grace of God. His 'Holy and Profane State,' his
+'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,'
+evidence a comfortable and reasonable reliance on the Unseen; but they
+will not be read for their spiritual insight so much as for their
+well-seasoned and delightful English. That quaint and fragrant style
+of his lends charm even to those passages in which his thought is
+commonplace.
+
+It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that posterity
+recognizes a man of marked intellectual power. His scholarship is
+exhibited in such a work as the 'Church History of Britain'; his
+peculiar faculty for happy description in the 'Worthies of England.'
+Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of his
+own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island; his
+love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same year
+as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyman of the same name as his own,
+he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men and things.
+His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.
+
+His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded him
+opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of his
+day, and especially with its "gentry." By birth, education, and
+inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
+the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death he
+has devoted the last volume of his great work, the 'History of the
+Church of Britain.' Under the Protectorate, the genial priest and man
+of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like many others in
+Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puritan authorities,
+but was permitted to preach again in London by the grace of Cromwell.
+He was subsequently appointed chaplain to Charles II., but did not
+live long after the Restoration, dying of a fever in 1661.
+
+An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
+written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was not
+inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back always to
+the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact which
+gives their permanent value to the 'History of the Church of Britain'
+and to the 'History of the Holy War.' These works bear witness to wide
+and patient research, to a thorough sifting of material. The
+antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its scholarly
+dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the 'Worthies
+of England.' Fuller's other writings may be of more intrinsic value,
+but it is through the 'Worthies' that he is remembered and loved. The
+book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an ancient flower garden,
+where blooms of every sort grow in lavish tangle. He considers the
+counties of England, one by one, telling of their physical
+characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of the princely
+children born in them, of the other "Worthies"--scholars, soldiers,
+and saints--who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller gathered his
+material for this variegated record from every quarter of his beloved
+little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he had many
+opportunities of visiting places and studying their people. As an
+incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ramblings of the
+old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering in their talk
+some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit of folk-lore.
+He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely families as
+familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk. Sometimes an
+exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as in this, of
+the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I.:--
+
+    She was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her
+    infancy, when not fully four years old. Being minded by those
+    about her to call upon God even when the pangs of death were
+    upon her, "I am not able," saith she, "to say my long prayer"
+    (meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I will say my short one,
+    'Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of
+    death.'" This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.
+
+Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be numbered
+among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the world of
+letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of their
+readers.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S CHILDREN
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+Katherine, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen Mary, was
+born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being at St. James), and
+survived not above half an hour after her baptizing; so that it is
+charity to mention her, whose memory is likely to be lost, so short
+her continuance in this life,--the rather because her name is not
+entered, as it ought, into the register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields;
+as indeed none of the King's children, save Prince Charles, though
+they were born in that parish. And hereupon a story depends.
+
+I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of kings born
+at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were ever faithfully
+paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record the names of such
+children in the register of St. Martin's. But the money being
+embezzled (we know by some, God knows by whom), no memorial is entered
+of them. Sad that bounty should betray any to baseness, and that which
+was intended to make them the more solemnly remembered should occasion
+that they should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the
+children of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children
+are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to them;"
+for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the cause that we have
+been so often at a loss about the nativities and other properties of
+those of royal extraction.
+
+
+
+
+A LEARNED LADY
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+Margaret More.--Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among men and
+learned statesmen. The reason is because of her unfeigned affection to
+her father, from whom she would not willingly be parted (and from me
+shall not be), either living or dead.
+
+She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's house therein,
+and attained to that skill in all learning and languages that she
+became the miracle of her age. Foreigners took such notice thereof
+that Erasmus hath dedicated some epistles unto her. No woman that
+could speak so well did speak so little; whose secrecy was such, that
+her father intrusted her with his most important affairs.
+
+Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a depraved place
+in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written "Nisi vos sinceritas"
+she amended it "Nervos sinceritas." Yea, she translated Eusebius out
+of Greek; but it was never printed, because J. Christopherson had done
+it so exactly before.
+
+She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire, one of a
+bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's head was set
+up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would be cast into the
+Thames to make room for divers others (then suffering for denying the
+King's supremacy), she bought the head and kept it for a relic (which
+some called affection, others religion, others superstition in her),
+for which she was questioned before the Council, and for some short
+time imprisoned until she had buried it; and how long she herself
+survived afterwards is to me unknown.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+It happened in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle
+fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and
+Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex, _animum et signum simul
+abjecit_,--betwixt traitor and coward,--cast away both his courage and
+banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that
+had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny, the doing of so foul
+a fact, until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a
+knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon
+his large inheritance was confiscated to the King, and he himself,
+partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl,
+under which, between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder
+of his life.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER
+
+From 'The Holy and Profane State'
+
+
+There is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more necessary,
+which is so slightly performed. The reasons whereof I conceive to be
+these: First, young scholars make this calling their refuge; yea,
+perchance before they have taken any degree in the university,
+commence schoolmasters in the country, as if nothing else were
+required to set up this profession but only a rod and a ferula.
+Secondly, others who are able use it only as a passage to better
+preferment, to patch the rents in their present fortune, till they can
+provide a new one and betake themselves to some more gainful calling.
+Thirdly, they are disheartened from doing their best with the
+miserable reward which in some places they receive, being masters to
+their children and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown
+rich, they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the
+proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves
+himself....
+
+He studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were books, and
+ranks their dispositions into several forms. And though it may seem
+difficult for him in a great school to descend to all particulars, yet
+experienced schoolmasters may quickly make a grammar of boys' natures,
+and reduce them all--saving some few exceptions--to these general
+rules:--
+
+1. Those that are ingenious and industrious. The conjunction of two
+such planets in a youth presages much good unto him. To such a lad a
+frown may be a whipping, and a whipping a death; yea, where their
+master whips them once, shame whips them all the week after. Such
+natures he useth with all gentleness.
+
+2. Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the hare in
+the fable, that running with snails--so they count the rest of their
+schoolfellows--they shall come soon enough to the post, though
+sleeping a good while before their starting. Oh! a good rod would
+finely take them napping!
+
+3. Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger they be, the
+more lees they have when they are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till
+they be clarified with age, and such afterwards prove the best.
+Bristol diamonds are both bright, and squared, and pointed by nature,
+and yet are soft and worthless; whereas Orient ones in India are rough
+and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit
+themselves afterwards the jewels of the country, and therefore their
+dullness at first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The
+schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy
+for a fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world can
+make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one minute before
+the hour Nature hath appointed.
+
+4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correction may
+reform the latter, not amend the former. All the whetting in the world
+can never set a razor's edge on that which hath no steel in it. Such
+boys he consigneth over to other professions. Shipwrights and
+boat-makers will choose those crooked pieces of timber which other
+carpenters refuse. Those may make excellent merchants and mechanics
+who will not serve for scholars.
+
+He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not leading them
+rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his precepts for children
+to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness of his own soul, that his
+scholars may go along with him.
+
+
+
+
+ON BOOKS
+
+From 'The Holy and Profane State'
+
+
+It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by getting
+a great library. As soon shall I believe every one is valiant that
+hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good housekeeping by the
+smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as knowing that many of
+them--built merely for uniformity--are without chimneys, and more
+without fires.
+
+Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first,
+voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over;
+secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions;
+thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on
+them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of
+the index sees as much as if he were in the house. But the laziness of
+those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass over authors of
+consequence, and only trade in their tables and contents. These, like
+city cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make
+silly people believe they have long lived in those places where they
+never were, and flourish with skill in those authors they never
+seriously studied.
+
+
+
+
+LONDON
+
+From 'The Worthies of England'
+
+
+It is the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first for
+good government. There is no civilized part of the world but it has
+heard thereof, though many with this mistake: that they conceive
+London to be the country and England but the city therein.
+
+Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, because of
+late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in buildings, Covent
+Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their fear) it will be
+found to burnish round about with new structures daily added
+thereunto.
+
+It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the
+well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant
+rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but
+employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to commerce, by
+the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was that when King
+James, offended with the city, threatened to remove his court to
+another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough) returned that "he might
+remove his court at his pleasure, but could not remove the river
+Thames."
+
+Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of Rhodes;
+averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and customs of the
+Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no doubt knew of it)
+honoreth not this his etymology with the least mention thereof. As
+improbable in my apprehension is the deduction from Lud's-Town,--town
+being a Saxon, not British termination; and that it was so termed from
+Lan Dian, a temple of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is
+most likely in my opinion.
+
+
+
+
+MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS
+
+
+It is dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the pit of
+hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with the Devil's
+rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword; and from making
+of sport they come to doing of mischief.
+
+A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from them who
+never invited it.
+
+Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their power
+to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own crutches.
+
+Learning has gained most by those books by which the printers have
+lost.
+
+Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all
+virtues.
+
+To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less
+are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
+
+The lion is not so fierce as painted.
+
+... Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room for wit;
+sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much room.
+
+Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built many
+stories high.
+
+The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of
+their founders.
+
+... One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue must be
+confuted by his conscience.
+
+But our captain counts the image of God--nevertheless his image--cut
+in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest Moors he sees the
+representation of the King of Heaven.
+
+
+
+
+EMILE GABORIAU
+
+(1835-1873)
+
+
+To speak of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He cannot be
+called the father of it; but the French novelist made his field so
+peculiarly his own, developed its type of human nature so
+painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation associated with it,
+that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to have outrivaled
+him.
+
+Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inferieure, in 1835,
+Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into three
+or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul together;
+and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the private
+secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Feval. His first successful
+story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It was 'The
+Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper circumstances
+find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute
+Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the
+fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to
+another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous
+success.
+
+From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In
+rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No.
+113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M. Lecoq'
+(1869),--in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of
+almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or
+five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every
+modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau
+a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable
+literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
+in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.
+
+Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
+plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in a
+large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and
+purposes the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
+that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The
+unfolding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family
+secret, of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
+The secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it
+the reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's
+novels have often been spoken of as "told backward." Most of the
+novels too gain their movement from one source--the wonderful
+shrewdness and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective
+service. M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and
+wonderfully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of
+episodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
+Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
+stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the
+family likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked
+abuses with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of
+Paris' and other books where he has set forth the merciless system of
+private blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.
+
+As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first order,
+even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write; and there
+is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is much to his
+credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced his work, and
+the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his profession.
+He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent. He has been
+criticized for making his denouements too simple, if one regards them
+as a whole process; but his details are full of variety, and the
+reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on the
+author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of the
+first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels is one
+of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113.'
+
+
+
+
+THE IMPOSTOR AND THE BANKER'S WIFE: THE ROBBERY
+
+From 'File No. 113'
+
+
+Raoul Spencer, supposed to be Raoul de Clameran, began to triumph over
+his instincts of revolt. He ran to the door and rang the bell. It
+opened.
+
+"Is my aunt at home?" he asked the footman.
+
+"Madame is alone in the boudoir next her room," replied the servant.
+
+Raoul ascended.
+
+Clameran had said to Raoul, "Above all, be careful about your
+entrance; your appearance must express everything, and thus you will
+avoid impossible explanations."
+
+The suggestion was useless.
+
+When Raoul entered the little reception-room, his pale face and wild
+eyes frightened Madame Fauvel, who cried:--
+
+"Raoul! What has happened to you?"
+
+The sound of her gentle voice produced upon the young vagrant the
+effect of an electric shock. He trembled from head to foot: yet his
+mind was clear; Louis had not been mistaken in him. Raoul continued
+his role as if on the stage, and as assurance came to him his knavery
+crushed his better nature.
+
+"Mother, the misfortune which has come to me," he replied, "is the
+last one."
+
+Madame Fauvel had never seen him like this. Trembling with emotion,
+she rose and stood before him, with her tender face near his. She
+fixed in a steady gaze the power of her will, as if she meant to read
+the depths of his soul.
+
+"What is it?" she insisted. "Raoul, my son, tell me."
+
+He pushed her gently away.
+
+"What has happened," he replied in a choked voice which pierced the
+heart of Madame Fauvel, "proves that I am unworthy of you, unworthy of
+my noble and generous father."
+
+She moved her head in protestation.
+
+"Ah!" he continued, "I know and judge myself. No one could reproach my
+own infamous conduct so cruelly as my own conscience. I was not born
+wicked, but I am a miserable fool. I have hours when, as if in a
+vertigo, I do not know what I am doing. Ah! I should not have been
+like this, mother, if you had been with me in my childhood. But
+brought up among strangers, and left to myself without any guides but
+my own instincts, I am at the mercy of my own passions. Possessing
+nothing, not even my stolen name, I am vain and devoured by ambition.
+Poor and without resources but your help, I have the tastes and vices
+of a millionaire's son. Alas! when I recovered you, the harm was done.
+Your affection, your maternal tenderness which have given me my only
+days of happiness, could not save me. I who have suffered so much, who
+have endured so many privations, who have known hunger, have been
+spoiled by this new luxury with which you have surrounded me. I threw
+myself into pleasure as a drunkard rushes for the strong drink of
+which he has been deprived."
+
+Raoul expressed himself with such intense conviction and assurance
+that Madame Fauvel did not interrupt.
+
+Mute and terrified, she dared not question him, fearful of learning
+some horrible news.
+
+He however continued:--"Yes, I have been a fool. Happiness has passed
+by me, and I did not know enough to stretch out my hand to take it. I
+have rejected an exquisite reality for the pursuit of a phantom. I,
+who should have spent my life by your side and sought constantly for
+new proofs of my love and gratitude, I, a dark shadow, give you a
+cruel stab, cause you sorrow, and render you the most unfortunate of
+beings. Ah! what a brute I have been! For the sake of a creature whom
+I should despise, I have thrown to the wind a fortune whose every
+piece of gold has cost you a tear! With you lies happiness. I know it
+too late."
+
+He stopped, overcome by the thought of his evil conduct, ready to
+burst into tears.
+
+"It is never too late to repent, my son," murmured Madame Fauvel, "and
+redeem your wrong."
+
+"Ah, if I could!" cried Raoul; "but no, it is too late. Who knows how
+long my good resolutions will last? It is not only to-day that I have
+condemned myself without pity. Seized by remorse at each new failure,
+I have sworn to regain my self-respect. Alas! to what has my
+periodical repentance amounted? At the first new temptation I forget
+my remorse and my oaths. You consider me a man: I am only an unstable
+child. I am weak and cowardly, and you are not strong enough to
+dominate my weakness and control my vacillating character. I have the
+best intentions in the world, yet my actions are those of a scoundrel.
+The gap between my position and my nature is too wide for me to
+reconcile them. Who knows where my deplorable character may lead me?"
+
+He gave a gesture expressing recklessness, and added, "I myself will
+bring justice upon myself."
+
+Madame Fauvel was too deeply agitated to follow Raoul's sudden moods.
+
+"Speak!" she cried; "explain yourself. Am I not your mother? You must
+tell me the truth; I must hear all."
+
+He appeared to hesitate, as if he feared to give so terrible a shock
+to his mother. Finally, in a hollow voice he said, "I am ruined!"
+
+"Ruined!"
+
+"Yes, and I have nothing more to wait for nor to hope for. I am
+dishonored, and through my own fault, my own grievous fault!"
+
+"Raoul!"
+
+"It is true. But fear not, mother; I will not drag the name that you
+bestowed upon me in the dirt. I have the vulgar courage not to survive
+my dishonor. Go, waste no sympathy on me. I am one of those creatures
+of destiny who have no refuge save death. I am the victim of fate.
+Have you not been forced to deny my birth? Did not the memory of me
+haunt you and deprive your nights of sleep? And now, having found you,
+in exchange for your devotion I bring into your life a bitter curse."
+
+"Ungrateful child! Have I ever reproached you?"
+
+"Never. And therefore with your blessing, and with your loved name on
+his lips, your Raoul will--die!"
+
+"Die? You?"
+
+"Yes, mother: honor bids it. I am condemned by inexorable judges--my
+will and my conscience."
+
+An hour earlier Madame Fauvel would have sworn that Raoul had made her
+suffer all that a woman could endure; and now he had brought her a new
+grief so acute that the former ones seemed naught in comparison.
+
+"What have you done?" she stammered.
+
+"Money was intrusted to me. I played, and lost it."
+
+"Was it a large amount?"
+
+"No, but neither you nor I can replace it. Poor mother, have I not
+taken everything from you? Haven't you given me your last jewel?"
+
+"But M. De Clameran is rich; he has put his fortune at my disposal. I
+will order the carriage and go to him."
+
+"M. De Clameran, mother, is absent for eight days; and I must have the
+money to-night, or I am lost. Go! I have thought of everything before
+deciding. But one loves life at twenty!"
+
+He drew a pistol half out of his pocket, saying with a grim smile,
+"This will arrange everything."
+
+Madame Fauvel was too unnerved in reflecting upon the horror of the
+conduct of the supposed Raoul de Clameran to fancy that this last wild
+menace was but a means for obtaining money.
+
+Forgetting the past, ignoring the future, and concentrating her
+thought on the present situation, she saw but one thing--that her son
+was about to kill himself, and that she was powerless to arrest his
+suicide.
+
+"Wait, wait," she said; "Andre will soon return, and I will tell him
+that I have need of--How much did you lose?"
+
+"Thirty thousand francs."
+
+"You shall have them to-morrow."
+
+"I must have them to-night."
+
+She seemed to be going mad; she wrung her hands in despair.
+
+"To-night!" she said: "why didn't you come sooner? Do you lack
+confidence in me? To-night there is no one to open the safe--without
+that--"
+
+The expectant Raoul caught the word. He gave an exclamation of joy, as
+if a light had broken upon his dark despair.
+
+"The safe!" he cried; "do you know where the key is?"
+
+"Yes, it is here."
+
+"Thank heaven!"
+
+He looked at Madame Fauvel with such a demoniacal glance that she
+dropped her eyes.
+
+"Give it to me, mother," he entreated.
+
+"Miserable boy!"
+
+"It is life that I ask of you."
+
+This prayer decided her. Taking a candle, she stepped quickly into her
+room, opened the writing-desk, and there found M. Fauvel's own key.
+
+But as she was handing it to Raoul, reason returned.
+
+"No," she murmured; "no, it is impossible."
+
+He did not insist, and indeed seemed willing to retire.
+
+"Ah, well!" he said. "Then, my mother, one last kiss."
+
+She stopped him:--"What will you do with the key, Raoul? Have you also
+the secret word?"
+
+"No, but I can try."
+
+"You know there is never money in the safe."
+
+"Let us try. If I open it by a miracle, and if there is money in the
+box, then I shall believe that God has taken pity upon us."
+
+"And if you do not succeed? Then will you swear that you will wait
+until to-morrow?"
+
+"Upon the memory of my father, I swear it."
+
+"Then here is the key! Come." ...
+
+They had now reached Prosper's office, and Raoul had placed the lamp
+on a high shelf, from which point it lighted the entire room. He had
+recovered all of his self-possession, or rather that peculiar
+mechanical precision of action which seems to be independent of the
+will, and which men accustomed to peril always find at their service
+in times of pressing need. Rapidly, and with the dexterity of
+experience, he placed the five buttons of the iron box upon the
+letters forming the name g,y,p,s,y. His expression during this short
+performance was one of intense anxiety. He began to fear that the
+excited energy which he had summoned might fail him, and also that if
+he did open the box he might not find the hoped-for sum. Prosper might
+have changed the letters, and he might have been sent to the bank that
+day.
+
+Madame Fauvel watched Raoul with pathetic distress. She read in his
+wild eyes that despair of the unfortunate, who so passionately desire
+a result that they fancy their unassisted will can overcome all
+obstacles.
+
+Being intimate with Prosper, and having frequently watched him close
+the office, Raoul knew perfectly well--indeed, he had made it a study
+and attempted it himself, for he was a far-seeing youth--how to
+manipulate the key in the lock.
+
+He inserted it gently, turned it, pushed it in deeper, and turned it
+again, then he pushed it in with a violent shock and turned it once
+more. His heart beat so loudly that Madame Fauvel could hear it.
+
+The word had not been changed: the box opened.
+
+Raoul and his mother uttered cries--hers of terror, his of triumph.
+
+"Shut it!" screamed Madame Fauvel, frightened at this inexplicable and
+incomprehensible result; "leave it--come!"
+
+And half mad, she threw herself upon Raoul, clinging to his arm in
+desperation and drawing him to her with such violence that the key was
+dragged from the lock and along the door of the coffer, leaving a long
+and deep mark.
+
+But Raoul had had time to notice upon the upper shelf of the box three
+bundles of bank-notes. These he quickly snatched with his left hand,
+slipped them under his coat and placed them between his waistcoat and
+shirt.
+
+Exhausted by her efforts, and yielding to the violence of her
+emotions, Madame Fauvel dropped Raoul's arm, and to avoid falling,
+supported herself on the back of Prosper's arm-chair.
+
+"I implore you, Raoul," she said, "I beseech you to put those
+bank-notes back in the box. I shall have money to-morrow, I swear it
+to you a hundred times over, and I will give it to you, my son. I beg
+you to take pity on your mother!"
+
+He paid no attention to her. He was examining the long scratch on the
+door. This mark of the theft was very convincing and disturbing.
+
+"At least," implored Madame Fauvel, "don't take all. Keep what you
+need to save yourself, and leave the rest."
+
+"What for? Would a balance make discovery less easy?"
+
+"Yes, because I--you see I can manage it. Let me arrange it! I can
+find an explanation! I will tell Andre that I needed money--"
+
+With precaution, Raoul closed the safe.
+
+"Come," he said to his mother, "let us leave, so that we may not be
+suspected. One of the servants might go to the drawing-room and be
+surprised not to find us there."
+
+His cruel indifference and cold calculation at such a moment filled
+Madame Fauvel with indignation. Yet she still hoped that she might
+influence her son. She still believed in the power of her entreaties
+and tears.
+
+"Ah me!" she said, "it might be as well! If they discover us, I care
+little or nothing. We are lost! Andre will drive me from the house, a
+miserable creature. But at least, I will not sacrifice the innocent.
+To-morrow Prosper will be accused. Clameran has taken from him the
+woman he loves, and you, now you will rob him of his honor. I will
+not."
+
+She spoke so loud and with such a penetrating voice that Raoul was
+alarmed. He knew that the office clerk slept in an adjoining room.
+Although it was not late, he might have gone to bed; and if so, he
+could hear every word.
+
+"Let us go," he said, seizing Madame Fauvel by the arm.
+
+But she resisted, and clung to a table, the better to resist.
+
+"I have been a coward to sacrifice Madeleine," she said quietly. "I
+will not sacrifice Prosper!"
+
+Raoul knew of a victorious argument which would break Madame Fauvel's
+resolution.
+
+"Ah!" he cried with a cynical laugh; "you do not know, then, that
+Prosper and I are in league, and that he shares my fate."
+
+"That is impossible."
+
+"What do you think? Do you imagine that it was chance which gave me
+the secret word and opened the box?"
+
+"Prosper is honest."
+
+"Of course, and so am I. But--we need the money."
+
+"You speak falsely!"
+
+"No, dear mother. Madeleine left Prosper, and--well, bless me! he has
+tried to console himself, the poor fellow; and such consolations are
+expensive."
+
+He had lifted the lamp; and gently but with much force pushed Madame
+Fauvel towards the staircase.
+
+She seemed to be more dumbfounded than when she saw the open safe.
+
+"What," she said, "Prosper a thief?"
+
+She asked herself if she were not the victim of a terrible nightmare;
+if an awakening would not rid her of this unspeakable torture. She
+could not control her thoughts, and mechanically, supported by Raoul,
+she placed her foot on the narrow stairs.
+
+"The key must be returned to the writing-desk," said Raoul, when they
+reached the bedroom.
+
+She appeared not to hear, and it was Raoul who replaced the key in the
+box from which he had seen her take it.
+
+He then led or rather carried Madame Fauvel to the little drawing-room
+where he had found her upon his arrival, and placed her in an
+easy-chair. The utter prostration of this unhappy woman, her fixed
+eyes, and her loss of expression, revealed only too well the agony of
+her mind. Raoul, frightened, asked if she had gone mad?
+
+"Come, mother dear," he said, as he tried to warm her icy hands, "come
+to yourself. You have saved my life, and we have both rendered a great
+service to Prosper. Fear nothing: all will come straight. Prosper will
+be accused, perhaps arrested. He expects that; but he will deny it,
+and as his guilt cannot be proved, he will be released."
+
+But his lies and his efforts were lost upon Madame Fauvel, who was too
+distracted to hear them.
+
+"Raoul," she murmured, "my son, you have killed me!"
+
+Her voice was so impressive in its sorrow, her tone was so tender in
+its despair, that Raoul was affected, and even decided to restore the
+stolen money. But the thought of Clameran returned.
+
+Then, noticing that Madame Fauvel remained in her chair, bewildered
+and as still as death, trembling at the thought that M. Fauvel or
+Madeleine might enter at any moment, he pressed a kiss upon his
+mother's forehead--and fled.
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+M. LECOQ'S SYSTEM
+
+From 'File No. 113'
+
+
+In the centre of a large and curiously furnished room, half library
+and half actor's study, was seated at a desk the same person wearing
+gold spectacles who had said at the police station to the accused
+cashier Prosper Bertomy, "Take courage!" This was M. Lecoq in his
+official character.
+
+Upon the entrance of Fanferlot, who advanced respectfully, curving his
+backbone as he bowed, M. Lecoq slightly lifted his head and laid down
+his pen, saying, "Ah! you have come at last, my boy! Well, you don't
+seem to be progressing with the Bertomy case."
+
+"Why, really," stammered Fanferlot, "you know--"
+
+"I know that you have muddled everything, until you are so blinded
+that you are ready to give over."
+
+"But master, it was not I--"
+
+M. Lecoq had arisen and was pacing the floor. Suddenly he stopped
+before Fanferlot, nicknamed "the Squirrel."
+
+"What do you think, Master Squirrel," he asked in a hard and ironical
+tone, "of a man who abuses the confidence of those who employ him, who
+reveals enough of what he has discovered to make the evidence
+misleading, and who betrays for the benefit of his foolish vanity the
+cause of justice--and an unhappy prisoner?"
+
+The frightened Fanferlot recoiled a step.
+
+"I should say," he began, "I should say--"
+
+"You think this man should be punished and dismissed; and you are
+right. The less a profession is honored, the more honorable should be
+those who follow it. You however are treacherous. Ah! Master Squirrel,
+we are ambitious, and we try to play the police in our own way! We let
+Justice wander where she will, while we search for other things. It
+takes a more cunning bloodhound than you, my boy, to hunt without a
+hunter and at his own risk."
+
+"But master, I swear--"
+
+"Be silent. Do you wish me to prove that you have told everything to
+the examining magistrate, as was your duty? Go to! While others were
+charging the cashier, _you_ informed against the banker! _You_ watched
+him; you became intimate with his _valet de chambre_!"
+
+Was M. Lecoq really in anger? Fanferlot, who knew him well, doubted it
+a little; but with this devil of a man one never quite knew how to
+take him.
+
+"If you were only clever," he continued, "but no! You wish to be a
+master, and you are not even a good workman."
+
+"You are right, master," said Fanferlot piteously, who could deny no
+longer. "But how could I work upon a business like this, when there
+was no trace, no mark, no sign, no conviction,--nothing, nothing?"
+
+M. Lecoq raised his shoulders.
+
+"Poor boy!" he said. "Know, then, that the day when you were summoned
+with the commissary to verify the robbery, you had--I will not say
+certainly but very probably--between your two large and stupid hands
+the means of knowing which key, the banker's or the cashier's, had
+been used in committing the theft."
+
+"What an idea!"
+
+"You want proof? Very well. Do you remember that mark which you
+observed on the side of the copper? It struck you, for you did not
+repress an exclamation when you saw it. You examined it carefully with
+a glass; and you were convinced that it was quite fresh, and therefore
+made recently. You said, and with reason, that this mark dated from
+the moment of the theft. But with what had it been made? With a key,
+evidently. That being the case, you should have demanded the keys of
+the banker and the cashier, and examined them attentively. One of
+these would have shown some atoms of the green paint with which a
+strong-box is usually coated."
+
+Fanferlot listened with open mouth to this explanation. At the last
+words, he slapped his forehead violently, and cried--of
+himself--"Imbecile!"
+
+"You are right," replied M. Lecoq--"imbecile. What! With such a guide
+before your eyes, you neglected it and drew no conclusion! This is the
+one clue to the affair. If I find the guilty one, it will be by means
+of this mark, and I will find him; I am determined to do it."
+
+When away from Lecoq, Fanferlot, nicknamed the Squirrel, often
+slandered and defied him; but in his presence he yielded to the
+magnetic influence which this extraordinary man exercised upon all who
+came near him.
+
+Such exact information and such minute details perplexed his mind.
+Where and how could M. Lecoq have gathered them?
+
+"You have been studying the case, master?"
+
+"Probably. But as I am not infallible, I may have let some valuable
+point escape me. Sit down, and tell me all that you know."
+
+One could not prevaricate with M. Lecoq. Therefore Fanferlot told the
+exact truth,--which was not his custom. However, before the end of his
+recital, his vanity prevented him from telling how he had been tricked
+by Mademoiselle Nina Gypsy and the stout gentleman.
+
+Unfortunately, M. Lecoq was never informed by halves.
+
+"It seems to me, Master Squirrel," he said, "that you have forgotten
+something. How far did you follow the empty cab?"
+
+Fanferlot, despite his assurance, blushed to his ears, and dropped his
+eyes like a schoolboy caught in a guilty act.
+
+"O patron," he stammered, "you know that too? How could you have--"
+
+Suddenly a thought flashed through his brain: he stopped, and bounding
+from his chair, cried, "Oh, I am sure--that stout gentleman with the
+red whiskers was you!"
+
+Fanferlot's surprise gave such a ridiculous expression to his face
+that M. Lecoq could not help smiling.
+
+"Then it _was_ you," continued the amazed detective, "it was you, that
+fat man at whom I stared. I did not recognize you! Ah, patron, what an
+actor you would make if you pleased! And _I_ was disguised also!"
+
+"But very poorly, my poor boy, I tell you for your own good. Do you
+think a heavy beard and a blouse sufficient to evade detection? But
+the eye, stupid fellow, the eye! It is the eye that must be changed.
+There is the secret."
+
+This theory of disguise explains why the official, lynx-like Lecoq
+never appeared at the police office without his gold spectacles.
+
+"But then, patron," continued Fanferlot, working out the idea, "you
+have made the little girl confess, although Madame Alexandre failed?
+You know then why she left 'The Grand-Archange'; why she did not wait
+for M. Louis de Clameran; and why she bought calico dresses for
+herself?"
+
+"She never acts without my instructions."
+
+"In this case," said the detective, greatly discouraged, "there is
+nothing more for me to do except acknowledge myself a fool."
+
+"No, Squirrel," replied M. Lecoq with kindness; "no, you are not a
+fool; you are simply wrong in undertaking a task beyond your powers.
+Have you made one progressive step since you began this case? No. This
+only proves that you are incomparable as a lieutenant, but that you
+have not the _sang-froid_ of a general. I will give you an aphorism;
+keep it, and make it a rule of conduct--'Some men may shine in the
+second who are eclipsed in the first rank.'"...
+
+Egotist, like all great artists, M. Lecoq had never had, nor did he
+wish to have, a pupil. He worked alone. He despised assistants; for he
+did not wish to share the pleasures of triumph nor the bitterness of
+defeat.
+
+Therefore Fanferlot, who knew his patron so well, was astonished to
+hear him, who had heretofore given nothing but orders, helping him
+with counsel.
+
+He was so mystified that he could not help showing his surprise.
+
+"It seems to me, patron," he risked saying, "that you take a strong
+personal interest in this case, that you study it so closely."
+
+M. Lecoq started nervously,--which motion escaped his detective,--and
+then, frowning, he said in a hard voice:--
+
+"It is your nature to be curious, Master Squirrel; but take care that
+you do not go too far. Do you understand?"
+
+Fanferlot began to offer excuses.
+
+"Enough! Enough!" interrupted M. Lecoq. "If I lend you a helping hand,
+it is because I wish to. I wish to be the head while you are the arm.
+Alone, with your preconceived ideas, you never would find the guilty
+one. If we two do not find him together, then I am not M. Lecoq."
+
+"We shall succeed, if you make it your business."
+
+"Yes, I am entangled in it, and during four days I have learned many
+things. However, keep this quiet. I have reasons for not being known
+in this case. Whatever happens, I forbid you to mention my name. If we
+succeed, the success must be given to you. And above all, do not seek
+explanations. Be satisfied with what I tell you."
+
+These charges seemed to fill Fanferlot with confidence.
+
+"I will be discreet, patron," he promised.
+
+"I depend upon you, my boy. To begin: Carry this photograph of the
+strong box to the examining magistrate. M. Patrigent, I know, is as
+perplexed as possible upon the subject of the prisoner. You must
+explain, as if it were your own discovery, what I have just shown you.
+When you repeat all this to him with these indications, I am sure he
+will release the cashier. Prosper Bertomy, the accused cashier, must
+be free before I begin my work."
+
+"I understand, patron. But shall I let M. Patrigent see that I suspect
+another than the banker or the cashier?"
+
+"Certainly. Justice demands that you follow up the case. M. Patrigent
+will charge you to watch Prosper; reply that you will not lose sight
+of him. I assure you that he will be in good hands."
+
+"And if he asks news of--Mademoiselle Gypsy?"
+
+M. Lecoq hesitated for a moment.
+
+"You will say to him," he said finally, "that you have decided, in the
+interest of Prosper, to place her in a house where she can watch some
+one whom you suspect."
+
+The joyous Fanferlot rolled the photograph, took his hat, and prepared
+to leave. M. Lecoq detained him by a gesture:--"I have not finished,"
+he said. "Do you know how to drive a carriage and take care of a
+horse?"
+
+"Why, patron, you ask me that--an old rider of the Bouthor Circus?"
+
+"Very well. As soon as the judge has dismissed you, return home, and
+prepare a wig and livery of a _valet de chambre_ of the first class;
+and having dressed, go with this letter to the Agency on the Rue
+Delorme."
+
+"But, patron--"
+
+"There are no 'buts,' my boy; for this agent will send you to M. Louis
+de Clameran, who needs a new _valet de chambre_, his own having left
+yesterday evening."
+
+"Excuse me if I dare say that you are deceived. Clameran will not
+agree to the conditions: he is no friend of the cashier."
+
+"How you always interrupt me," said M. Lecoq, in his most imperative
+tones. "Do only what I tell you, and let everything else alone. M.
+Clameran is not a friend to Prosper. I know that. But he is the friend
+and protector of Raoul de Lagors. Why? Who can explain the intimacy of
+these two men of such different ages? We must know this. We must also
+know who _is_ M. Louis de Clameran--this forge-master who lives in
+Paris and never goes to his own factories! A jolly dog who has taken
+it into his head to live at the Hotel du Louvre and who mingles in
+the whirling crowd, is difficult to watch. Through you, I shall have
+my eye on him. He has a carriage; you will drive it; and in the
+easiest way you will know his acquaintances, and be able to give me an
+account of his slightest proceedings."
+
+"You shall be obeyed, patron."
+
+"Still another word. M. De Clameran is very irritable and suspicious.
+You will be introduced to him as Joseph Dubois. He will ask for your
+recommendations. Here are three, showing that you have served the
+Marquis de Sairmeuse, the Count de Commarin, and your last place--the
+house of the Baron de Wortschen, who has just gone to Germany. Keep
+your eyes open, be correct, and watch his movements. Serve well, but
+without excess of manner. But don't be too cringing, for that would
+arouse suspicion."
+
+"Make yourself easy, patron: now, where shall I report?"
+
+"I will come to see you every day. Until you have an order, don't step
+inside of this house: you might be followed. If anything unforeseen
+occurs, send a dispatch to your wife, and she will advise me. Now go;
+and be prudent."
+
+The door shut behind Fanferlot, and M. Lecoq passed quickly into his
+bedroom.
+
+In the twinkling of an eye he stripped off all traces of the official
+detective chief,--the starched cravat, the gold spectacles, and the
+wig, which when removed released the thick black hair.
+
+The official Lecoq disappeared; the true Lecoq remained, a person that
+no one knew,--a handsome young man with brilliant eyes and a resolute
+manner.
+
+Only a moment was he visible. Seated before a dressing-table, on which
+were spread a greater array of paints, essences, rouge, cosmetics, and
+false hair than is required for a modern belle, he began to substitute
+a new face for the one accorded him by nature.
+
+He worked slowly, handling his little brushes with extreme care, and
+in about an hour had achieved one of his periodical masterpieces. When
+he had finished, he was no longer Lecoq: he was the stout gentleman
+with the red whiskers, not recognized by Fanferlot.
+
+"There," he exclaimed, giving a last glance in the mirror, "I have
+forgotten nothing; I have left nothing to chance. All my threads are
+tied, and I can progress. I hope the Squirrel will not lose time."
+
+But Fanferlot was too joyous to squander a moment. He did not run,--he
+flew along the way toward the Palais de Justice and M. Patrigent the
+judge.
+
+At last he had the opportunity of demonstrating his own superior
+perspicacity.
+
+It never occurred to him that he was striving to triumph through the
+ideas of another man. The greater part of the world is content to
+strut, like the jackdaw, in peacock's feathers.
+
+The result did not blight his hopes. If M. Patrigent was not
+altogether convinced, he at least admired the ingenuity of the
+proceeding.
+
+"This is what I will do," he said in dismissing Fanferlot: "I will
+present a favorable report to the council chamber, and to-morrow,
+most likely, the cashier will be released."
+
+Immediately he began to write one of those terrible decisions of "Not
+Proven," which restores liberty to the accused man, but not honor;
+which says that he is not guilty, but which does not declare him
+innocent:--
+
+"Whereas, against the prisoner Prosper Bertomy sufficient charges do
+not exist, in accordance with Article 128 of the Criminal Code, we
+declare there are no grounds at present for prosecution against the
+aforesaid prisoner: we therefore order that he be released from the
+prison where he is now detained, and set at liberty by the jailer,"
+etc.
+
+When this was finished, M. Patrigent remarked to his registrar
+Sigault:--"Here is one of those mysterious crimes which baffle
+justice! This is another file to be added to the archives of the
+record office." And with his own hand he wrote upon the outside the
+official number, "_File No. 113_."
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
+
+
+
+
+BENITO PEREZ GALDOS
+
+(1845-)
+
+BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP
+
+
+I
+
+The contemporary school of Spanish fiction dates from about the
+revolution of 1868, which drove out Isabel II. and brought in a more
+liberal form of government. Without this revolution, it would scarcely
+have found opportunity for the free expression of opinion and the bold
+critical tone towards ancient institutions which are among its leading
+characteristics. It is a fresh stirring of the human intellect, a
+distinctly new product, and a valuable contribution to the world's
+literature. It has affiliation with the Russian, the English, and
+other vital modern movements in fiction, and yet it can by no means be
+confused with that of any other country. Its method is realistic; but
+one of its leading figures, De Pereda, a strong delineator of rural
+life, protests, as to him and his works, against the use of the
+word,--"if," he says vigorously, "it means to rank me under the
+triumphal French banner of foul-smelling realism." That is to say,
+they consider the best material for fiction to be the better and
+sweeter part of life and its higher aspirations, and not that coarse
+part of it to which the French would seem to have devoted an undue
+amount of attention. The reader of Anglo-Saxon origin approaches this
+fiction with ease and sympathy; he has not to acquire any new point of
+view in order to understand it, nor to unlearn any wonted standards of
+taste or morals.
+
+An informing Spanish critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, herself a novelist of
+talent, points out that the present Spanish school cannot be said to
+have a "yesterday," but only "a day before yesterday." She means that
+it has skipped a certain interval, and connects itself with remoter,
+and not with recent, tradition. It really comes down from a time
+antedating even the great "Golden Age." It takes its rise in the
+wonderful naturalness of the 'Celestina,' a quaint "tragi-comedy" of
+the year 1499. It bears a close relationship, next, to Don Quixote and
+to the "Novelas Picarescas," the stories of amusing knaves in very low
+life, of which 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and 'Guzman de Alfarache' are the
+best examples, and that French imitation, 'Gil Blas,' better than the
+originals. A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth
+century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the
+nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then
+arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question.
+The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor,
+and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish
+fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary
+novelists in a higher degree than ever before. The Picaresque or Rogue
+stories seem to be--their naturalness admitted--a mere string of
+disconnected adventures, written to the taste of a period that had not
+the habit of keeping its attention fixed upon anything long; and we
+scarcely know any leading character more intimately at the end than at
+the beginning. As against this, we have now complete and lengthy
+novels, in which situations and characters are all worked out upon a
+symmetrical plan, and in which the conclusions generally follow like
+those of fate; that is to say, they are not arbitrary, but inevitably
+result from the conditions and circumstances given.
+
+So far as there is English influence in this literature, it may be
+said to be more in the form of example than as a direct component. It
+has given the Spanish movement courage and persistence, to see the
+same ideals elsewhere affording profit and pleasure to millions of
+men. Otherwise it is a mere coloring, a superficial trace. In
+particular, Perez Galdos is fond of introducing English characters.
+Some of them have the Dickens-like trait of a beaming, exuberant
+benevolence, and the athletic parson in 'Gloria' who risks his life
+pulling out to the rescue of a wrecked steamer is like Barrie's Little
+Minister. Many of his leading characters are of that mixed blood, at
+Cadiz and elsewhere in the South, where one parent is English and the
+other Spanish, and the offspring have had the advantage of an
+education in England. He admires English types and ways, and yet with
+a reluctance too; which brings it about that they are generally
+introduced subject to considerable satire and mockery. English
+steadiness and thrift,--yes, very well; but he has a lingering
+tenderness still for Spanish levity and improvidence. In 'Halma,' all
+the Marquis de Feramor's children have English names, as "Sandy"
+(_Alexandrito_), "Frank" (_Paquito_), and "Kitty" (_Catalanita_). The
+Marquis has been a student at Cambridge, and he imports into his
+career in Spanish politics the thorough study of the question at
+issue, the conservative temper and abhorrence of extremes, and the
+correct "good form" of some finished English statesman. These ideas of
+English policy and conservatism are talked over again, in the
+_tertulias_ of the amusing family in 'El Amigo Manso,' who have come
+back wealthy from Cuba, the head of the household with the purpose of
+going into Parliament and securing a title. The English and the
+Spanish literary movements may be said to accompany each other
+amicably, much as Wellington's red-coats and the Spanish troops
+marched side by side in the War of Independence, which has left a
+feeling of friendship between the two nations ever since.
+
+At the head of the school of fiction in question are four writers,
+namely, Jose Maria de Pereda, Armando Palacio Valdes, Benito Perez
+Galdos, and Juan Valera. They may be considered, in their various
+ways, as of well-nigh equal merit; each one has some very
+distinguished and distinguishing quality, in virtue of which he cannot
+justly be rated below the others. De Pereda occupies a position apart
+in devoting himself wholly to the lives of humble people, the
+mountaineers and fishermen of the Biscayan Provinces. He never
+willingly departs from these scenes either in his literary or personal
+excursions; he has his home among them, near Santander. Valera stands
+apart in a different way, and would occupy himself by preference with
+the opposite class of society. He is the most learned and scholarly of
+the quartette, and his writing is the most carefully polished in
+style. He is a scholarly critic and essayist as well as a novelist. He
+is a realist like the rest, yet eschews, for instance, the imitation
+of dialect: he is not a realist in quite the same energetic and
+conscientious way; his atmosphere, while no doubt equally true, is
+rather dreamy and poetic. Valdes and Galdos are much more vividly
+modern, and they treat many of the same kind of subjects, the events
+of real life such as we see it all around us. Of the four, Valdes has
+perhaps, in certain passages, the truest tenderness and most delicate
+pathos, and the most genuine humor, of that sunny kind which allows us
+to laugh without bitterness. He can sometimes be bitter too, and such
+a severe social satire as 'Froth' and such books as 'The Grandee' and
+'The Origin of Thought' leave, like many of those of Galdos, an
+impression of gloom; yet even in these we are charmed on the way by
+his light touch and easy grace of treatment. Galdos is he who takes
+the gravest attitude; many great problems of life and destiny occupy
+him seriously; he not only is very earnest, but seems so,--which does
+not however preclude a plentiful use of humor, as will be seen in the
+examples given. Furthermore, he is much the most prolific of the
+distinguished group, and to that extent he may be said to have the
+widest range.
+
+These writers are a highly beneficent influence in Spain at the
+present time, spreading over it as they do a multitude of stimulating
+pictures and liberalizing ideas, cast into charming literary form.
+They cannot fail to have a considerable effect upon conduct. In its
+manner, its aversion to obscurity, and fondness for floods of daylight
+that almost abolish shadow, this fiction is like the Spanish-Roman
+school of art, the painting of Fortuny, the two Madrazos, and others:
+the two seem but manifestations of a common impulse. On another side
+it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of
+information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain,
+and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its
+interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets
+an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and
+mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely
+the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells.
+With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature
+that makes the world akin; and we see, with pleasure and hope, the
+breaking up of the forces of mediaevalism, the working of a mental and
+moral turmoil that is preparing the way for a general betterment.
+
+It would not be reasonable to suppose that Spanish literature remained
+wholly unaffected by the vigorous French movement just across the
+border. On the contrary, it clearly shows the trace of the robust
+modern style that has prevailed in France from Balzac to Zola. This
+trace, however, is in the style and not in the matter. It may possibly
+have aided the plainness of speech in the Spanish work, which is
+greater than in English books; and yet this plainness of speech is
+probably not greater than all books should be allowed, in the interest
+of their own usefulness, and in order not to be narrow instead of
+broad pictures of life. The tone towards sexual problems is never
+flippant; immorality is never put in an attractive light; there is
+hardly anywhere a more severe homily on the text that "the wages of
+sin is death" than is found in the wretched career of the
+transgressors in such books as Galdos's 'Lo Prohibido,' 'Tormento,'
+and 'La Desheredada.'
+
+Just as in English books, the young girl, her aspirations and her
+innocent love affairs before marriage, figure largely in these novels.
+It is not necessary for her to wait until she is married in order to
+become a suitable heroine for fiction. Religious revolt or dissent,
+again, is one of the features most often used. There is still a very
+close union of Church and State in Spain, and life has a very
+ecclesiastical coloring. Nearly every family has ties of relationship
+or intimacy with some ecclesiastical person of either sex. This brings
+it about that such figures are as frequent in books as,
+correspondingly, in real life. In Valera's 'Pepita Ximenez' we find an
+earnest young student, a candidate for the priesthood, son of a noble
+house, turned aside from his holy career--through his father's
+connivance--by the fascinations of a most charming woman, their
+neighbor. In Valdes's 'Sister San Sulpicio' it is a young novice, a
+delightfully gay and bright creature, whom love and matrimony withdraw
+from her convent. In the same author's 'Marta y Maria' a fair young
+girl is seen endeavoring to conform in the midst of modern life to
+the ascetic ideals of the mediaeval saints, even to the point of
+wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge.
+Galdos's 'Dona Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the
+undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family,
+and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews.
+As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant
+way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such
+is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely
+critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this
+century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of
+the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards
+living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Galdos attacks only
+the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be
+known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from
+within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the
+sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their
+efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a
+curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern
+and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion
+of monarchy in its most absolute form.
+
+The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in
+Antonio de Trueba, and Madame Boehl de Faber, who signed herself
+"Fernan Caballero,"--one of the first of those who took a man's name,
+after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things
+than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott
+and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist
+who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue.
+Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian
+cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a
+torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de
+Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the
+present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The
+Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present
+generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no
+great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in
+it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of
+the movement should read Madame Pardo Bazan's valuable critical study,
+'La Cuestion Palpitante' (The Vital Question). Various books by the
+leading authors named have been well translated into English by Clara
+Bell, Mrs. Mary J. Serrano, Mary Springer, Rollo Ogden, Nathan Haskell
+Dole, and others.
+
+
+II
+
+Benito Perez Galdos was born May 10th, 1845, in the Canary Islands.
+Las Palmas, his birthplace, capital of the Grand Canary, is a
+well-built little town of about eighteen thousand people, and the
+island is the most fertile of the group. In climate and situation the
+islands belong rather to Africa than Europe. The people are considered
+descendants of the Gothic inhabitants of Spain, who sought refuge
+there from the Saracen invasion. Their existence was all but lost to
+sight for some centuries, and they were only brought under European
+sway about the time of the discovery of America. These Fortunate
+Islands, the somewhat unusual scene where Galdos was born and passed
+his youth, would seem to offer a fresh literary field, yet no word of
+description or reminiscence concerning them appears in any of his
+books. This is perhaps part of the policy of reserve that induces him
+to deny, even by implication, any biographical details concerning
+himself,--a reserve so marked as to have been generally noted as an
+eccentricity. Leopoldo Alas, his biographer, in the 'Celebridades
+Espaniolas Contemporaneas,' assures us that it was only with the
+greatest difficulty he drew from him the bare admission that he was
+born in the Canary Islands. He made his studies there in the State
+college, and came to Madrid at the age of eighteen to study law. He
+had no great liking for it, and did not follow it further, unless as
+it became a step for entrance into political life, for he has been a
+deputy in the National Cortes, for Porto Rico. He did not acquire
+skill in forensic eloquence; his biographer, above, states that he
+cannot put four words together in public, nor in private either. A
+reticent man, he is forced to write in order to find expression.
+
+He wrote his first book in 1867 and '68, but it was not published till
+1871. In the mean time the revolution of 1868 took place, which
+enlarged the boundaries of freedom in literature as in many other
+directions; and Galdos at Barcelona had some small part in it. The
+book was 'La Fontana de Oro' (The Fount of Gold). It treats of the
+aspirations of the "ardent youth" of 1820, who rebelled against the
+reactionary policy brought in by Ferdinand VII. after the expulsion of
+the French from the country; and in the student hero Lazaro he perhaps
+displays his own ideas at the period. Violent political clubs were
+formed, on the model of the Jacobin Clubs of the French Revolution,
+and it is from the name of a cafe that was the meeting-place of the
+most famous of these clubs that the name of the story is derived. His
+next book was 'El Audaz' (The Fearless: 1872). The period is the same.
+The hero is an utterly fearless young radical, who has been driven to
+revolt through wrongs done his family by the Count de Cerezuelo. By a
+peculiar hazard, though far below her in social station, he meets the
+daughter of the count, a very proud and disdainful beauty. It is her
+caprice to fall in love with him, and she remains true to him to the
+end, when he dies in a street tumult, having first gone mad with his
+superheated enthusiasm. These early books are conceived upon
+conventional romantic lines, and hardly gave promise of their
+author's future fame. They contain however passages of strong
+character-drawing, like that of the Porrenos, three ancient spinster
+sisters of a fallen patrician house in 'El Audaz,' which are equal to
+his later work.
+
+He next entered upon an extensive enterprise which soon began to give
+him both reputation and profit. This was the writing of a score of
+historical romances, after the model of those of Erckmann-Chatrian,
+called 'Episodios Nacionales' (National Episodes). They are divided
+into two series, the first beginning with 'Trafalgar' (1873), the
+second with 'El Equipaje del Rey Jose' (King Joseph's Baggage: 1875).
+They deal with the two modern periods comprising the deliverance of
+the country from the usurpation of the French, and the more obscure
+struggles against Ferdinand VII., who sought to reduce the country
+under the same absolutist rule that had prevailed before the ideas of
+the French Revolution liberalized the whole of Europe. The history in
+these romances is intermingled with personal interests and adventures,
+to give it an air of informality; and though each is complete in
+itself, some knowledge of Spanish history is desirable as an aid to
+understanding them. They are considerably interlinked among
+themselves, the same characters appearing more or less in successive
+volumes. The hero of the first series is one Gabriel, who narrates
+them all in the first person. He is a poor boy who becomes servant to
+a family near Cadiz. He accompanies his master on board the huge
+Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship of her age, and is able to
+describe in detail the action of Trafalgar, the description being the
+more interesting for us as coming from the Spanish point of view. In
+'La Corte de Carlos IV.' (The Court of Charles IV.: 1873), we find him
+page to a leading actress, and an eye-witness to the degeneracy of
+that monarch and his favorite Godoy, which resulted in the seizure of
+the country by Napoleon for his brother Joseph. In 'La Batalla de los
+Arapiles' (translated by Rollo Ogden as 'The Battle of Salamanca':
+1875), the last of the series, the same Gabriel is a major, and
+performs an important commission for Wellington. He has risen to this
+level step by step, and on the way has had as many adventures as one
+of Dumas's guardsmen, and has carried them off as gallantly. In the
+second series of 'Episodios,' Salvador Monsalud is the principal
+character. He is a young fellow who is led by dire want--and also by
+sharing the liberalized French view of the decadence and
+worthlessness of the Spanish form of rule--to take service in the
+body-guard of Joseph Bonaparte. A chapter full of strength and pathos,
+in 'King Joseph's Baggage,' shows him disowned by his mother and cast
+off by his village sweetheart on account of such service, both of them
+frantic with a spirit of independence like that which animated the
+Maid of Saragossa. A feature of this book that gives it originality is
+that the action turns not upon the usual principal features of battle,
+but upon the fate of the rich baggage train of booty with which Joseph
+Bonaparte had hoped to escape to France after his brief, disastrous
+reign.
+
+The 'Episodios' have had an extensive influence, and have been
+imitated, under a like title, in the Spanish Americas. The author's
+tone toward the past is generally severe and disdainful. "Had Spain,
+perchance, a 'constitution' when she was the foremost nation in the
+world?" he puts into the mouth of one of his characters, with sardonic
+intent. He has been called unappreciative, and his attitude towards
+Spanish antiquity has been protested against by other leading writers,
+of more conservative feeling, as unwarranted. These romances contain
+some passages showing aversion to the barbarities of war, but in
+general they are less humanitarian than those of Erckmann-Chatrian:
+they are principally devoted to glorifying Spanish fortitude and
+courage. These books are a great advance upon the two earlier novels;
+from the first they showed literary workmanship of a high order: they
+possess ingenuity of plot, sufficient probability, and graphic power
+of description, movement, and conversation. In the latter respects,
+indeed, they surpass some of the author's later works that make more
+serious pretensions.
+
+The wider and more definitely literary reputation of Perez Galdos
+rests upon more than a score of other works, in addition to the above.
+These are distinctly novels, as contrasted with romances; and they
+treat of contemporary life, in a method that aims to be
+conscientiously observant and impartial. It is often said, without
+much reflection, that we see enough of the things close about us, and
+need our literary recreation in the remote and strange. But it must be
+recalled that we see those things without the eyes of genius, and he
+is a true benefactor who poetizes and dignifies life in making evident
+that all of life is vivid with interest, even that part of it nearest
+to us, which without such illumination we may have thought devoid of
+it. The words in which the ostensible narrator of 'Lo Prohibido'
+(Forbidden Fruit: 1885), explains the purpose of his journal may well
+enough be taken to exhibit the method of Galdos. It was to set down
+"my prosaic adventures, events that in no way differ from those that
+fill and make up the lives of other men. I aspire to no further
+effects than such as the sincere and unaffected presentation of the
+truth may produce; and I have no design upon the reader's emotions by
+means of calculated surprises, frights, or conjurer's tricks, through
+which things look one way for a time and then turn out in a manner
+diametrically opposite."
+
+The titles of a number of his principal books, not hitherto given,
+with dates, are as follows. The dates are those when they were
+written, and they were generally published shortly after: 'Dona
+Perfecta,' 1876; 'Gloria,' 1876; 'Torquemada en la Hoguera'
+(Torquemada at the Stake: 1876); 'Marianela,' 1878; 'La Familia de
+Leon Roch' (Leon Roch's Family: 1878); 'Los Cien Mil Hijos de San
+Luis' (The Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis: 1877) of the
+Episodios; 'Un Faccioso Mas' (A Rebel the More: 1879) the completion
+of the Episodios; 'La Desheredada' (The Disowned: 1881); 'El Amigo
+Manso' (Friend Mildman: 1882); 'El Doctor Centeno,' 1883; 'Tormento,'
+1884; 'La de Bringas' (That Mrs. de Bringas: 1884); 'Fortunata y
+Jacinta,' 1886; 'Miau,' 1888; 'La Incognita' (The Unknown: 1889);
+'Realidad' (Reality: 1890); 'Angel Guerra,' 1891; 'Torquemada en la
+Cruz' (Torquemada on the Cross: 1894); 'Torquemada en el Purgatorio'
+(Torquemada in Purgatory: 1894); 'Torquemada y San Pedro,' 1895;
+'Nazarin,' 1895; 'Halma,' 1896.
+
+Even in his new departure, Galdos did not at once enter upon his final
+manner. 'Dona Perfecta,' 'The Family of Leon Roch,' and 'Gloria' are
+quite distinctly didactic, or "novels with a purpose"; while
+'Marianela' is somewhat cloyingly sentimental, a prose poem after the
+manner of Ouida. In spite of all this, however, 'Dona Perfecta' has
+been pronounced by many his best work. It is the one that has obtained
+greatest celebrity abroad, and it is the one, all things considered,
+likely to be the most satisfactory example of his work to the English
+reader. 'La Desheredada' marks the transition to his final period, and
+he has put it upon record that with this book the real difficulties of
+his vocation began. It is a poignantly affecting story of a poor girl
+who was brought up, by a parent half knave and half insane, to believe
+that she was not his daughter but that of a noble house. After his
+death she undertakes in all good faith to prosecute her claim, and is
+thrown into prison as an impostor. Her heart is broken by the
+disillusionment; she cannot adjust herself to life again without the
+sweetness of that beguiling belief, and so, in the end, not having the
+boldness to die, she throws herself upon the street, a social outcast.
+Both in the person of Isidora and others, the book is a moving
+treatise on false education. Other leading figures are her brother, a
+young "hoodlum" and thief, the burden of whose career she has also to
+bear upon her slender shoulders, and the pampered son of the poor
+Sastres, who have denied themselves bread that he might have an
+education and luxuries. He has a hundred fine schemes for getting a
+living, but never a one of them includes turning his hand to a stroke
+of honest labor.
+
+'El Amigo Manso' is an extended piece of character-drawing, self-told,
+in a gently humorous vein. It gives an account of a college
+instructor, very benevolent, very methodical and prudent, and a trifle
+conceited and patronizing, who is in love with a pretty governess. By
+the time he has settled all his judicious pros and cons, the pretty
+governess, who really cared nothing about him, is engaged to a suitor
+of a more dashing sort. The scenes of 'Tormento,' 'La de Bringas,' and
+'Miau' are laid chiefly among the class of minor office-holders, with
+whose manners the author shows an exhaustive familiarity, and each has
+its peculiar tragic situation in itself. 'Realidad,' written once in
+the form of a novel, and again as a drama, treats of the subject of a
+wife's infidelity, as it might pass in real life, instead of in the
+conventional and hackneyed way. Its title seems to propose to adhere
+even closer to the exact truth than do the others. There come to mind,
+in its suppressed passion and its calm, intellectual, and bitter
+philosophy, suggestions both of Ibsen and Suderman. The banker Orozco,
+a noble and reserved nature, does not slay his wife, does not banish
+her from him, nor even make her reproaches. Augusta, on her side,
+wonders if his mind is not giving way. This bitter commentary on life
+is as near as her smaller mind can approach to a comprehension of his
+magnanimous conduct. The same Augusta, earlier, has said in
+conversation, "Real life is the greatest of all inventors; the only
+one who is ever ready, fresh, and inexhaustible in resource." In these
+books, however serious, the purpose does not obtrude to the detriment
+of art; the reader is left free to draw his own conclusions, as from
+events in actual life; the author ostensibly is neither for nor
+against, and yet he leaves us in no doubt as to his decision, always a
+moral and stimulating one.
+
+The favorite scenes of Galdos's books are in Madrid and the small
+suburban resorts round about it, or at the numerous mineral springs
+which are so important a feature of Spanish summer life. He himself
+lives at Madrid, but goes for the season to a summer place he owns on
+the bold cliffs of the Bay of Biscay, at Santander. There, too he is
+near to Pereda, between whom and himself a remarkable friendship
+exists. A friendship so strong, warm, and long continued has been
+recognized as a notable feature in the careers of both. It is the more
+remarkable because except in literature, which both set above
+everything else, he is violently opposed to most of the views of
+Pereda--a conservative of the conservatives, even to the point of
+preferring the absolutist pretender Don Carlos for king. Even at
+Madrid and at Santander, however, Galdos's scenery is mere stage
+setting; he does not describe nature sympathetically nor aim to
+render local color in an accurate way. As the action must pass
+somewhere, he gives it just as much of a setting as will suffice, and
+seems satisfied with that. The impression of his books, on the whole,
+is a gloomy one. He who sees life clearly must perchance see it
+darkly, and few see it more clearly than Galdos. Yet his admirers will
+not have it that he is pessimistic, because Nature herself is not
+pessimistic. Even the sadness of nightfall ought not to be considered
+gloomy, they say, with much show of reason, since it is only the
+preparation for another day.
+
+                                 [Signature: William Henry Bishop]
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST NIGHT OF A FAMOUS PLAY, IN THE YEAR 1807
+
+From 'The Court of Charles IV.' Copyright 1888, by W.S. Gottsberger.
+Reprinted by permission of George G. Peck, publisher, New York
+
+
+    [Gabriel, a boy of sixteen, has taken service as page with a
+    very charming actress of the Principe Theatre. Between this
+    theatre and La Cruz exists the same sort of hostility as
+    between the rival theatres at Venice when Goldoni inaugurated
+    his reform. La Cruz represents the new and "natural" spirit
+    in the drama, as against the absurd artificial tradition that
+    had prevailed up to that time. A part of Gabriel's duties is
+    to go and hiss the plays at that theatre. The principal
+    occasion of this kind is when he accompanies a band, led by a
+    rival playwright, to the first performance of 'El Si de las
+    Ninas' (The Maidens' Yes), by the famous Moratin, the leading
+    piece of the new school.]
+
+"What an opening!" he [the rival poet and playwright] exclaimed, as he
+listened to the first dialogue between Don Diego and Simon. "A pretty
+way to begin a comedy! The scene a village inn! What can happen of any
+interest in a village inn? In all my plays, and they are many,--though
+never a one has been represented,--the action opens in a Corinthian
+garden, with monumental fountains to the right and left, and a temple
+of Juno in the background; or in a wide square with three regiments
+drawn up, and in the background the city of Warsaw, with a bridge, and
+so forth. And just listen to the twaddle this old man is made to talk!
+He is about to marry a young girl who has been brought up by the nuns
+of Guadalajara. Well, is that very remarkable? Is not that a matter of
+every-day occurrence?"
+
+Pouring out these remarks, that confounded poet did not allow me to
+hear a word of the piece, and though I answered all his comments with
+humbly acquiescent monosyllables, I only wished that he would hold his
+tongue, deuce take him!...
+
+"What a vulgar subject! what low ideas!" he exclaimed, loud enough for
+every one to hear. "And this is how comedies are written!"...
+
+"But let us listen to it," said I, finding my chief's comments quite
+intolerable. "We can laugh at Moratin afterwards."
+
+"But I cannot bear such a medley of absurdities," he went on. "We do
+not come to the theatre to see just what is to be seen any day in the
+streets, or in every house you go into. If instead of enlarging on her
+matrimonial experiences, the lady were to come in invoking curses on
+an enemy because he had killed one-and-twenty of her sons in battle,
+and left her with only the twenty-second, still an infant at the
+breast, and if she had to carry that one off to save him from being
+eaten by the besieged, all dying of famine--then there would be some
+interest in the plot, and the public would clap their hands till they
+were sore. Gabriel, my boy, we must protest, protest vehemently. We
+must thump the floor with our feet and sticks to show that we are
+bored and out of patience. Yawn; open your mouth till your jaws are
+dislocated; look about you; let all the neighbors see that we are
+people of taste, and utterly weary of this tiresome and monstrous
+piece."
+
+No sooner said than done: we began thumping on the floor, and yawning
+in chorus, exclaiming, "What a bore!" "What a dreary piece!" "What
+waste of money!" and other phrases to the same effect; all of which
+soon bore fruit. The party in the pit imitated our patriotic example
+with great exactness. A general murmur of dissatisfaction was
+presently audible from every part of the theatre; for though the
+author had enemies, he had no lack of friends too, scattered
+throughout the pit, boxes, and upper tiers, and they were not slow to
+protest against our demonstration, sometimes by applauding, and then
+again by roaring at us with threats and oaths, to be silent; till a
+stentorian voice from the very back of the pit bellowed, "Turn the
+blackguards out!" raising a noisy storm of applause that reduced us to
+silence.
+
+Our poetaster was almost jumping out of his skin with indignation, and
+persisted in making his remarks as the piece went on....
+
+"A pretty plot indeed! It seems hardly credible that a civilized
+nation should applaud it. I would sentence Moratin to the galleys, and
+forbid his writing such coarse stuff as long as he lives. So you call
+this a play, Gabrielito? There is no intrigue, no plot, no surprise,
+no catastrophe, no illusion, no _quid pro quo_; no attempt at
+disguising a character to make it seem another--not even the little
+complication that comes of two men provoking each other as enemies,
+and then discovering that they are father and son. If Don Diego now,
+were to catch his nephew and kill him out of hand in the cellar, and
+prepare a banquet and have a dish of the victim's flesh served up to
+his bride, well disguised with spice and bay leaves, there would be
+some spirit in the thing."...
+
+I could not, in fact, conceal my enjoyment of the scene, which seemed
+to me a masterpiece of nature, grace, and interesting comedy. The poet
+however called me to order, abusing me for deserting to the hostile
+camp.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said I. "It was a mistake. And yet--does it not
+strike you, too, that this scene is not altogether bad?"
+
+"How should you be able to judge?--a mere novice who never wrote a
+line in your life! Pray what is there in this scene in the least
+remarkable, or pathetic, or historical?"
+
+"But it is nature itself. I feel that I have seen in the real world
+just what the author has set on the stage."
+
+"Gaby! simpleton! that is exactly what makes it so bad. Have you not
+observed that in 'Frederick the Second,' in 'Catharine of Russia,' in
+'The Slave of Negroponte,' and other fine works, nothing ever takes
+place that has the smallest resemblance to real life? Is not
+everything in those plays strange, startling, exceptional, wonderful,
+and surprising? That is why they are so good. The poets of to-day do
+not choose to imitate those of my time, and hence art has fallen to
+the lowest depths."
+
+"And yet, begging your pardon," I said, "I cannot help thinking--The
+play is wretched, I quite agree, and when you say so there must be a
+good reason for it. But the idea here seems to me a good one, since I
+fancy the author has intended to censure the vicious system of
+education which young girls get nowadays."...
+
+"And who asks the author to introduce all this philosophy?" said the
+pedant. "What has the theatre to do with moralizing? In the 'Magician
+of Astrakhan,' in 'Leon and the Asturias Gave Heraldry to Spain,' and
+in the 'Triumphs of Don Pelayo'--plays that all the world admires--did
+you ever find a passage that describes how girls are to be brought
+up?"
+
+"I have certainly read or heard somewhere that the theatre was to
+serve the purposes of entertainment and instruction."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!"
+
+                                          Translation of Clara Bell.
+
+
+
+
+DONA PERFECTA'S DAUGHTER
+
+From 'Dona Perfecta.' Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers
+
+
+    [Pepe Rey, a young engineer, arrives at Orbajosa to marry his
+    cousin Rosario, the match having been made up between his
+    father and Dona Perfecta, the girl's mother, who is warmly
+    attached to the father of Pepe, her brother, and furthermore
+    under heavy obligations to him for his excellent management
+    of her large property interests. The landscape is the arid
+    and poverty-stricken country of central Spain, though the
+    town itself--"seated on the slope of a hill from the midst of
+    whose closely clustered houses arose many dark towers, and on
+    the height above it the ruins of a dilapidated castle"--such
+    a town would probably be more appreciated by a traveler from
+    abroad and a lover of the picturesque, than by a Spaniard,
+    too familiar with its type. Orbajosa is a little place, full
+    of narrow prejudices and vanities. Pepe Rey, with his modern
+    ways, soon finds that he is wounding these prejudices at
+    every turn. We look on with pained surprise at the
+    difficulties that grow up around the young man, an excellent
+    and kind-hearted fellow. Lawsuits are multiplied against him;
+    he is turned out of the cathedral by order of the bishop for
+    strolling about during service-time to look at some
+    architectural features; and he is refused the hand of his
+    cousin. Dona Perfecta herself joins in this hostility, which
+    finally develops into a venomous bitterness that menaces his
+    life. Such a feeling was not the outgrowth of mere provincial
+    narrowness: we see in the end that it was the result of the
+    plot of Maria Remedios, a woman of a humble sort, who aspired
+    to secure the heiress Rosario for her own chubby-faced
+    home-bred son. She influenced the village priest, and he
+    influenced Dona Perfecta. Early in the day the young engineer
+    would have abandoned the sinister place but for Rosario, who
+    really loved him. She conveyed to him, on a scrap from the
+    margin of a newspaper, the message:
+
+    "They say you are going away. If you do, I shall die."
+
+    She is a charming picture of girlhood,--lovely, true-hearted,
+    affectionate, aspiring to be heroic, and yet crippled at last
+    by a filial conscience and the long habit of clinging
+    dependence. She has agreed to flee at night with her lover,
+    and he is already in the garden. Her mother, the stern Dona
+    Perfecta, ranging uneasily through the house, enters her room
+    about the appointed time for the escape.]
+
+    [Illustration: _THE WEDDING DRESS._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by Worms.]
+
+"Why don't you sleep?" her mother asked her.
+
+"What time is it?" asked the girl.
+
+"It will soon be midnight."...
+
+Rosario was trembling, and everything about her denoted the keenest
+anxiety. She lifted her eyes to heaven supplicatingly, and then turned
+them on her mother with a look of the utmost terror.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with you?"
+
+"Did you not say it was midnight?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then--but is it already midnight?"...
+
+"Something is the matter with you; you have something on your mind,"
+said her mother, fixing on her daughter her penetrating eyes.
+
+"Yes--I wanted to tell you," stammered the girl, "I wanted to
+say--Nothing, nothing; I will go to sleep."
+
+"Rosario, Rosario! your mother can read your heart like an open book,"
+exclaimed Dona Perfecta with severity. "You are agitated. I have
+already told you that I am willing to pardon you if you will repent,
+if you are a good and sensible girl."
+
+"Why, am I not good? Ah, mamma, mamma! I am dying." Rosario burst into
+a flood of bitter and disconsolate tears.
+
+"What are these tears about?" said her mother, embracing her. "If they
+are tears of repentance, blessed be they."
+
+"I don't repent! I can't repent!" cried the girl, in a burst of
+sublime despair. She lifted her head, and in her face was depicted a
+sudden inspired strength. Her hair fell in disorder over her
+shoulders. Never was there seen a more beautiful image of a rebellious
+angel.
+
+"What is this? Have you lost your senses?" said Dona Perfecta, laying
+both hands on her daughter's shoulders.
+
+"I am going away! I am going away!" said the girl with the exaltation
+of delirium. And she sprang out of bed.
+
+"Rosario, Rosario--my daughter! For God's sake, what is this?"
+
+"Ah mamma, senora!" exclaimed the girl, embracing her mother; "bind me
+fast!"
+
+"In truth, you would deserve it. What madness is this?"
+
+"Bind me fast! I am going away--I am going away with him!"...
+
+"Has he told you to do so? has he counseled you to do that? has he
+commanded you to do that?" asked the mother, launching these words
+like thunderbolts against her daughter.
+
+"He has counseled me to do it. We have agreed to be married. We must
+be married, mamma, dear mamma. I will love you--I know that I ought to
+love you--I shall be forever lost if I do not love you."
+
+"Rosario, Rosario!" cried Dona Perfecta in a terrible voice, "rise!"
+
+There was a short pause.
+
+"This man--has he written to you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you seen him again since that night?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you have written to him?"
+
+"I have written to him also. O senora! why do you look at me in that
+way? You are not my mother."
+
+"Would to God that I were not! Rejoice in the harm you are doing me.
+You are killing me; you have given me my death-blow!" cried Dona
+Perfecta, with indescribable agitation. "You say that that man--"
+
+"Is my husband--I will be his wife, protected by the law. You are not
+a woman! Why do you look at me in that way? You make me tremble.
+Mother, mother, do not condemn me!"
+
+"You have already condemned yourself--that is enough. Obey me, and I
+will forgive you. Answer me--when did you receive letters from that
+man?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+"What treachery! what infamy!" cried her mother, roaring rather than
+speaking. "Had you appointed a meeting?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Here, here! I will confess everything, everything! I know it is a
+crime. I am a wretch; but you, my mother, will take me out of this
+hell. Give your consent. Say one word to me, only one word!"
+
+"That man here in my house!" cried Dona Perfecta, springing back
+several paces from her daughter.
+
+Rosario followed her on her knees.
+
+At the same instant three blows were heard, three crashes, three
+explosions. [Maria Remedios had spied upon Pepe Rey, the lover; shown
+Caballuco, a brutal servant and ally, how to follow him stealthily
+into the garden; and had then come to arouse the house.] It was the
+heart of Maria Remedios knocking at the door through the knocker. The
+house trembled with an awful dread. Mother and daughter stood as
+motionless as statues.
+
+A servant went down-stairs to open the door, and shortly afterward
+Maria Remedios, who was not now a woman but a basilisk enveloped in a
+mantle, entered Dona Perfecta's room. Her face, flushed with anxiety,
+exhaled fire.
+
+"He is there, he is there," she said, as she entered. "He got into the
+garden through the condemned door." She paused for breath at every
+syllable.
+
+"I know already," returned Dona Perfecta, with a sort of bellow.
+
+Rosario fell senseless to the floor.
+
+"Let us go down-stairs," said Dona Perfecta, without paying any
+attention to her daughter's swoon.
+
+The two women glided down-stairs like two snakes. The maids and the
+man-servant were in the hall, not knowing what to do. Dona Perfecta
+passed through the dining-room into the garden, followed by Maria
+Remedios.
+
+"Fortunately we have Ca-Ca-Ca-balluco there," said the canon's niece.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the garden, also. He cli-cli-climbed over the wall."
+
+Dona Perfecta explored the darkness with her wrathful eyes. Rage gave
+them the singular power of seeing in the dark that is peculiar to the
+feline race.
+
+"I see a figure there," she said. "It is going towards the oleanders."
+
+"It is he," cried Remedios. "But there comes Ramos--Ramos!" [Cristobal
+Ramos, or "Cabulluco."]
+
+The colossal figure of the Centaur was plainly distinguishable.
+
+"Towards the oleanders, Ramos! Towards the oleanders!"
+
+Dona Perfecta took a few steps forward. Her hoarse voice, vibrating
+with a terrible accent, hissed forth these words:--
+
+"Cristobal, Cristobal,--kill him!"
+
+A shot was heard. Then another.
+
+                                     Translation of Mary J. Serrano.
+
+
+
+
+    A FAMILY OF OFFICE-HOLDERS
+
+    Don Francisco de Bringas y Caballero had a second-class
+    clerkship in one of the most ancient of the royal bureaus. He
+    belonged to a family which had held just such offices for time
+    out of mind. "Government employees were his parents and his
+    grandparents, and it is believed that his great-grandparents,
+    and even the ancestors of these, served in one way and another
+    in the administration of the two worlds." His wife Dona
+    Rosalia Pipaon was equally connected with the official class,
+    and particularly with that which had to do with the domestic
+    service of the royal abodes. Thus, "on producing her family
+    tree, this was found to show not so much glorious deeds of war
+    and statesmanship as those humbler doings belonging to a long
+    and intimate association with the royal person. Her mother had
+    been lady of the queen's wardrobe, her uncle a halberdier of
+    the royal guard, her grandfather keeper of the buttery, other
+    uncles at various removes, equerries, pages, dispatch-bearers,
+    huntsmen, and managers of the royal farm at Aranjuez, and so
+    forth and so on.... For this dame there existed two things
+    wholly Divine; namely, heaven and that almost equally
+    desirable dwelling-place for the elect which we indicate by
+    the mere laconic word 'the Palace.' In the Palace were her
+    family history and her ideal; her aspiration was that Bringas
+    might obtain a superior post in the royal exchequer, and that
+    then they should go and take up their abode in one of the
+    apartments of the second story of the great mansion which were
+    conceded to such tenants." The above is from 'Tormento.' In
+    the next succeeding novel, 'La de Bringas,' this aspiration is
+    gratified; the Bringas family are installed in the Palace, in
+    the quarters assigned to the employees of the royal household.
+    The efforts of two of their acquaintances to find them, in the
+    puzzling intricacies of the place, are thus amusingly
+    described.
+
+
+
+
+ABOVE-STAIRS IN A ROYAL PALACE
+
+From 'La de Bringas'
+
+
+Well, this is about the way it was. We threw ourselves bravely into
+the interminable corridor, a veritable street, or alley at least,
+paved with red tiles, feebly lighted with gas jets, and full of
+doublings and twistings. Now and then it spread out into broad
+openings like little plazas, inundated with sunlight which entered
+through large openings from the main court-yard. This illumination
+penetrated lengthwise along the white walls of the narrow passageways,
+alleys, or tunnels, or whatever they may be called, growing ever
+feebler and more uncertain as it went, till finally it fainted away
+entirely at sight of the fan-shaped yellow gas flames, smoking little
+circlets upon their protecting metal disks. There were uncounted
+paneled doors with numbers on them, some newly painted and others
+moldering and weather-stained, but not one displaying the figure we
+were seeking. At this one you would see a rich silken bell cord, some
+happy find in the royal upholstery shop, while the next had nothing
+more than a poor frayed rope's-end; and these were an indication of
+what was likely to be found within, as to order and neatness or
+disarray and squalor. So, too, the mats or bits of carpet laid before
+the doors threw a useful light upon the character of the lodgings. We
+came upon vacant apartments with cobwebs spun across the openings, and
+the door gratings thick with dust, and through broken transoms, drew
+chill drafts that conveyed the breath of silence and desolation. Even
+whole precincts were abandoned, and the vaultings, of unequal height,
+returned the sound of our footsteps hollowly to our ears. We passed up
+one stairway, then down another, and then, as likely as not, we would
+ascend again.... The labyrinthine maze led us on and ever onward....
+
+"It is useless to come here," at length said Pez, decidedly losing
+patience, "without charts and a mariner's compass. I suppose we are
+now in the south wing of the palace. The roofs down there must be
+those of the Hall of Columns and the outer stairway, are they not?
+What a huge mass of a place!" The roofs of which he spoke were great
+pyramidal shapes protected with lead, and they covered in the ceilings
+on which Bayeu's frescoed cherubs cut their lively pigeon-wings and
+pirouettes.
+
+Still going on and on and onward without pause, we found ourselves
+shut up in a place without exit, a considerable inclosure lighted from
+the top, and we had to turn round and beat a retreat by the way we had
+entered. Any one who knows the palace and its symmetrical grandeur
+only from without could never divine all these irregularities that
+constitute a veritable small town in its upper regions. In truth, for
+an entire century there has been but one continual modifying of the
+original plan, a stopping up here and an opening there, a condemning
+of staircases, a widening of some rooms at the expense of others, a
+changing of corridors into living-rooms and of living-rooms into
+corridors, and a cutting through of partitions and a shutting up of
+windows. You fall in with stairways that begin but never arrive
+anywhere, and with balconies that are but the made-over roof coverings
+of dwelling-places below. These dove-cotes were once stately
+drawing-rooms, and on the other hand, these fine salons have been made
+out of the inclosing space of a grand staircase. Then again winding
+stairs are frequent; but if you should take them, Heaven knows what
+would become of you; and frequent, too, are glazed doors permanently
+closed, with naught behind them but silence, dust, and darkness....
+
+"We are looking for the apartment of Don Francisco Bringas."
+
+"Bringas? yes, yes," said an old woman; "you're close to it. All you
+have got to do is, go down the first circular stairway you come to,
+and then make a half-turn. Bringas? yes to be sure; he's sacristan of
+the chapel."
+
+"Sacristan,--he? What is the matter with you? He is head clerk of the
+Administrative Department."
+
+"Oh, then he must be lower down, just off the terrace. I suppose you
+know your way to the fountain?"
+
+"No, not we."
+
+"You know the stairs called the Caceres Staircase?"
+
+"No, not that either."
+
+"At any rate, you know where the Oratory is?"
+
+"We know nothing about it."
+
+"But the choir of the Oratory? but the dove-cotes?"--
+
+Sum total, we had not the slightest acquaintance with any of that
+congeries of winding turns, sudden tricks, and baffling surprises. The
+architectural arrangement was a mad caprice, a mocking jest at all
+plan and symmetry. Nevertheless, despite our notable lack of
+experience we stuck to our quest, and even carried our infatuation so
+far as to reject the services of a boy who offered himself as our
+guide.
+
+"We are now in the wing facing on the Plaza de Oriente," said Pez;
+"that is to say, at exactly the opposite extreme from the wing in
+which our friend resides." His geographical notions were delivered
+with the gravity and conviction of some character in Jules Verne.
+"Hence, the problem now demanding our attention is by what route to
+get from here to the western wing. In the first place, the cupola of
+the chapel and the grand stairway roof-covering furnish us with a
+certain basis; we should take our bearings from them. I assume that,
+having once arrived in the western wing, we shall be numskulls indeed
+if we do not strike Bringas's abode. All the same, I for one will
+never return to these outlandish regions without a pocket compass, and
+what is more, without a good supply of provender too, against such
+emergencies as this."
+
+Before striking out on the new stage of our explorations, as thus
+projected, we paused to look down from the window. The Plaza de
+Oriente lay below us in a beautiful panorama, and beyond it a portion
+of Madrid crested with at least fifty cupolas, steeples, and bell
+towers. The equestrian Philip IV. appeared a mere toy, and the Royal
+Theatre a paltry shed.... The doves had their nests far below where we
+stood, and we saw them, by pairs or larger groups, plunge headlong
+downward into the dizzy abyss, and then presently come whirling upward
+again, with swift and graceful motion, and settle on the carved
+capitals and moldings. It is credibly stated that all the political
+revolutions do not matter a jot to these doves, and there is nothing
+either in the ancient pile they inhabit or in the free realms of air
+around it, to limit their sway. They remain undisputed masters of the
+place.
+
+Away we go once more. Pez begins to put the geographical notions he
+has acquired from the books of Jules Verne yet further into practice.
+At every step he stops to say to me, "Now we are making our way
+northward.--We shall undoubtedly soon find a road or trail on our
+right, leading to the west.--There is no cause to be alarmed in
+descending this winding stairway to the second story.--Good, it is
+done! Well, bless me! where are we now? I don't see the main dome any
+longer, not so much as a lightning-rod of it.--We are in the realms of
+the feebly flickering gas once more.--Suppose we ascend again by this
+other stairway luckily just at hand. What now? Well, here we are back
+again in the eastward wing and nothing else, just where we were
+before. Are we? no, yes; see, down there in the court the big dome is
+still on our right. There's a regular grove of chimney stacks. You may
+believe it or not, but this sort of thing begins to make my head swim;
+it seems as if the whole place gave a lurch now and then, like a ship
+at sea.--The fountain must be over that way, do you see? for the maids
+are coming and going from there with their pitchers.--Oh well, I for
+one give the whole thing up. We want a guide, and an expert, or we'll
+never get out of this. I can't take another step; we've walked miles
+and I can't stand on my legs.--Hey, there, halloo! send us a
+guide!--Oh for a guide! Get me out of this infernal tangle
+quickly!"...
+
+We came at last to Bringas's apartment. When we got there, we
+understood how we must have passed it, earlier, without knowing it,
+for its number was quite rubbed out and invisible.
+
+                                Translation of William Henry Bishop.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCIS GALTON
+
+(1822-)
+
+
+The modern doctrine of heredity regards man less as an individual than
+as a link in a series, involuntarily inheriting and transmitting a
+number of peculiarities, physical and mental. The general acceptance
+of this doctrine would necessitate a modification of popular ethical
+conceptions, and consequently of social conditions. Except Darwin,
+probably no one has done so much to place the doctrine on a scientific
+basis as Francis Galton, whose brilliant researches have sought to
+establish the hereditary nature of psychical as well as physical
+qualities.
+
+Mr. Galton first took up the subject of the transmissibility of
+intellectual gifts in his 'Hereditary Genius' (1869). An examination
+of the relationships of the judges of England for a period of two
+hundred years, of the statesmen of the time of George III., of the
+premiers of the last one hundred years, and of a certain selection of
+divines and modern scholars, together with the kindred of the most
+illustrious commanders, men of letters and science, poets, painters,
+and musicians of all times and nations, resulted in his conclusion
+that man's mental abilities are derived by inheritance under exactly
+the same limitations as are the forms and features of the whole
+organic world. Mr. Galton argued that, as it is practicable to produce
+a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several
+consecutive generations, the State ought to encourage by dowries and
+other artificial means such marriages as make for the elevation of the
+race.
+
+Having set forth the hereditary nature of general intellectual
+ability, he attempts to discover what particular qualities commonly
+combine to form genius, and whether they also are transmissible.
+'English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture' (1874) was a
+summary of the results obtained from inquiries addressed to the most
+eminent scientific men of England, respecting the circumstances of
+heredity and environment which might have been influential in
+directing them toward their careers. One hundred and eighty persons
+were questioned. From the replies it appeared that in the order of
+their prevalence, the chief qualities that commonly unite to form
+scientific genius are energy both of body and mind; good health; great
+independence of character; tenacity of purpose; practical business
+habits; and strong innate tastes for science generally, or for some
+branch of it. The replies indicated the hereditary character of the
+qualities in question, showing incidentally that in the matter of
+heredity the influence of the father is greater than that of the
+mother. It would have been interesting to have had the results of
+similar inquiries in the case of other classes of eminent
+persons,--statesmen, lawyers, poets, divines, etc. However, it is
+problematical whether other classes would have entered so heartily
+into the spirit of the inquiry, and given such full and frank replies.
+
+Large variation in individuals from their parents is, he argues, not
+only not incompatible with the strict doctrine of heredity, but is a
+consequence of it wherever the breed is impure. Likewise, abnormal
+attributes of individual parents are less transmissible than the
+general characteristics of the family. Both these influences operate
+to deprive the science of heredity of the certainty of prediction in
+individual cases. The latter influence--_i. e._, the law of
+reversion--is made the subject of a separate inquiry in the volume
+entitled 'Natural Inheritance' (1889).
+
+In 'Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development' (1883), he
+described a method of accurately measuring mental processes, such as
+sensation, volition, the formation of elementary judgments, and the
+estimation of numbers; suggested composite photography as a means of
+studying the physiognomy of criminal and other classes; treated the
+subject of heredity in crime; and discussed the mental process of
+visualizing.
+
+'Finger Prints' (1892) is a study from the point of view of heredity
+of the patterns observed in the skin of finger-tips. These patterns
+are not only hereditary, but also furnish a certain means of
+identification--an idea improved in Mark Twain's story of 'Pudd'nhead
+Wilson.'
+
+Mr. Galton is himself an example of the heredity of genius, being a
+grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the author of 'Zoonomia,' and a cousin of
+Charles Darwin. Born near Birmingham in 1822, he studied some time at
+Birmingham Hospital and at King's College, London, with the intention
+of entering the medical profession; but abandoned this design, and was
+graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. He soon after made
+two journeys of exploration in Africa, the latter of which is
+described in his 'Narrative of an Explorer in South Africa' (1853). An
+indirect result of these journeys was 'The Art of Travel; or Shifts
+and Contrivances in Wild Countries' (1855).
+
+'Meteorographica' (1863) is noteworthy as the first attempt ever made
+to represent in charts on a large scale the progress of the weather,
+and on account of the theory of anti-cyclones which Mr. Galton
+advances in it.
+
+Although strictly scientific in aim and method, Mr. Galton's writings,
+particularly those on heredity, appeal to all classes of readers and
+possess a distinct literary value. One may admire in them simplicity
+and purity of diction, animation of style, fertility in the
+construction of theory, resourcefulness in the search for proof, and a
+fine enthusiasm for the subject under consideration.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPARATIVE WORTH OF DIFFERENT RACES
+
+From 'Hereditary Genius'
+
+
+Every long-established race has necessarily its peculiar fitness for
+the conditions under which it has lived, owing to the sure operation
+of Darwin's law of natural selection. However, I am not much concerned
+for the present with the greater part of those aptitudes, but only
+with such as are available in some form or other of high civilization.
+We may reckon upon the advent of a time when civilization, which is
+now sparse and feeble and far more superficial than it is vaunted to
+be, shall overspread the globe. Ultimately it is sure to do so,
+because civilization is the necessary fruit of high intelligence when
+found in a social animal, and there is no plainer lesson to be read
+off the face of Nature than that the result of the operation of her
+laws is to evoke intelligence in connection with sociability.
+Intelligence is as much an advantage to an animal as physical strength
+or any other natural gift; and therefore, out of two varieties of any
+race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most
+intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life.
+Similarly, among animals as intelligent as man, the most social race
+is sure to prevail, other qualities being equal.
+
+Under even a very moderate form of material civilization, a vast
+number of aptitudes acquired through the "survivorship of the fittest"
+and the unsparing destruction of the unfit, for hundreds of
+generations, have become as obsolete as the old mail-coach habits and
+customs since the establishment of railroads, and there is not the
+slightest use in attempting to preserve them; they are hindrances, and
+not gains, to civilization. I shall refer to some of these a little
+further on, but I will first speak of the qualities needed in
+civilized society. They are, speaking generally, such as will enable a
+race to supply a large contingent to the various groups of eminent men
+of whom I have treated in my several chapters. Without going so far as
+to say that this very convenient test is perfectly fair, we are at all
+events justified in making considerable use of it, as I will do in the
+estimates I am about to give.
+
+In comparing the worth of different races, I shall make frequent use
+of the law of deviation from an average, to which I have already been
+much beholden; and to save the reader's time and patience, I propose
+to act upon an assumption that would require a good deal of discussion
+to limit, and to which the reader may at first demur, but which cannot
+lead to any error of importance in a rough provisional inquiry. I
+shall assume that the _intervals_ between the grades of ability are
+the _same_ in all the races.... I know this cannot be strictly true,
+for it would be in defiance of analogy if the variability of all races
+were precisely the same; but on the other hand, there is good reason
+to expect that the error introduced by the assumption cannot sensibly
+affect the off-hand results for which alone I propose to employ it;
+moreover, the rough data I shall adduce will go far to show the
+justice of this expectation.
+
+Let us then compare the negro race with the Anglo-Saxon, with respect
+to those qualities alone which are capable of producing judges,
+statesmen, commanders, men of literature and science, poets, artists,
+and divines. If the negro race in America had been affected by no
+social disabilities, a comparison of their achievements with those of
+the whites in their several branches of intellectual effort, having
+regard to the total number of their respective populations, would give
+the necessary information. As matters stand, we must be content with
+much rougher data.
+
+First, the negro race has occasionally, but very rarely, produced such
+men as Toussaint L'Ouverture....
+
+Secondly, the negro race is by no means wholly deficient in men
+capable of becoming good factors, thriving merchants, and otherwise
+considerably raised above the average of whites....
+
+Thirdly, we may compare, but with much caution, the relative position
+of negroes in their native country with that of the travelers who
+visit them. The latter no doubt bring with them the knowledge current
+in civilized lands, but that is an advantage of less importance than
+we are apt to suppose. The native chief has as good an education in
+the art of ruling men as can be desired; he is continually exercised
+in personal government, and usually maintains his place by the
+ascendency of his character, shown every day over his subjects and
+rivals. A traveler in wild countries also fills to a certain degree
+the position of a commander, and has to confront native chiefs at
+every inhabited place. The result is familiar enough--the white
+traveler almost invariably holds his own in their presence. It is
+seldom that we hear of a white traveler meeting with a black chief
+whom he feels to be the better man. I have often discussed this
+subject with competent persons, and can only recall a few cases of the
+inferiority of the white man,--certainly not more than might be
+ascribed to an average actual difference of three grades, of which one
+may be due to the relative demerits of native education, and the
+remaining two to a difference in natural gifts.
+
+Fourthly, the number among the negroes of those whom we should call
+half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants
+in America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this
+fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in
+their own matters were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like as
+frequently to make me ashamed of my own species. I do not think it any
+exaggeration to say that their _c_ is as low as our _e_, which would
+be a difference of two grades, as before. I have no information as to
+actual idiocy among the negroes--I mean, of course, of that class of
+idiocy which is not due to disease.
+
+The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. I
+possess a few serviceable data about the natural capacity of the
+Australian, but not sufficient to induce me to invite the reader to
+consider them.
+
+The average standard of the Lowland Scotch and the English North
+Country men is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior to that of the
+ordinary English, because the number of the former who attain to
+eminence is far greater than the proportionate number of their race
+would have led us to expect. The same superiority is distinctly shown
+by a comparison of the well-being of the masses of the population; for
+the Scotch laborer is much less of a drudge than the Englishman of the
+Midland counties--he does his work better, and "lives his life"
+besides. The peasant women of Northumberland work all day in the
+fields, and are not broken down by the work; on the contrary, they
+take a pride in their effective labor as girls, and when married they
+attend well to the comfort of their homes. It is perfectly distressing
+to me to witness the draggled, drudged, mean look of the mass of
+individuals, especially of the women, that one meets in the streets of
+London and other purely English towns. The conditions of their life
+seem too hard for their constitutions, and to be crushing them into
+degeneracy.
+
+The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the
+ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal
+departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed and in many
+respects unequaled, and partly because the population that gave birth
+to the creators of those masterpieces was very small. Of the various
+Greek sub-races, that of Attica was the ablest, and she was no doubt
+largely indebted to the following cause for her superiority: Athens
+opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her
+social life was such that none but very able men could take any
+pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men
+of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus
+by a system of partly unconscious selection she built up a magnificent
+breed of human animals, which in the space of one century--viz.,
+between 530 and 430 B. C.--produced the following illustrious persons,
+fourteen in number:--
+
+_Statesmen and Commanders._--Themistocles (mother an alien),
+Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon (son of Miltiades), Pericles (son of
+Xanthippus, the victor at Mycale).
+
+_Literary and Scientific Men._--Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato.
+
+_Poets._--AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.
+
+_Sculptor._--Phidias.
+
+We are able to make a closely approximate estimate of the population
+that produced these men, because the number of the inhabitants of
+Attica has been a matter of frequent inquiry, and critics appear at
+length to be quite agreed in the general results.... The average
+ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very
+nearly two grades higher than our own--that is, about as much as our
+race is above that of the African negro. This estimate, which may seem
+prodigious to some, is confirmed by the quick intelligence and high
+culture of the Athenian commonalty, before whom literary works were
+recited, and works of art exhibited, of a far more severe character
+than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the
+calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the
+contents of a railway book-stall.
+
+We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this
+marvelously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly
+lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more
+ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and
+consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population
+were of a heterogeneous class. In a small sea-bordered country, where
+emigration and immigration are constantly going on, and where the
+manners are as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of
+which I speak, the purity of a race would necessarily fail. It can be
+therefore no surprise to us, though it has been a severe misfortune to
+humanity, that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if
+it had maintained its excellence, and had multiplied and spread over
+large countries, displacing inferior populations (which it well might
+have done, for it was exceedingly prolific), it would assuredly have
+accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree
+that transcends our powers of imagination.
+
+If we could raise the average standard of our race only one grade,
+what vast changes would be produced! The number of men of natural
+gifts equal to those of the eminent men of the present day would be
+necessarily increased more than tenfold;... but far more important to
+the progress of civilization would be the increase in the yet higher
+orders of intellect. We know how intimately the course of events is
+dependent on the thoughts of a few illustrious men. If the first-rate
+men in the different groups had never been born, even if those among
+them who have a place in my appendices on account of their hereditary
+gifts had never existed, the world would be very different to what it
+is....
+
+It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations,
+that the average standard of ability of the present time should be
+raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course
+of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions
+have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have
+had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the
+process of natural selection, whenever the changes were sufficiently
+slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them
+altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding.
+The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed
+under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization,
+reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world
+has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected
+over such wide areas, and with such startling rapidity, as in the case
+of savage man. In the North-American continent, in the West-Indian
+islands, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, and Van
+Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely
+swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure
+of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they
+were incapable of supporting. And we too, the foremost laborers in
+creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable
+of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralization,
+communication, and culture, call for more brains and mental stamina
+than the average of our race possess. We are in crying want for a
+greater fund of ability in all stations of life; for neither the
+classes of statesmen, philosophers, artisans, nor laborers are up to
+the modern complexity of their several professions. An extended
+civilization like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary
+statesmen or philosophers of our present race are capable of dealing
+with, and it exacts more intelligent work than our ordinary artisans
+and laborers are capable of performing. Our race is overweighted, and
+appears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed
+its powers....
+
+When the severity of the struggle for existence is not too great for
+the powers of the race, its action is healthy and conservative;
+otherwise it is deadly, just as we may see exemplified in the scanty,
+wretched vegetation that leads a precarious existence near the summer
+snow line of the Alps, and disappears altogether a little higher up.
+We want as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket to which we
+are henceforth to be exposed, and as good brains as possible to
+contrive machinery, for modern life to work more smoothly than at
+present. We can in some degree raise the nature of man to a level with
+the new conditions imposed upon his existence; and we can also in some
+degree modify the conditions to suit his nature. It is clearly right
+that both these powers should be exerted, with the view of bringing
+his nature and the conditions of his existence into as close harmony
+as possible.
+
+In proportion as the world becomes filled with mankind, the relations
+of society necessarily increase in complexity, and the nomadic
+disposition found in most barbarians becomes unsuitable to the novel
+conditions. There is a most unusual unanimity in respect to the causes
+of incapacity of savages for civilization, among writers on those
+hunting and migratory nations who are brought into contact with
+advancing colonization, and perish, as they invariably do, by the
+contact. They tell us that the labor of such men is neither constant
+nor steady; that the love of a wandering, independent life prevents
+their settling anywhere to work, except for a short time, when urged
+by want and encouraged by kind treatment. Meadows says that the
+Chinese call the barbarous races on their borders by a phrase which
+means "hither and thither," "not fixed." And any amount of evidence
+might be adduced, to show how deeply Bohemian habits of one kind or
+another were ingrained in the nature of the men who inhabited most
+parts of the earth, now overspread by the Anglo-Saxon and other
+civilized races. Luckily there is still room for adventure, and a man
+who feels the cravings of a roving, adventurous spirit to be too
+strong for resistance, may yet find a legitimate outlet for it in the
+colonies, in the army, or on board ship. But such a spirit is, on the
+whole, an heirloom that brings more impatient restlessness and beating
+of the wings against cage bars, than persons of more civilized
+characters can readily comprehend, and it is directly at war with the
+more modern portion of our moral natures. If a man be purely a nomad,
+he has only to be nomadic and his instinct is satisfied; but no
+Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purely nomadic. The most so
+among them have also inherited many civilized cravings that are
+necessarily starved when they become wanderers, in the same way as the
+wandering instincts are starved when they are settled at home.
+Consequently their nature has opposite wants, which can never be
+satisfied except by chance, through some very exceptional turn of
+circumstances. This is a serious calamity; and as the Bohemianism in
+the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes the
+happier for mankind. The social requirements of English life are
+steadily destroying it. No man who only works by fits and starts is
+able to obtain his living nowadays, for he has not a chance of
+thriving in competition with steady workmen. If his nature revolts
+against the monotony of daily labor, he is tempted to the
+public-house, to intemperance, and it may be to poaching, and to much
+more serious crime; otherwise he banishes himself from our shores. In
+the first case, he is unlikely to leave as many children as men of
+more domestic and marrying habits; and in the second case, his breed
+is wholly lost to England. By this steady riddance of the Bohemian
+spirit of our race, the artisan part of our population is slowly
+becoming bred to its duties, and the primary qualities of the typical
+modern British workman are already the very opposite of those of the
+nomad. What they are now was well described by Mr. Chadwick as
+consisting of "great bodily strength, applied under the command of a
+steady, persevering will; mental self-contentedness; impassibility to
+external irrelevant impressions, which carries them through the
+continued repetition of toilsome labor, 'steady as time.'"
+
+It is curious to remark how unimportant to modern civilization has
+become the once famous and thoroughbred-looking Norman. The type of
+his features, which is probably in some degree correlated with his
+peculiar form of adventurous disposition, is no longer characteristic
+of our rulers, and is rarely found among celebrities of the present
+day; it is more often met with among the undistinguished members of
+highly born families, and especially among the less conspicuous
+officers of the army. Modern leading men in all paths of eminence, as
+may easily be seen in a collection of photographs, are of a coarser
+and more robust breed: less excitable and dashing, but endowed with
+far more ruggedness and real vigor. Such also is the case as regards
+the German portion of the Austrian nation....
+
+Much more alien to the genius of an enlightened civilization than the
+nomadic habit is the impulsive and uncontrolled nature of the savage.
+A civilized man must bear and forbear; he must keep before his mind
+the claims of the morrow as clearly as those of the passing minute; of
+the absent as well as of the present. This is the most trying of the
+new conditions imposed on man by civilization, and the one that makes
+it hopeless for any but exceptional natures among savages to live
+under them. The instinct of a savage is admirably consonant with the
+needs of savage life; every day he is in danger through transient
+causes; he lives from hand to mouth, in the hour and for the hour,
+without care for the past or forethought for the future: but such an
+instinct is utterly at fault in civilized life. The half-reclaimed
+savage, being unable to deal with more subjects of consideration than
+are directly before him, is continually doing acts through mere
+maladroitness and incapacity, at which he is afterwards deeply grieved
+and annoyed. The nearer inducements always seem to him, through his
+uncorrected sense of moral perspective, to be incomparably larger than
+others of the same actual size but more remote; consequently, when the
+temptation of the moment has been yielded to and passed away, and its
+bitter result comes in its turn before the man, he is amazed and
+remorseful at his past weakness. It seems incredible that he should
+have done that yesterday which to-day seems so silly, so unjust, and
+so unkindly. The newly reclaimed barbarian, with the impulsive,
+unstable nature of the savage, when he also chances to be gifted with
+a peculiarly generous and affectionate disposition, is of all others
+the man most oppressed with the sense of sin.
+
+Now, it is a just assertion, and a common theme of moralists of many
+creeds, that man, such as we find him, is born with an imperfect
+nature. He has lofty aspirations, but there is a weakness in his
+disposition which incapacitates him from carrying his nobler purposes
+into effect. He sees that some particular course of action is his
+duty, and should be his delight; but his inclinations are fickle and
+base, and do not conform to his better judgment. The whole moral
+nature of man is tainted with sin, which prevents him from doing the
+things he knows to be right.
+
+The explanation I offer to this apparent anomaly seems perfectly
+satisfactory from a scientific point of view. It is neither more nor
+less than that the development of our nature, whether under Darwin's
+law of natural selection or through the effects of changed ancestral
+habits, has not yet overtaken the development of our moral
+civilization. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not
+to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already
+have become molded into accordance with his very recent advance. We,
+men of the present centuries, are like animals suddenly transplanted
+among new conditions of climate and of food: our instincts fail us
+under the altered circumstances.
+
+My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old
+civilizations are far less sensible than recent converts from
+barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The
+conscience of a negro is aghast at his own wild, impulsive nature, and
+is easily stirred by a preacher; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle
+the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.
+
+The sense of original sin would show, according to my theory, not that
+man was fallen from high estate, but that he was rising in moral
+culture with more rapidity than the nature of his race could follow.
+My view is corroborated by the conclusion reached at the end of each
+of the many independent lines of ethnological research--that the human
+race were utter savages in the beginning; and that after myriads of
+years of barbarism, man has but very recently found his way into the
+paths of morality and civilization.
+
+
+
+
+ARNE GARBORG
+
+(1851-)
+
+
+Arne Garborg is one of the most potent forces in the new school of
+Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is
+more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly
+different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the
+result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the
+foundations of a literature essentially Norse.
+
+The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social
+conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates
+the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this
+social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he
+himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental
+idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the
+paths. Where Bjoernson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life
+might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the
+outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a
+storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material
+way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had
+held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a
+consequence of his books.
+
+Arne Garborg was born at Jaederen, in the southwestern part of Norway,
+January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of
+his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village
+schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom
+religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived,
+Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with
+conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction
+led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of
+his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he
+reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was
+extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only
+models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong
+tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a
+school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in
+1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student
+was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and
+indeed sometimes actual want.
+
+He had previously, in Risoer, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a
+small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school
+affairs; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the
+Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had
+qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with
+the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the
+Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really
+the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early
+enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional
+articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book,
+a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'
+
+The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national
+language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in
+Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary
+medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen
+appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon
+the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and
+ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief
+propagandist of the new speech.
+
+His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously
+in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the
+vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism
+and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but
+then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own
+environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story.
+The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was
+looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and
+thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just
+punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper,
+is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of
+unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find
+most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives,
+and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!
+
+Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883),
+deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no
+rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked;
+and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result
+from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to
+which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book,
+again, is to a degree autobiographical; for Garborg, as has been said,
+is himself peasant, and he has fought the fight and suffered the
+anguish of the new culture attained with incalculable sacrifice.
+'Peasant Students' is undoubtedly his greatest work. Nowhere else has
+he indicated more clearly his seriousness of purpose, or worked out
+his theme with more effectiveness. The hero, Daniel Braut, is the
+representative of the ideal student, a son of the people who shall
+strive for "poetry and the soul" and introduce the elements of culture
+among his class. Manual labor is his aversion; and at last, forced by
+the weakness of his nature and the necessity of his poverty, he goes
+over to the ranks of philistinism, marries a woman of property, and
+studies theology. Both books are stories of high ideals and
+humiliating compromises. The author's pessimism is in the ascendant,
+and in the end the lower nature conquers.
+
+In 'Mannfolk' (1886) he takes up a different theme, the relation of
+the sexes, a question which he treats with startling frankness.
+Garborg is a realist in so far that he prefers to depict life as it
+is, well knowing that fiction cannot approach truth in point of
+interest. He bears true testimony of what he sees and knows, but his
+realism is very far removed from the naturalism of the French school.
+
+Following 'Peasant Students' appeared in 1884 'Forteljinger og Sogar'
+(Narratives and Tales), a volume of stories dealing sometimes with
+subjects generally proscribed. Of his other works the most important
+are the narrative 'Hjaa ho Mor' (With Mama), 'Kolbotnbrev og andre
+Skildringar' (Kolbotn Letters and Other Sketches: 1890), the novels
+'Traette Maend' (Weary Souls: 1891), 'Fred' (Peace: 1893), and the drama
+'Uforsonlige' (The Irreconcilables: 1888).
+
+After being deprived of his government position upon the publication
+of 'Mannfolk,' Arne Garborg retired with his wife and child into the
+solitude of the mountains, where for two years he lived and wrote in
+his saeter hut; but at last, overcome by the loneliness of this
+isolated life, he left Norway and settled in Germany.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONFLICT OF THE CREEDS
+
+From 'A Freethinker'
+
+
+The noise of carriage wheels increased. The carriage drove up before
+the door, and all the people of the parsonage sprang up in joy. Ragna
+however reddened somewhat. A minute after, both Hans Vangen and
+Eystein Hauk stood in the room. Hans embraced his parents and his
+sister, and on the surface was happy; Hauk greeted them kindly and
+warmly like an acquaintance of the family, and bowed deep before
+Ragna.
+
+"A good evening to you, and a merry Christmas-time!" called out Hans.
+"Here is the great foreign traveler and wise man Eystein Hauk, and
+here"--he pointed to the chaplain--"is the strict man of God, Balle;
+chaplain now, pastor later on, finally bishop; a well-founded
+theologian and a true support to the Church in these distracted times.
+It will be well with you if you do not fall into a quarrel about
+belief."
+
+There was talking and laughing; the pastor's wife poured out wine; the
+new-comers sat down; the table was quickly set, and then they went
+into the dining-room, where Christmas grits and Christmas fish stood
+smoking in a great dish and "awaited the help of the people." The
+pastor read a blessing, which was not listened to with any further
+devoutness. Ragna and Balle sat for the most part and looked at Hauk,
+but Hauk looked at Ragna, and the pastor's wife said of Hans how he
+had grown during the past year, and how his good looks and his
+affability had improved.
+
+The one who talked most at the table was Hans. Hauk was rather silent.
+The pastor asked him in a few words about his travels abroad; he
+answered promptly but shortly, and often in such a cleverly turned way
+of speaking that it was difficult to find out his real meaning.
+
+The chaplain, too, would have liked to hear about foreign lands. What
+was the state of the Christian religion in France?--Well, it was
+various. It was there as here: there were people of all sorts.--But
+was not the great majority unchristian?--Well, of enlightened and
+learned people it was, to be sure, the smallest part who strictly
+could be called Christians.--But with morals? Was there not a great
+deal of social viciousness and impropriety?--Well, if it were only
+considered under certain conditions, in certain cities, it was
+probably there as in other places.--Indeed!--Balle, rebuffed, looked
+away from Hauk, and did not talk with him afterward.
+
+When they left the table there was set out dessert, with wine, and
+pipes were also brought. The conversation went on as before, but it
+was none the less Hans who talked most. He was a fresh, happy fellow.
+His mother sat and found pleasure in looking at him. The pastor and
+Balle sat and smoked; glanced now and then at Hauk, who was a little
+way off at a smaller table, talking small-talk with Ragna. The pastor
+had become more silent, and Balle looked as if he little liked the
+state of things, although he tried to control himself. Hans understood
+this, and laughed.
+
+"Do not bother yourself about Hauk," said he. "He has been in Paris
+and has learned French manners, and consequently he likes women's
+society best; but even if he is a little grand, he will quickly become
+Norse again, keep to his pipe and his glass, and let the women take
+care of themselves."
+
+Balle bit his lips; the pastor smiled a little. "Young people are more
+bashful here in Norway," said he. "That is true," he continued. "You
+have read the new novel 'Virginia,' that the people have waited so
+long for?"
+
+"'Virginia'?--pfh! that is a vile book," answered Hans, and smiled.
+
+"Vile?" said the chaplain questioningly.
+
+"It is a scandalous book! says Christiania. It has set the whole town
+on end. It works destruction upon marriage, they say; upon morals,
+upon society. I have never seen Christiania so moral as in these
+days."
+
+"H'm!" said Balle; "Christiania is on the whole a moral town."
+
+"It is at this time! The young poets are happy for all the days of
+their life. The men forbid the women to read the book, and the women
+forbid their daughters--"
+
+"And so they all read it together?" said the pastor.
+
+"Certainly! The women read it and say, 'Paugh! the poets do not know
+life.' The daughters, the poor dear angels, they read it and say,
+'Dear me, is that anything? Have we not read worse books than that?'"
+
+"But tell us, then, what the book is about?" said the pastor.
+
+"It is about--that married people shall love each other," said Hans
+stoutly.
+
+"Oho! free love!" called out the chaplain.
+
+"Certainly! Free love! 'All true love is free,' says the fool-hardy
+fellow of a poet."
+
+"Do you hear that, pastor?" said Balle.
+
+"If our own poets also take it up, let us have a care! Then he
+recognizes 'free thought'; and what then?" asked the chaplain.
+
+"That is true," replied Hans. "'All thoughts are free,' he says, 'and
+not merely duty free.'"
+
+"Of course he does not believe in God?"
+
+"I doubt it; but even that is not the worst."
+
+"Not the--"
+
+"No, for there are many people in Christiania who do not believe in
+God. But these poets do not even believe in the Devil!" Hans laughed
+like a child at the face that the chaplain made; the pastor looked
+severely at Hans, who cast down his eyes and was silent.
+
+"Worthless fruit," sighed the chaplain. "Our poets have hitherto kept
+themselves free from these godless thoughts, even if they have not
+always had the right opinion of Christianity, and particularly have
+taken up with the confusions of Grundtvigianism; but now, now it has
+taken another path. Do you see the spirit of revolt, pastor? Do you
+hear how they rise and tear asunder all its bonds; how opposition
+arises against all that is high and holy, and they storm even against
+the foundations of society?"
+
+"May God help us!" sighed the pastor. "It does not look right. Is
+there anything new in the newspapers?" he asked, as if to get away
+from a conversation that plainly oppressed him.
+
+Hans ran out, and came quickly in again with the newspapers. Such of
+these as were French he took for himself, the rest he gave to Balle.
+
+"Do you see, father?" said Hans with the mien of a schoolmaster. "If
+you will have politics, you must turn to France. All other politics
+are merely an echo of theirs. France is Europe. France is the world!"
+
+"Do you hear, pastor?" said Balle. "Do you hear how the French spirit
+spreads and increases in power? the French spirit, which has always
+been one and the same with rationalism and revolution?"
+
+"Here is an article that will do Balle good!" called out Hans. "It
+does not assume the good tone or prattle tediously like our Norse
+newspaper articles. There is fire and burning in it; you recognize
+something like a clenched fist back of the words, prepared for
+everything upon which it may hit. That is what I call politics!"
+
+"Oh, you are a foolish fellow," said the pastor. "Come, out with it!"
+
+Hans read an article against the priestly party or clericals, and the
+piece was severely radical. It was particularly to the effect that the
+clergy and Christianity must be ousted from the public schools, if
+thinkers were to be really for a genuine and sound popular education.
+Christianity had already done what it could do; hereafter it lay
+merely in the way. "Freedom and self-government" was the war-cry now,
+for this generation. They might be fair enough, many of the dreams
+which the new time compelled us to abandon; but light and life and
+truth were ten times fairer than all dreams.
+
+The chaplain sat and sulked, and looked into one of the Norse papers.
+"Here stands the same," said he. "No, but--? Yes, the same, and yet
+not the same. The Norse paper has cut out or changed all that treats
+directly of Christianity; the rest is the same."
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Hans.
+
+"Yes, they are as wise as serpents," sighed the chaplain. "Here may
+plainly be seen how the matter stands. It is hidden away in politics,
+but the spirit they cannot conceal; it is precisely the same French
+spirit of hell, the spirit of revolt, the spirit of the Devil, which
+lifts itself against even the living God. Do you see that, pastor? Do
+you see how wholly these 'freedom politics,' as they are called, are
+held up and impregnated with this godless spirit of revolt? In truth,
+it becomes more and more clear that it is the part of us, the watchmen
+of Zion,--more now than ever before,--to watch and pray."
+
+The pastor sat and meditated. He looked oppressed and sorrowful. It
+was too quiet for Hans: he moved away to Hauk and Ragna. The chaplain
+appeared to like this, and became more calm.
+
+"Dear pastor," said he after a while, "just as surely as there is
+truth in our work,--yes, this question presses itself more and more in
+upon me,--as surely as there is truth in our work: that we shall watch
+over God's house and people,--we _cannot_ remain silent and be calm
+when we see a spirit like this coming bearing in upon us--a spirit
+which is directly founded upon heathenism, and so plainly shows its
+Satanic origin. Shall it be? Can we answer for that before our Lord
+and God?"
+
+The pastor was silent. He was in great doubt and uncertainty of mind.
+"I do not believe that it is right to bring politics into the house of
+God," said he at last.
+
+"Politics, no! But this is not politics; this is a spirit of the
+times, a view of life which takes the outward garb of politics, but at
+the bottom is merely a new outbreak of the same old heathenism that
+the Church at all times has had to contend with. I, for my part, do
+not believe that I can keep silent with a quiet conscience."
+
+The pastor held his peace and thought. "This is a hard question," he
+said finally. "May our Lord give us wisdom!"
+
+"Amen," said the chaplain....
+
+That night the old pastor did not sleep well. He walked up and down
+his chamber and thought. "When it comes to the point," said he to
+himself, "Balle is right; there _is_ something bad and evil in the
+spirit of the time; there _is_ something devilish. Merely look, now,
+at this Eystein Hauk, this clever fine fellow: he is not to be got at.
+He is frozen to ice and hardened to steel, slippery and smooth as a
+serpent. There came such an uncanny spirit from him that he made me
+downright sick: no respect, no veneration even for his own father; God
+knows how he can hold fast to his Christian faith. They call it
+freedom, humanity; but it is not that. It is hate, venom, bad blood.
+They will tear from them all bonds, as Balle says, raise a
+revolt--revolt against all that is beautiful and good, against God,
+against belief. H'm! Build the State, this whole earthly life, upon a
+heathen foundation! Sever connection with Christianity, cast the
+Church away from them like old trash. That is terrible! And free love,
+free thought--the Christian religion out of the schools--no! that is
+Satan himself who rages. Free thoughts in my time were not so: they
+were warm and beautiful; there was heart in them; they made us good
+and happy." He shook himself, as if to throw off a chill. Should one
+be silent at such things? Should one look quietly on while this evil
+spirit eats itself in among the people? or should one, like a disciple
+of God, lift up the sword of the Word and the Spirit against this
+poisonous basilisk?
+
+He read in the Bible and in Luther. Then he got up again and walked.
+The clock struck hour after hour, but the old man did not hear it. He
+thought only of the heavy responsibility. Was it not to profane the
+house of God and the holy office, to drag the struggle and strife of
+the day into it? Was he not set to watch over word and teaching, but
+not to be a judge in the world's disputes? But of his flock, the
+people of the Church, the Bride of Christ, whom he should watch, but
+who stood in the midst of a wicked world, and whose souls were harmed
+when such evil gusts blew? Would not every soul at the Judgment Day be
+demanded at his hands? And was he a good shepherd, who indeed kept
+watch against the wolf when the wolf came having on his right garb,
+but looked on and was silent when he came clothed in sheep's garments
+and pretended to belong among the good? He read anew in Luther. At
+last he knelt down and prayed for a long time, and ended with a
+fervent and heartfelt "Our Father."
+
+Then he arose as if freed from doubt, looked meekly up to heaven, and
+said, "As thou wilt, O Lord!" He seated himself in his arm-chair,
+weary but happy, and fell asleep for a while. Presently, however, the
+day grew gray in the east and he awoke. He read the morning prayers to
+himself, chose his text, and thought about the sermon. When the bell
+began to ring he went to church. He was pale, but calm and kindly. The
+farmers looked at him and greeted him more warmly than usual. The
+pastor's wife and Ragna came shortly after; Hans and Eystein did not
+arrive at the church until the pastor stood in the pulpit.
+
+The Christmas sermon was fervid and good. He spoke about the angels'
+song, "Peace on earth." They had seldom heard the old man preach so
+well. But at the end came a turn in the thought that caused some
+astonishment. It was about politics.
+
+"Dear Christians," he said, "how is it in our days with 'peace on
+earth'? Ah, my brothers, we know that all too well. Peace has gone
+from us. It has vanished like a beautiful evening cloud. Evil powers
+rise up in these hours. The Devil is abroad, and tempts anew mankind
+to eat of the tree of knowledge and to tear themselves loose from God.
+Take heed, take heed, dear brothers! Take heed of the false prophets,
+who proclaim a new gospel and promise you 'freedom' and
+'enlightenment,' and all that is good,--yes, promise you righteousness
+and power, if you will eat of the forbidden tree. They give themselves
+out for sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. They promise you
+freedom, but they give you thraldom, the thraldom of sin, which is the
+worst of all. They promise you blessings and joy, but they steal you
+away from Him who alone has blessings and freedom for our poor race.
+They promise you security and defense against all tyranny and
+oppression, but they give you gladly into his power who is the father
+of all tyranny and of all evil; he who is the destroyer of man from
+the beginning. Dear Christians, let us watch and pray! Let us prove
+the spirit, whether it is from God! Let us harden our ears and our
+hearts against false voices and magic songs that deceive, which come
+to us out of the dark chasms and abysses in this wicked world! Let us
+be fearful of this wild and sinful thought of freedom, that from Adam
+down has been the deep and true source of all our woe! Let us pray for
+'peace on earth,' for only then can our Lord God have consideration
+for mankind." With this he ended his sermon.
+
+          Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
+          by William H. Carpenter
+
+
+
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+(1860-)
+
+[Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND]
+
+
+Hamlin Garland is a favorable example of a class of young writers
+which is coming to the fore in the Middle West of the United
+States,--fresh, original, full of faith and energy, with a robust and
+somewhat aggressive Americanism. In native endowment he is a strong
+man, and his personal character is manly, clean, and high. At times,
+carelessness of technique and lack of taste can be detected in his
+writings, but his strength and spirit make amends for these defects.
+
+Mr. Garland was born September 16th, 1860, in the La Crosse Valley,
+Wisconsin. His family is of Scotch descent,--sturdy farmer folk,
+remarkable for their physical powers. His maternal grandfather was an
+Adventist, with the touch of mysticism that word implies. Garland was
+reared in the picturesque coule country (French _coulee_, a dry
+gulch); living in various Western towns, one of them being the Quaker
+community of Hesper, Iowa. His early education was received from the
+local schools; the unconscious assimilation of the Western ways came
+while he rode horses, herded cattle, and led the wholesome, simple
+open-air life of the middle-class people. Some years were spent in a
+small seminary at Osage, Wisconsin, whence he was graduated at
+twenty-one years of age. His kin moved to Dakota, but Hamlin faced
+Eastward, eager to see the world. Two years of travel and teaching in
+Illinois found him in 1883 "holding down" a Dakota claim--the only
+result of the land boom being a rich field of literary ore. Then in
+1884 he went to Boston, made his headquarters at the Public Library,
+read diligently, taught literature and elocution in the School of
+Oratory, and became one of the literary workers there, remaining until
+1891. Since then he has lectured much throughout the country, and has
+settled in Chicago, his summer home being at West Salem, Wisconsin, in
+the beautiful coule region of his boyhood.
+
+Mr. Garland's main work is in fiction, but he has also tried his hand
+at verse and the essay. His volume 'Crumbling Idols,' published in
+1894, a series of audacious papers in which the doctrine of realism is
+cried up and the appeal to past literary canons made a mock of,
+called out critical abuse and ridicule, and no doubt shows a lack of
+perspective. Yet the book is racy and stimulating in the extreme. The
+volume of poetry, 'Prairie Songs' (1893), has the merit of dealing
+picturesquely and at first hand with Western scenery and life, and
+contains many a stroke of imaginative beauty. Of the half-dozen books
+of tales and longer stories, 'Main-Traveled Roads,' Mr. Garland's
+first collection of short stories, including work as striking as
+anything he has done, gives vivid pastoral pictures of the Mississippi
+Valley life. 'A Little Norsk' (1893), along with its realism in
+sketching frontier scenes, possesses a fine romantic flavor. And 'Rose
+of Dutcher's Coolly' (1895), decidedly his strongest full-length
+fiction, is a delineation of Wisconsin rustic and urban life,
+including a study of Chicago, daringly unconventional, but strong,
+earnest, evidently drawn from the author's deepest experiences and
+convictions. Other books of fiction are 'Jason Edwards,' 'A Member of
+the Third House,' 'A Spoil of Office,' and 'Prairie Folks.'
+
+Mr. Garland's work in its increasing command of art, its understanding
+of and sincere sympathy with the life of the great toiling population
+of the Middle West, and its unmistakable qualities of independence,
+vigor, and ideality, is worthy of warm praise. A rich, large nature is
+felt beneath his fiction. His literary creed is "truth for truth's
+sake," and his conception of his art is broad enough to include love
+of country and belief in his fellow-man.
+
+
+
+
+A SUMMER MOOD
+
+From 'Prairie Songs.' Copyright 1893 by Hamlin Garland, and published
+by Stone & Kimball
+
+
+  Oh, to be lost in the wind and the sun,
+    To be one with the wind and the stream!
+  With never a care while the waters run,
+    With never a thought in my dream.
+  To be part of the robin's lilting call
+    And part of the bobolink's rhyme.
+  Lying close to the shy thrush singing alone,
+    And lapped in the cricket's chime!
+
+  Oh, to live with these beautiful ones!
+    With the lust and the glory of man
+  Lost in the circuit of springtime suns--
+    Submissive as earth and part of her plan;
+  To lie as the snake lies, content in the grass!
+    To drift as the clouds drift, effortless, free,
+  Glad of the power that drives them on,
+    With never a question of wind or sea.
+
+
+
+
+A STORM ON LAKE MICHIGAN
+
+From 'Rose of Dutcher's Coolly.' Copyright 1895 by Hamlin Garland, and
+published by Stone & Kimball
+
+
+As the winter deepened, Rose narrowed the circle of conquest. She no
+longer thought of conquering the world; it came to be the question of
+winning the approbation of one human soul. That is, she wished to win
+the approbation of the world in order that Warren Mason might smile
+and say "Well done!"
+
+She did not reach this state of mind smoothly and easily. On the
+contrary, she had moments when she rebelled at the thought of any
+man's opinion being the greatest good in the world to her. She
+rebelled at the implied inferiority of her position in relation to
+him, and also at the physical bondage implied. In the morning, when
+she was strong, in the midst of some social success, when people
+swarmed about her and men bent deferentially, then she held herself
+like a soldier on a tower, defying capture.
+
+But at night, when the lights were all out, when she felt her
+essential loneliness and weakness and need, when the world seemed cold
+and cruel and selfish,--then it seemed as if the sweetest thing in the
+universe would be to have him open his arms and say "Come!"
+
+There would be rest there, and repose. His judgment, his keen wit, his
+penetrating, powerful influence, made him seem a giant to her; a giant
+who disdained effort and gave out an appearance of indifference and
+lassitude. She had known physical giants in her neighborhood, who
+spoke in soft drawl and slouched lazily in action, but who were
+invincible when aroused.
+
+She imagined she perceived in Mason a mental giant, who assumed
+irresolution and weakness for reasons of his own. He was always off
+duty when she saw him, and bent more upon rest than a display of
+power. Once or twice she saw him roused, and it thrilled her; that
+measured lazy roll of voice changed to a quick, stern snarl, the brows
+lowered, and the big plump face took on battle lines. It was like a
+seemingly shallow pool, suddenly disclosed to be of soundless depths
+by a wind of passion.
+
+The lake had been the refuge of the distracted and restless girl. She
+went to it often in the autumn days, for it rested her from the noise
+of grinding wheels, and screams, and yells. Its smooth rise and fall,
+its sparkle of white-caps, its sailing gulls, filled her with
+delicious pleasure. It soothed her and it roused her also. It gave her
+time to think.
+
+The street disturbed her, left her purposeless and powerless; but out
+there where the ships floated like shadows, and shadows shifted like
+flame, and the wind was keen and sweet,--there she could get her
+mental breath again. She watched it change to wintry desolation, till
+it grew empty of vessels and was lonely as the Arctic Sea; and always
+it was grand and thought-inspiring.
+
+She went out one day in March, when the home longing was upon her and
+when it seemed that the city would be her death. She was tired of her
+food, tired of Mary, tired of her room. Her forehead was knotted
+tensely with pain of life and love--
+
+She cried out with sudden joy, for she had never seen the lake more
+beautiful. Near the shore a great mass of churned and heaving ice and
+snow lay like a robe of shaggy fur. Beyond this the deep water spread,
+a vivid pea-green broken by wide irregular strips of dark purple. In
+the open water by the wall a spatter of steel blue lay like the petals
+of some strange flower, scattered upon the green.
+
+Great splendid clouds developed, marvelously like the clouds of June,
+making the girl's heart swell with memories of summer. They were white
+as wool, these mountainous clouds, and bottomed in violet, and as they
+passed the snow-fields they sent down pink-purple misty shadows, which
+trailed away in splendor toward the green which flamed in bewildering
+beauty beyond. The girl sat like one in a dream, while the wind blew
+the green and purple of the outer sea into fantastic, flitting forms
+which dazzled her eyes like the stream of mingled banners.
+
+Each form seemed more beautiful than the preceding one; each
+combination had such unearthly radiance, her heart ached with
+exquisite sorrow to see it vanish. The girl felt that spring was
+coming on the wing of the southern wind, and the desire to utter her
+passion grew almost into pain.
+
+It had other moods, this mighty spread of water. It could be angry,
+dangerous. Sometimes it rolled sullenly, and convoluted in oily surges
+beneath its coverlid of snow, like a bed of monstrous serpents.
+Sometimes the leaden sky shut down over it, and from the desolate
+northeast a snow-storm rushed, hissing and howling. Sometimes it
+slumbered for days, quiet as a sleeping boa, then awoke and was a
+presence and a voice in the night, fit to make the hardiest tremble.
+
+Rose saw it when it was roused, but she had yet to see it in a frenzy.
+The knowledge of its worst came to her early in May, just before her
+return to the Coule.
+
+The day broke with the wind in the northeast. Rose, lying in her bed,
+could hear the roar of the lake; never before had its voice penetrated
+so far. She sprang up and dressed, eager to see it in such a mood.
+Mary responded sleepily to her call, saying the lake would be there
+after breakfast.
+
+Rose did not regret her eagerness, though it was piercingly cold and
+raw. The sea was already terrific. Its spread of tawny yellow showed
+how it had reached down and laid hold on the sand of its bed. There
+were oily splotches of plum color scattered over it where the wind
+blew it smooth, and it reached to the wild east sky, cold, desolate,
+destructive.
+
+It had a fierce, breathing snarl like a monster at meat. It leaped
+against the sea-wall like a rabid tiger, its sleek and spotted hide
+rolling. Every surge sent a triangular sheet of foam twenty-five feet
+above the wall, yellow and white and shadowed with dull blue; and the
+wind caught it as it rose, and its crest burst into great clouds of
+spray, which sailed across the streets and dashed along the walk like
+rain, making the roadway like a river; while the main body of each
+upleaping wave, falling back astride the wall, crashed like the fall
+of glass, and the next wave met it with a growl of thunderous rage,
+striking it with concave palm with a sound like a cannon's exploding
+roar.
+
+Out of the appalling obscurity to the north, frightened ships scudded
+at intervals, with bare masts bending like fire-trimmed pines. They
+hastened like the homing pigeons, which do not look behind. The
+helmsmen stood grimly at their wheels, with eyes on the harbor ahead.
+
+The girl felt it all as no one native to the sea can possibly do. It
+seemed as if the bounds of the flood had been overcome, and that it
+was about to hurl itself upon the land. The slender trees, standing
+deep in the swash of water, bowed like women in pain; the wall was
+half hidden, and the flood and the land seemed mingled in battle.
+
+Rose walked along the shore, too much excited to go back to her
+breakfast. At noon she ate lunch hurriedly and returned to the shore.
+There were hundreds of people coming and going along the drive; young
+girls shrieking with glee, as the sailing clouds of spray fell upon
+them. Rose felt angry to think they could be so silly in face of such
+dreadful power.
+
+She came upon Mason, dressed in a thick mackintosh coat, taking notes
+rapidly in a little book. He did not look up, and she passed him,
+wishing to speak, yet afraid to speak. Near him a young man was
+sketching.
+
+Mason stood like a rock in his long, close-fitting rain coat, while
+she was blown nearly off her feet by the blast. She came back against
+the wind, feeling her soul's internal storm rising. It seemed quite
+like a proposal of marriage to go up and speak to him--yet she could
+not forego the pleasure.
+
+He did not see her until she came into his lee; then he smiled,
+extending his hand. She spoke first:--
+
+"May I take shelter here?"
+
+His eyes lightened with a sudden tender humor.
+
+"Free anchorage," he said, and drew her by the hand closer to his
+shoulder. It was a beautiful moment to her, and a dangerous one to
+him. He took refuge in outside matters.
+
+"How does that strike your inland eyes?" He pointed to the north.
+
+"It's awful. It's like the anger of God." She spoke into his bowed
+ear.
+
+"Please don't think I'm reporting it," he explained. "I'm only making
+a few notes about it for an editorial on the need of harbors."
+
+Each moment the fury increased, the waves deepened. The commotion sank
+down amid the sands of the deeper inshore water, and it boiled like
+milk. Splendid colors grew into it near at hand; the winds tore at the
+tops of the waves, and wove them into tawny banners, which blurred the
+air like blown sand. On the horizon the waves leaped in savage ranks,
+clutching at the sky like insane sea monsters,--frantic, futile.
+
+"I've seen the Atlantic twice during a gale," shouted the artist to a
+companion, "but I never saw anything more awful than this. These waves
+are quicker and higher. I don't see how a vessel could live in it if
+caught broadside."
+
+"It's the worst I ever saw here."
+
+"I'm going down to the south side: would you like to go?" Mason asked
+of Rose.
+
+"I would indeed," she replied.
+
+Back from the lake shore the wind was less powerful but more
+uncertain. It came in gusts which nearly upturned the street cars. Men
+and women scudded from shelter to shelter, like beleaguered citizens
+avoiding cannon shots.
+
+"What makes our lake so terrible," said Mason in the car, "is the fact
+that it has a smooth shore--no indentations, no harbors. There is only
+one harbor here at Chicago, behind the breakwater, and every vessel in
+mid-lake must come here. Those flying ships are seeking safety here
+like birds. The harbor will be full of disabled vessels."
+
+As they left the car, a roaring gust swept around a twenty-story
+building with such power [that] Rose would have been taken off her
+feet had not Mason put his arms about her shoulders.
+
+"You're at a disadvantage," he said, "with skirts." He knew she prided
+herself on her strength, and he took no credit to himself for standing
+where she fell.
+
+It was precisely as if they were alone together; the storm seemed to
+wall them in, and his manner was more intimate than ever before. It
+was in very truth the first time they had been out together, and also
+it was the only time he had assumed any physical care of her. He had
+never asserted his greater muscular power and mastery of material
+things, and she was amazed to see that his lethargy was only a mood.
+He could be alert and agile at need. It made his cynicism appear to be
+a mood also; at least, it made her heart wondrously light to think so.
+
+They came upon the lake shore again, near the Auditorium. The refuge
+behind the breakwater was full of boats, straining at anchor, rolling,
+pitching, crashing together. Close about the edge of the breakwater,
+ships were rounding hurriedly, and two broken vessels lay against the
+shore, threshing up and down in the awful grasp of the breakers. Far
+down toward the south the water dashed against the spiles, shooting
+fifty feet above the wall, sailing like smoke, deluging the street,
+and lashing against the row of buildings across the way.
+
+Mason's keen eye took in the situation:--
+
+"Every vessel that breaks anchor is doomed! Nothing can keep them from
+going on shore. Doubtless those two schooners lost anchor--that one
+there is dragging anchor." He said suddenly, "She is shifting
+position, and see that hulk--"
+
+Rose for a moment could not see it. She lay flat on her side, a
+two-master, her sails flapping and floating on the waves. Her anchor
+still held, but she had listed her cargo, careened, and so lay
+helpless.
+
+"There are men on it!" cried some one. "Three men--don't you see them?
+The water goes over them every time!"
+
+"Sure enough! I wonder if they are going to let them drown, here in
+the harbor!"
+
+Rose grew numb with horror. On the rounded side of the floating hulk
+three men were clinging, looking like pegs of tops. They could only be
+seen at intervals, for the water broke clear over their heads. It was
+only when one of them began to move to and fro that the mighty crowd
+became certainly aware of life still clinging to the hull. It was an
+awful thing to stand helplessly by and see those brave men battle, but
+no life-boat or tug could live out there. In the station, men wept and
+imprecated in their despair; twice they tried to go to the rescue of
+the beleaguered men, but could not reach them.
+
+Suddenly a flare of yellow spread out on the wave. A cry arose:--
+
+"She's breaking up!"
+
+Rose seized Mason's arm in a frenzy of horror.
+
+"O God! can't somebody help them?"
+
+"They're out of reach!" said Mason solemnly. And then the throng was
+silent.
+
+"They are building a raft!" shouted a man with a glass, speaking at
+intervals for the information of all. "One man is tying a rope to
+planks; ... he is helping the other men; ... he has his little raft
+nearly ready; ... they are crawling toward him--"
+
+"Oh, see them!" exclaimed Rose. "Oh, the brave men! There! they are
+gone--the vessel has broken up."
+
+On the wave nothing now lived but a yellow spread of lumber; the glass
+revealed no living thing.
+
+Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.
+
+"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies--"
+
+"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to
+Mason's thought.
+
+Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of
+human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater
+of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with
+people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow
+approach of that tiny raft. Again and again the waves swept over it,
+and each time that indomitable man rose from the flood and was seen to
+pull his companions aboard.
+
+Other vessels drifted upon the rocks. Other steamers rolled heavily
+around the long breakwater, but nothing now distracted the gaze of the
+multitude from this appalling and amazing struggle against death.
+Nothing? No; once and only once did the onlookers shift their intent
+gaze, and that was when a vessel passed the breakwater and went
+sailing toward the south through the fleet of anchored, straining,
+agonized ships. At first no one paid much attention to this late-comer
+till Mason lifted his voice.
+
+"By Heaven, the man is _sailing_!"
+
+It was true; steady, swift, undeviating, the vessel headed through the
+fleet. She did not drift nor wander nor hesitate. She sailed as if the
+helmsman, with set teeth, were saying:--
+
+"By God! If I must die on the rocks, I'll go to my death the captain
+of my vessel!"
+
+And so with wheel in his hand and epic oaths in his mouth, he sailed
+directly into the long row of spiles, over which the waves ran like
+hell-hounds; where half a score of wrecks lay already churning into
+fragments in the awful tumult.
+
+The sailing vessel seemed not to waver, nor seek nor dodge--seemed
+rather to choose the most deadly battle-place of waves and wall.
+
+"God! but that's magnificent of him!" Mason said to himself.
+
+Rose held her breath, her face white and set with horror.
+
+"Oh, must he die?"
+
+"There is no hope for him. She will strike in a moment--she
+strikes!--she is gone!"
+
+The vessel entered the gray confusion of the breakers and struck the
+piles like a battering-ram; the waves buried her from sight; then the
+recoil flung her back; for the first time she swung broadside to the
+storm. The work of the helmsman was over. She reeled--resisted an
+instant, then submitted to her fate, crumbled against the pitiless
+wall like paper, and thereafter was lost to sight.
+
+This dramatic and terrible scene had held the attention of the
+onlookers--once more they searched for the tiny raft. It was nearing
+the lake wall at another furious point of contact. An innumerable
+crowd spread like a black robe over the shore, waiting to see the tiny
+float strike.
+
+A hush fell over every voice. Each soul was solemn as if facing the
+Maker of the world. Out on the point, just where the doomed sailors
+seemed like to strike, there was a little commotion. A tiny figure was
+seen perched on one of the spiles. Each wave, as it towered above him,
+seemed ready to sweep him away, but each time he bowed his head and
+seemed to sweep through the gray wall. He was a negro, and he held a
+rope in his hands.
+
+As they comprehended his danger the crowd cheered him, but in the
+thunder of the surf no human voice could avail. The bold negro could
+not cry out, he could only motion; but the brave man on the raft saw
+his purpose--he was alone with the shipwrecked ones.
+
+In they came, lifted and hurled by a prodigious swell. They struck the
+wall just beneath the negro and disappeared beneath the waves.
+
+All seemed over, and some of the spectators fell weeping; others
+turned away.
+
+Suddenly the indomitable commander of the raft rose, then his
+companions, and then it was perceived that he had bound them all to
+the raft.
+
+The negro flung his rope and one man caught at it, but it was swept
+out of reach on a backward-leaping billow. Again they came in, their
+white, strained, set faces and wild eyes turned to the intrepid
+rescuer. Again they struck, and this time the negro caught and held
+one of the sailors, held him while the foam fell away, and the
+succeeding wave swept him over the spiles to safety. Again the
+resolute man flung his noose and caught the second sailor, whose rope
+was cut by the leader, the captain, who was last to be saved.
+
+As the negro came back, dragging his third man over the wall, a mighty
+cry went up, a strange, faint, multitudinous cry, and the negro was
+swallowed up in the multitude.
+
+Mason turned to Rose and spoke: "Sometimes men seem to be worth
+while!"
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH STEVENSON GASKELL
+
+(1810-1865)
+
+[Illustration: ELIZABETH S. GASKELL]
+
+
+Critics agree in placing the novels of Mrs. Gaskell on a level with
+the works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. It is more than
+probable that future generations will turn to her stories for correct
+pictures of simple every-day life that must fade in the swift
+succession of years. She has been compared to a naturalist who knows
+intimately the flora and fauna of his native heath.
+
+Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in Chelsea, England, September
+29th, 1810, the daughter of William Stevenson, a literary man,
+who was keeper of the records of the Treasury. She lived with her
+aunt at Knutsford in Cheshire, was sent to a private school in
+Stratford-on-Avon, and visited London and Edinburgh, where her beauty
+was much admired. In 1832 she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell,
+minister of a Unitarian chapel in Manchester. Mrs. Gaskell did not
+begin to write until she had reached middle age, and then chiefly to
+distract her thoughts after the death of their only son in 1844. Her
+first book, 'Mary Barton,' published anonymously in 1848, achieved
+extraordinary success. This was a "novel with a purpose," for Mrs.
+Gaskell believed that the hostility between employers and employed,
+which constantly disturbed the manufacturing beehive of Manchester,
+was caused by mutual ignorance. She therefore set herself the task of
+depicting faithfully the lives of the people around her. It must be
+remembered, too, that the social types chosen by her were at that
+moment peculiarly interesting to a public weary of the novel of
+fashionable high life. The story provoked much public discussion; and
+among other critics, the social economist Mr. W. R. Greg, in his
+'Essay on Mary Barton,' published in 1849, took the part of the
+manufacturer. 'Mary Barton' has been translated into French, German,
+and other languages, including Hungarian and Finnish. The story has
+for its central theme the gradual degeneration of John Barton, a
+workman who has a passionate hatred of the classes above him, and who,
+embittered by poverty and the death of his son and wife, joins the
+law-breakers of the town, and finally murders Henry Corson, a master
+manufacturer. 'North and South,' published in 1855, was written from
+the point of view of the masters, an admirable contrast to Barton
+being found in Thornton, the hero of this novel.
+
+In 1850, when Dickens was about to establish Household Words, he
+invited Mrs. Gaskell to contribute. This magazine contained her story
+'Lizzie Leigh' and those immortal pictures of village life known as
+'Cranford.' Mrs. Gaskell's other novels are: 'Ruth,' the tragical
+story of a pretty young milliner's apprentice; 'Sylvia's Lovers,'
+whose scene is Monkhaven (Whitby), at the end of the last century;
+'Cousin Phillis,' a simple story of a farmer's daughter, which
+appeared first in the Cornhill Magazine in 1863-64; and 'Wives and
+Daughters,' also contributed to the Cornhill, and left unfinished by
+her death in Manchester, November 12th, 1865. By many persons the last
+novel is considered her best work, owing to its strength of
+characterization. Molly Gibson, the heroine; Cynthia, a heartless
+coquette; Squire Hamley and his sons Roger and Osborne, of Hamley
+Hall; and the Earl of Cumnor and his family at the Towers,--all are
+treated with impartial skill. Her famous 'Life of Charlotte Bronte'
+appeared in 1857. She became acquainted with Miss Bronte in 1850, and
+they were friends at once.
+
+A collected edition of Mrs. Gaskell's works, published in seven
+volumes in 1873, includes the short stories 'The Grey Woman,' 'Morton
+Hall,' 'Mr. Harrison's Confessions,' 'A Dark Night's Work,' 'The
+Moorland Cottage,' 'Round the Sofa,' 'The Old Nurse's Story,' 'The
+Well of Pen-Morfa,' 'The Sexton's Hero,' 'Lois the Witch,' and others.
+Cranford is identified as the town of Knutsford. Its population
+consists of widows and maiden ladies, in bonds to their ancient
+gentility. With deft touch Mrs. Gaskell brings out the humor and
+pathos of these quaint characters, her finest creation being Miss
+Matty Jenkyns.
+
+
+
+
+OUR SOCIETY
+
+From 'Cranford'
+
+
+In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the
+holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married
+couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears;
+he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the
+Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his
+regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the
+great neighboring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty
+miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen,
+they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The
+surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but
+every man cannot be a surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of
+choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away
+little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the
+railings; for rushing out at the geese that occasionally venture into
+the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of
+literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary
+reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of
+everybody's affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat
+maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial)
+to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they
+are in distress,--the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. "A
+man," as one of them observed to me once, "is _so_ in the way in the
+house!" Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's
+proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's
+opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say
+eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal
+retaliation; but somehow, good-will reigns among them to a
+considerable degree.
+
+The Cranford ladies have only an occasional little quarrel, spurted
+out in a few peppery words and angry jerks of the heads; just enough
+to prevent the even tenor of their lives from becoming too flat. Their
+dress is very independent of fashion: as they observe, "What does it
+signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?" And
+if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent: "What does it
+signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?" The materials of
+their clothes are in general good and plain, and most of them are
+nearly as scrupulous as Miss Tyler of cleanly memory; but I will
+answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in
+wear in England, was seen in Cranford--and seen without a smile.
+
+I can testify to a magnificent family red-silk umbrella, under which a
+gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used
+to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red-silk umbrellas in
+London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in
+Cranford; and the little boys mobbed it, and called it "a stick in
+petticoats." It might have been the very red-silk one I have
+described, held by a strong father over a troop of little ones; the
+poor little lady--the survivor of all--could scarcely carry it.
+
+Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they
+were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town,
+with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a
+year on the Tinwald Mount.
+
+"Our friends have sent to inquire how you are after your journey
+to-night, my dear" (fifteen miles in a gentleman's carriage); "they
+will give you some rest to-morrow, but the next day, I have no doubt,
+they will call; so be at liberty after twelve--from twelve to three
+are our calling hours."
+
+Then, after they had called:--
+
+"It is the third day: I daresay your mamma has told you, my dear,
+never to let more than three days elapse between receiving a call and
+returning it; and also, that you are never to stay longer than a
+quarter of an hour."
+
+"But am I to look at my watch? How am I to find out when a quarter of
+an hour has passed?"
+
+"You must keep thinking about the time, my dear, and not allow
+yourself to forget it in conversation."
+
+As everybody had this rule in their minds, whether they received or
+paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We
+kept ourselves to short sentences of small-talk, and were punctual to
+our time.
+
+I imagine that a few of the gentlefolks of Cranford were poor, and had
+some difficulty in making both ends meet; but they were like the
+Spartans, and concealed their smart under a smiling face. We none of
+us spoke of money, because that subject savored of commerce and trade,
+and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The
+Cranfordians had that kindly _esprit de corps_ which made them
+overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to
+conceal their poverty. When Mrs. Forrester, for instance, gave a party
+in her baby-house of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the
+ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out
+from underneath, every one took this novel proceeding as the most
+natural thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and
+ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular
+servants' hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of
+the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could
+never have been strong enough to carry the tray up-stairs if she had
+not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state,
+pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and
+we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we
+knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and
+sponge-cakes.
+
+There were one or two consequences arising from this general but
+unacknowledged poverty and this very much acknowledged gentility,
+which were not amiss, and which might be introduced into many circles
+of society to their great improvement. For instance, the inhabitants
+of Cranford kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens
+under the guidance of a lantern-bearer about nine o'clock at night;
+and the whole town was abed and asleep by half-past ten. Moreover, it
+was considered "vulgar" (a tremendous word in Cranford) to give
+anything expensive in the way of eatable or drinkable, at the evening
+entertainments. Wafer bread and butter and sponge-biscuits were all
+that the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson gave; and she was sister-in-law to
+the late Earl of Glenmire, although she did practice such "elegant
+economy."
+
+"Elegant economy!" How naturally one falls back into the phraseology
+of Cranford! There, economy was always "elegant," and money-spending
+always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism which made
+us very peaceful and satisfied. I never shall forget the dismay felt
+when a certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford, and openly
+spoke about his being poor--not in a whisper to an intimate friend,
+the doors and windows being previously closed, but in the public
+street! in a loud military voice! alleging his poverty as a reason for
+not taking a particular house. The ladies of Cranford were already
+rather moaning over the invasion of their territories by a man and a
+gentleman. He was a half-pay captain, and had obtained some situation
+on a neighboring railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned
+against by the little town; and if in addition to his masculine gender
+and his connection with the obnoxious railroad, he was so brazen as to
+talk of being poor--why then indeed he must be sent to Coventry. Death
+was as true and as common as poverty; yet people never spoke about
+that, loud out in the streets. It was a word not to be mentioned to
+ears polite. We had tacitly agreed to ignore that any with whom we
+associated on terms of visiting equality could ever be prevented by
+poverty from doing anything that they wished. If we walked to or from
+a party, it was because the night was _so_ fine, or the air _so_
+refreshing; not because sedan-chairs were expensive. If we wore prints
+instead of summer silks, it was because we preferred a washing
+material; and so on, till we blinded ourselves to the vulgar fact that
+we were all of us people of very moderate means. Of course, then, we
+did not know what to make of a man who could speak of poverty as if it
+was not a disgrace. Yet somehow Captain Brown made himself respected
+in Cranford, and was called upon, in spite of all resolutions to the
+contrary. I was surprised to hear his opinions quoted as authority at
+a visit which I paid to Cranford about a year after he had settled in
+the town. My own friends had been among the bitterest opponents of any
+proposal to visit the captain and his daughters only twelve months
+before; and now he was even admitted in the tabooed hours before
+twelve. True, it was to discover the cause of a smoking chimney,
+before the fire was lighted; but still Captain Brown walked up-stairs,
+nothing daunted, spoke in a voice too large for the room, and joked
+quite in the way of a tame man about the house. He had been blind to
+all the small slights, and omissions of trivial ceremonies, with which
+he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies
+had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good
+faith; and with his manly frankness had overpowered all the shrinking
+which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And at last his
+excellent masculine common-sense, and his facility in devising
+expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas, had gained him an
+extraordinary place as authority among the Cranford ladies. He himself
+went on in his course, as unaware of his popularity as he had been of
+the reverse....
+
+I wondered what the Cranford ladies did with Captain Brown at their
+parties. We had often rejoiced, in former days, that there was no
+gentleman to be attended to and to find conversation for, at the card
+parties. We had congratulated ourselves upon the snugness of the
+evenings, and in our love for gentility and distaste of mankind we had
+almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man was to be "vulgar"; so
+that when I found my friend and hostess Miss Jenkyns was going to have
+a party in my honor, and that Captain and the Miss Browns were
+invited, I wondered much what would be the course of the evening. Card
+tables, with green-baize tops, were set out by daylight, just as
+usual: it was the third week in November, so the evenings closed in
+about four. Candles and clean packs of cards were arranged on each
+table. The fire was made up; the neat maid-servant had received her
+last directions: and there we stood, dressed in our best, each with a
+candle-lighter in our hands, ready to dart at the candles as soon as
+the first knock came. Parties in Cranford were solemn festivities,
+making the ladies feel gravely elated as they sat together in their
+best dresses. As soon as three had arrived, we sat down to Preference,
+I being the unlucky fourth. The next four comers were put down
+immediately to another table; and presently the tea-trays, which I had
+seen set out in the store-room as I passed in the morning, were placed
+each on the middle of a card table. The china was delicate egg-shell;
+the old-fashioned silver glittered with polishing; but the eatables
+were of the slightest description.
+
+While the trays were yet on the tables, Captain and the Miss Browns
+came in; and I could see that, somehow or other, the captain was a
+favorite with all the ladies present. Ruffled brows were smoothed,
+sharp voices lowered at his approach. Miss Brown looked ill, and
+depressed almost to gloom. Miss Jessie smiled as usual, and seemed
+nearly as popular as her father. He immediately and quietly assumed
+the man's place in the room; attended to every one's wants, lessened
+the pretty maid-servant's labor by waiting on empty cups and
+bread-and-butterless ladies; and yet did it all in so easy and
+dignified a manner, and so much as if it were a matter of course for
+the strong to attend to the weak, that he was a true man throughout.
+He played for threepenny points with as grave an interest as if they
+had been pounds; and yet in all his attention to strangers he had an
+eye on his suffering daughter--for suffering I was sure she was,
+though to many eyes she might only appear to be irritable. Miss Jessie
+could not play cards, but she talked to the sitters-out, who before
+her coming had been rather inclined to be cross. She sang, too, to an
+old cracked piano which I think had been a spinet in its youth. Miss
+Jessie sang 'Jock o' Hazeldean' a little out of tune; but we were none
+of us musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of
+appearing to be so.
+
+It was very good of Miss Jenkyns to do this; for I had seen that, a
+little before, she had been a good deal annoyed by Miss Jessie Brown's
+unguarded admission (apropos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle,
+her mother's brother, who was a shopkeeper in Edinburgh. Miss
+Jenkyns tried to drown this confession by a terrible cough--for the
+Honorable Mrs. Jamieson was sitting at the card table nearest Miss
+Jessie, and what would she say or think if she found out that she was
+in the same room with a shopkeeper's niece! But Miss Jessie Brown (who
+had no tact, as we all agreed the next morning) _would_ repeat the
+information, and assure Miss Pole she could easily get her the
+identical Shetland wool required "through my uncle, who has the best
+assortment of Shetland goods of any one in Edinbro'." It was to take
+the taste of this out of our mouths, and the sound of this out of our
+ears, that Miss Jenkyns proposed music: so I say again, it was very
+good of her to beat time to the song.
+
+When the trays reappeared with biscuits and wine, punctually at a
+quarter to nine, there was conversation, comparing of cards, and
+talking over tricks; but by-and-by Captain Brown sported a bit of
+literature.
+
+"Have you seen any numbers of 'The Pickwick Papers'?" said he. (They
+were then publishing in parts.) "Capital thing!"
+
+Now, Miss Jenkyns was daughter of a deceased rector of Cranford, and
+on the strength of a number of manuscript sermons and a pretty good
+library of divinity considered herself literary, and looked upon any
+conversation about books as a challenge to her. So she answered and
+said, "Yes, she had seen them; indeed, she might say she had read
+them."
+
+"And what do you think of them?" exclaimed Captain Brown. "Aren't they
+famously good?"
+
+So urged, Miss Jenkyns could not but speak.
+
+"I must say, I don't think they are by any means equal to Dr. Johnson.
+Still, perhaps, the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows
+what he may become if he will take the great Doctor for his model."
+
+This was evidently too much for Captain Brown to take placidly; and I
+saw the words on the tip of his tongue before Miss Jenkyns had
+finished her sentence.
+
+"It is quite a different sort of thing, my dear madam," he began.
+
+"I am quite aware of that," returned she; "and I make allowances,
+Captain Brown."
+
+"Just allow me to read you a scene out of this month's number,"
+pleaded he. "I had it only this morning, and I don't think the company
+can have read it yet."
+
+"As you please," said she, settling herself with an air of
+resignation. He read the account of the "swarry" which Sam Weller gave
+at Bath. Some of us laughed heartily. I did not dare, because I was
+staying in the house. Miss Jenkyns sat in patient gravity. When it was
+ended, she turned to me, and said, with mild dignity:--
+
+"Fetch me 'Rasselas,' my dear, out of the book-room."
+
+When I brought it to her, she turned to Captain Brown:--
+
+"Now allow _me_ to read you a scene, and then the present company can
+judge between your favorite Mr. Boz and Dr. Johnson."
+
+She read one of the conversations between Rasselas and Imlac, in a
+high-pitched, majestic voice; and when she had ended she said, "I
+imagine I am now justified in my preference of Dr. Johnson as a writer
+of fiction." The captain screwed his lips up, and drummed on the
+table, but he did not speak. She thought she would give a finishing
+blow or two.
+
+"I consider it vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish
+in numbers."
+
+"How was The Rambler published, ma'am?" asked Captain Brown, in a low
+voice, which I think Miss Jenkyns could not have heard.
+
+"Dr. Johnson's style is a model for young beginners. My father
+recommended it to me when I began to write letters--I have formed my
+own style upon it; I recommend it to your favorite."
+
+"I should be very sorry for him to exchange his style for any such
+pompous writing," said Captain Brown.
+
+Miss Jenkyns felt this as a personal affront, in a way of which the
+captain had not dreamed. Epistolary writing she and her friends
+considered as her _forte_. Many a copy of many a letter have I seen
+written and corrected on the slate, before she "seized the half-hour
+just previous to post-time to assure her friends" of this or that; and
+Dr. Johnson was, as she said, her model in these compositions. She
+drew herself up with dignity, and only replied to Captain Brown's last
+remark by saying, with marked emphasis on every syllable, "I prefer
+Dr. Johnson to Mr. Boz."
+
+It is said--I won't vouch for the fact--that Captain Brown was heard
+to say, _sotto voce_, "D----n Dr. Johnson!" If he did, he was penitent
+afterwards, as he showed by going to stand near Miss Jenkyns's
+arm-chair, and endeavoring to beguile her into conversation on some
+more pleasing subject. But she was inexorable.
+
+
+
+
+VISITING
+
+From 'Cranford'
+
+
+One morning, as Miss Matty and I sat at our work--it was before twelve
+o'clock, and Miss Matty had not changed the cap with yellow ribbons
+that had been Miss Jenkyns's best, and which Miss Matty was now
+wearing out in private, putting on the one made in imitation of Mrs.
+Jamieson's at all times when she expected to be seen--Martha came up,
+and asked if Miss Betty Barker might speak to her mistress. Miss Matty
+assented, and quickly disappeared to change the yellow ribbons while
+Miss Barker came up-stairs; but as she had forgotten her spectacles,
+and was rather flurried by the unusual time of the visit, I was not
+surprised to see her return with one cap on the top of the other. She
+was quite unconscious of it herself, and looked at us with bland
+satisfaction. Nor do I think Miss Barker perceived it; for putting
+aside the little circumstance that she was not so young as she had
+been, she was very much absorbed in her errand, which she delivered
+herself of with an oppressive modesty that found vent in endless
+apologies.
+
+Miss Betty Barker was the daughter of the old clerk at Cranford who
+had officiated in Mr. Jenkyns's time. She and her sister had had
+pretty good situations as ladies'-maids, and had saved money enough to
+set up a milliner's shop, which had been patronized by the ladies in
+the neighborhood. Lady Arley, for instance, would occasionally give
+Miss Barkers the pattern of an old cap of hers, which they immediately
+copied and circulated among the _elite_ of Cranford. I say the
+_elite_, for Miss Barkers had caught the trick of the place, and
+piqued themselves upon their "aristocratic connection." They would not
+sell their caps and ribbons to any one without a pedigree. Many a
+farmer's wife or daughter turned away huffed from Miss Barkers' select
+millinery, and went rather to the universal shop, where the profits of
+brown soap and moist sugar enabled the proprietor to go straight to
+(Paris, he said, until he found his customers too patriotic and
+John-Bullish to wear what the Mounseers wore) London, where, as he
+often told his customers, Queen Adelaide had appeared only the very
+week before in a cap exactly like the one he showed them, trimmed with
+yellow and blue ribbons, and had been complimented by King William on
+the becoming nature of her head-dress.
+
+Miss Barkers, who confined themselves to truth and did not approve of
+miscellaneous customers, throve notwithstanding. They were
+self-denying, good people. Many a time have I seen the eldest of them
+(she that had been maid to Mrs. Jamieson) carrying out some delicate
+mess to a poor person. They only aped their betters in having "nothing
+to do" with the class immediately below theirs. And when Miss Barker
+died, their profits and income were found to be such that Miss Betty
+was justified in shutting up shop and retiring from business. She also
+(as I think I have before said) set up her cow,--a mark of
+respectability in Cranford almost as decided as setting up a gig is
+among some people. She dressed finer than any lady in Cranford, and we
+did not wonder at it; for it was understood that she was wearing out
+all the bonnets and caps and outrageous ribbons which had once formed
+her stock in trade. It was five or six years since she had given up
+shop, so in any other place than Cranford her dress might have been
+considered _passe_.
+
+And now Miss Betty Barker had called to invite Miss Matty to tea at
+her house on the following Tuesday. She gave me also an impromptu
+invitation, as I happened to be a visitor--though I could see she had
+a little fear lest, since my father had gone to live in Drumble, he
+might have engaged in that "horrid cotton trade," and so dragged his
+family down out of "aristocratic society." She prefaced this
+invitation with so many apologies that she quite excited my curiosity.
+"Her presumption" was to be excused. What had she been doing? She
+seemed so overpowered by it, I could only think that she had been
+writing to Queen Adelaide to ask for a receipt for washing lace; but
+the act which she so characterized was only an invitation she had
+carried to her sister's former mistress, Mrs. Jamieson. "Her former
+occupation considered, could Miss Matty excuse the liberty?" Ah!
+thought I, she has found out that double cap, and is going to rectify
+Miss Matty's head-dress. No; it was simply to extend her invitation to
+Miss Matty and to me. Miss Matty bowed acceptance; and I wondered that
+in the graceful action she did not feel the unusual weight and
+extraordinary height of her head-dress. But I do not think she did,
+for she recovered her balance, and went on talking to Miss Betty in a
+kind, condescending manner, very different from the fidgety way she
+would have had if she had suspected how singular her appearance was.
+
+"Mrs. Jamieson is coming, I think you said?" asked Miss Matty.
+
+"Yes. Mrs. Jamieson most kindly and condescendingly said she would be
+happy to come. One little stipulation she made, that she should bring
+Carlo. I told her that if I had a weakness, it was for dogs."
+
+"And Miss Pole?" questioned Miss Matty, who was thinking of her pool
+at Preference, in which Carlo would not be available as a partner.
+
+"I am going to ask Miss Pole. Of course, I could not think of asking
+her until I had asked you, madam--the rector's daughter, madam.
+Believe me, I do not forget the situation my father held under yours."
+
+"And Mrs. Forrester, of course?"
+
+"And Mrs. Forrester. I thought, in fact, of going to her before I went
+to Miss Pole. Although her circumstances are changed, madam, she was
+born a Tyrrell, and we can never forget her alliance to the Bigges of
+Bigelow Hall."
+
+Miss Matty cared much more for the little circumstance of her being a
+very good card-player. Miss Barker looked at me with sidelong dignity,
+as much as to say, although a retired milliner, she was no democrat,
+and understood the difference of ranks.
+
+"May I beg you to come as near half-past six to my little dwelling as
+possible, Miss Matilda? Mrs. Jamieson dines at five, but has kindly
+promised not to delay her visit beyond that time--half-past six." And
+with a swimming curtsy Miss Betty Barker took her leave....
+
+The spring evenings were getting bright and long, when three or four
+ladies in calashes met at Miss Barker's door. Do you know what a
+calash is? It is a covering worn over caps, not unlike the heads
+fastened on old-fashioned gigs; but sometimes it is not quite so
+large. This kind of head-gear always made an awful impression on the
+children in Cranford; and now two or three left off their play in the
+quiet sunny little street, and gathered in wondering silence round
+Miss Pole, Miss Matty, and myself. We were silent too, so that we
+could hear loud suppressed whispers inside Miss Barker's house: "Wait,
+Peggy! wait till I've run up-stairs and washed my hands. When I cough,
+open the door; I'll not be a minute."
+
+And true enough, it was not a minute before we heard a noise, between
+a sneeze and a crow; on which the door flew open. Behind it stood a
+round-eyed maiden, all aghast at the honorable company of calashes,
+who marched in without a word. She recovered presence of mind enough
+to usher us into a small room, which had been a shop, but was now
+converted into a temporary dressing-room. There we unpinned and shook
+ourselves, and arranged our features before the glass into a sweet and
+gracious company face; and then, bowing backwards with "After you,
+ma'am," we allowed Mrs. Forrester to take precedence up the narrow
+staircase that led to Miss Barker's drawing-room. There she sat, as
+stately and composed as though we had never heard that odd-sounding
+cough, from which her throat must have been even then sore and rough.
+Kind, gentle, shabbily dressed Mrs. Forrester was immediately
+conducted to the second place of honor--a seat arranged something like
+Prince Albert's near the Queen's--good, but not so good. The place of
+pre-eminence was of course reserved for the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson,
+who presently came panting up the stairs--Carlo rushing round her on
+her progress, as if he meant to trip her up.
+
+And now Miss Betty Barker was a proud and happy woman! She stirred the
+fire, and shut the door, and sat as near to it as she could, quite on
+the edge of her chair. When Peggy came in, tottering under the weight
+of the tea-tray, I noticed that Miss Barker was sadly afraid lest
+Peggy should not keep her distance sufficiently. She and her mistress
+were on very familiar terms in their every-day intercourse, and Peggy
+wanted now to make several little confidences to her, which Miss
+Barker was on thorns to hear, but which she thought it her duty as a
+lady to repress. So she turned away from all Peggy's asides and signs;
+but she made one or two very malapropos answers to what was said; and
+at last, seized with a bright idea, she exclaimed, "Poor sweet Carlo!
+I'm forgetting him. Come down-stairs with me, poor little doggie, and
+it shall have its tea, it shall!"
+
+In a few minutes she returned, bland and benignant as before; but I
+thought she had forgotten to give the "poor little doggie" anything to
+eat, judging by the avidity with which he swallowed down chance pieces
+of cake. The tea tray was abundantly laden--I was pleased to see it, I
+was so hungry; but I was afraid the ladies present might think it
+vulgarly heaped up. I know they would have done at their own houses;
+but somehow the heaps disappeared here. I saw Mrs. Jamieson eating
+seed-cake slowly and considerately, as she did everything; and I was
+rather surprised, for I knew she had told us on the occasion of her
+last party that she never had it in her house, it reminded her so much
+of scented soap. She always gave us Savoy biscuits. However, Mrs.
+Jamieson, kindly indulgent to Miss Barker's want of knowledge of the
+customs of high life, and to spare her feelings, ate three large
+pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of
+countenance, not unlike a cow's.
+
+After tea there was some little demur and difficulty. We were six in
+number; four could play at Preference, and for the other two there was
+Cribbage. But all except myself (I was rather afraid of the Cranford
+ladies at cards, for it was the most earnest and serious business they
+ever engaged in) were anxious to be of the "pool." Even Miss Barker,
+while declaring she did not know Spadille from Manille, was evidently
+hankering to take a hand. The dilemma was soon put an end to by a
+singular kind of noise. If a baron's daughter-in-law could ever be
+supposed to snore, I should have said Mrs. Jamieson did so then; for
+overcome by the heat of the room, and inclined to doze by nature, the
+temptation of that very comfortable arm-chair had been too much for
+her, and Mrs. Jamieson was nodding. Once or twice she opened her eyes
+with an effort, and calmly but unconsciously smiled upon us; but
+by-and-by even her benevolence was not equal to this exertion, and she
+was sound asleep.
+
+"It is very gratifying to me," whispered Miss Barker at the card table
+to her three opponents, whom notwithstanding her ignorance of the game
+she was "basting" most unmercifully--"very gratifying indeed, to see
+how completely Mrs. Jamieson feels at home in my poor little dwelling;
+she could not have paid me a greater compliment."
+
+Miss Barker provided me with some literature, in the shape of three or
+four handsomely bound fashion-books ten or twelve years old;
+observing, as she put a little table and a candle for my special
+benefit, that she knew young people liked to look at pictures. Carlo
+lay and snorted and started at his mistress's feet. He too was quite
+at home.
+
+The card table was an animated scene to watch: four ladies' heads,
+with niddle-noddling caps, all nearly meeting over the middle of the
+table in their eagerness to whisper quick enough and loud enough; and
+every now and then came Miss Barker's "Hush, ladies! if you please,
+hush! Mrs. Jamieson is asleep."
+
+It was very difficult to steer clear between Mrs. Forrester's deafness
+and Mrs. Jamieson's sleepiness. But Miss Barker managed her arduous
+task well. She repeated the whisper to Mrs. Forrester, distorting her
+face considerably in order to show by the motions of her lips what was
+said; and then she smiled kindly all round at us, and murmured to
+herself, "Very gratifying indeed; I wish my poor sister had been alive
+to see this day."
+
+Presently the door was thrown wide open; Carlo started to his feet
+with a loud snapping bark, and Mrs. Jamieson awoke; or perhaps she had
+not been asleep--as she said almost directly, the room had been so
+light she had been glad to keep her eyes shut, but had been listening
+with great interest to all our amusing and agreeable conversation.
+Peggy came in once more, red with importance. Another tray! "O
+gentility!" thought I, "can you endure this last shock?" For Miss
+Barker had ordered (nay, I doubt not prepared, although she did say,
+"Why! Peggy, what have you brought us?" and looked pleasantly
+surprised at the unexpected pleasure) all sorts of good things for
+supper--scalloped oysters, potted lobsters, jelly, a dish called
+"little Cupids" (which was in great favor with the Cranford ladies,
+although too expensive to be given except on solemn and state
+occasions--macaroons sopped in brandy, I should have called it, if I
+had not known its more refined and classical name). In short, we were
+evidently to be feasted with all that was sweetest and best; and we
+thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our
+gentility--which never ate suppers in general, but which, like most
+non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.
+
+Miss Barker in her former sphere had, I daresay, been made acquainted
+with the beverage they call cherry brandy. We none of us had ever seen
+such a thing, and rather shrank back when she proffered it us--"just a
+little, leetle glass, ladies; after the oysters and lobsters, you
+know. Shell-fish are sometimes thought not very wholesome." We all
+shook our heads like female mandarins; but at last Mrs. Jamieson
+suffered herself to be persuaded, and we followed her lead. It was not
+exactly unpalatable, though so hot and so strong that we thought
+ourselves bound to give evidence that we were not accustomed to such
+things by coughing terribly--almost as strangely as Miss Barker had
+done, before we were admitted by Peggy.
+
+"It's very strong," said Miss Pole, as she put down her empty glass;
+"I do believe there's spirit in it."
+
+"Only a little drop--just necessary to make it keep," said Miss
+Barker. "You know we put brandy paper over preserves to make them
+keep. I often feel tipsy myself from eating damson tart."
+
+I question whether damson tart would have opened Mrs. Jamieson's heart
+as the cherry brandy did; but she told us of a coming event,
+respecting which she had been quite silent till that moment.
+
+"My sister-in-law, Lady Glenmire, is coming to stay with me." There
+was a chorus of "Indeed!" and then a pause. Each one rapidly reviewed
+her wardrobe, as to its fitness to appear in the presence of a baron's
+widow; for of course a series of small festivals were always held in
+Cranford on the arrival of a visitor at any of our friends' houses. We
+felt very pleasantly excited on the present occasion.
+
+Not long after this, the maids and the lanterns were announced. Mrs.
+Jamieson had the sedan-chair, which squeezed itself into Miss Barker's
+narrow lobby with some difficulty, and most literally "stopped the
+way." It required some skillful manoeuvring on the part of the old
+chairmen (shoemakers by day, but when summoned to carry the sedan,
+dressed up in a strange old livery--long greatcoats with small capes,
+coeval with the sedan and similar to the dress of the class in
+Hogarth's pictures) to edge, and back, and try at it again, and
+finally to succeed in carrying their burden out of Miss Barker's front
+door. Then we heard their pit-a-pat along the quiet little street, as
+we put on our calashes and pinned up our gowns; Miss Barker hovering
+about us with offers of help, which if she had not remembered her
+former occupation, and wished us to forget it, would have been much
+more pressing.
+
+
+
+
+THEOPHILE GAUTIER
+
+(1811-1872)
+
+BY ROBERT SANDERSON
+
+[Illustration: THEOPHILE GAUTIER]
+
+
+Theophile Gautier was born in Tarbes (Department of the
+Hautes-Pyrenees) in Southern France, August 31st, 1811. Like all
+French boys, he was sent to the lycee (academy), where he promised to
+be a brilliant scholar; but his father was really his tutor, and to
+him Gautier attributed his instruction. Young Theophile showed marked
+preference for the so-called authors of the Decadence--Claudianus,
+Martial, Petronius, and others; also for the old French writers,
+especially Villon and Rabelais, whom he says he knew by heart. This is
+significant, in view of the young man's strong tendencies, later on,
+towards the new romantic school. The artistic temperament was very
+strong in him; and while still carrying on his studies at college he
+entered the painter Rioult's studio. His introduction to Victor Hugo
+in 1830 may be considered the decisive point in Gautier's career: from
+that day he gave up painting and became a fanatic admirer of the
+romantic leader.
+
+A short time afterwards, the first representation of 'Hernani' took
+place (February 25th, 1830), an important date in the life of Gautier.
+It was on this occasion that he put on for the only time that famous
+red waistcoat, which, with his long black mane streaming down his
+back, so horrified the staid Parisian bourgeois. This red waistcoat
+turns out, after all, not to have been a waistcoat at all, but a
+doublet; nor was it red, but pink. No truer is the legend, according
+to Gautier, that on this memorable occasion, armed with his two
+formidable fists, he felled right and left the terrified bourgeois. He
+says that he was at that time rather delicate, and had not yet
+developed that prodigious strength which later on enabled him to
+strike a 520-pound blow on a Turk's-head. In appearance Gautier was a
+large corpulent man with a leonine countenance, swarthy complexion,
+long black hair falling over his shoulders, black beard, and brilliant
+black eyes; an Oriental in looks as well as in some of his tastes. He
+had a passion for cats. His house was overrun by them, and he seldom
+wrote without having one on his lap. The privations he underwent
+during the siege of Paris, doubly hard to a man of Gautier's
+Gargantuesque appetite, no doubt hastened his death. He died on
+October 23d, 1872, of hypertrophy of the heart.
+
+Gautier is one of those writers of whom one may say a vast deal of
+good and a vast deal of harm. His admirers think that justice has not
+been done him, that his fame will go on rising and his name will live
+as one of the great writers of France; others think that his name may
+perhaps not entirely disappear, but that if he is remembered at all it
+will be solely as the author of 'Emaux et Camees' (Enamels and
+Cameos). He wrote in his youth a book that did him great harm in the
+eyes of the public; but he has written something else besides
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin,' and both in prose and poetry we shall find a
+good deal to admire in him. One thing is certain: he is a marvelous
+stylist. In his earliest poems Gautier already possesses that
+admirable artistic skill that prompts him to choose his words as a
+painter his colors, or a jeweler his gems and stones, so as to produce
+the most brilliant effects: these first compositions also have a
+grace, a charm, that we shall find lacking later on, for as he
+proceeds with his work he pays more and more attention to form and
+finish.
+
+'Albertus, or Soul and Sin,' the closing poem of Gautier's first
+collection, is a "semi-diabolic, semi-fashionable" legend. An old
+witch, Veronica, a second Meg Merrilies, transforms herself into a
+beautiful maiden and makes love to Albertus, a young artist--otherwise
+Gautier himself. He cares for nothing but his art, but falls a victim
+to the spell cast over him by the siren. At the stroke of midnight,
+Veronica, to the young man's horror, from a beautiful woman changes
+back to the old hag she was, and carries him off to a place where
+witches, sorcerers, hobgoblins, harpies, ghouls, and other frightful
+creatures are holding a monstrous saturnalia; at the end of which,
+Albertus is left for dead in a ditch of the Appian Way with broken
+back and twisted neck. What does it all mean? the reader may ask. That
+"the wages of sin is death" seems to be the moral contained in this
+poem, if indeed any moral is intended at all. Be that as it may,
+'Albertus' is a literary gem in its way; a work in which the poet has
+given free scope to his brilliant imagination, and showered by the
+handful the gems and jewels in his literary casket. Gautier may be
+said to have possessed the poetry of Death--some would say its
+horrors. This sentiment of horror at the repulsive manner of man's
+total destruction finds most vivid expression in 'The Comedy of
+Death,' a fantastic poem divided into two parts, 'Death in Life' and
+'Life in Death.' The dialogue between the bride and the earth-worm is
+of a flesh-creeping nature.
+
+It is however as the poet of 'Emaux et Camees' (Enamels and Cameos)
+that Theophile Gautier will be chiefly remembered. Every poem but one
+in this collection is written in short octosyllabic verse, and every
+one is what the title implies,--a precious stone, a chiseled gem.
+Gautier's wonderful and admirable talent for grouping together certain
+words that produce on one's eye and mind the effect of a beautiful
+picture, his intense love of art, of the outline, the plastic, appear
+throughout this work. You realize on reading 'Emaux et Camees,' more
+perhaps than in any other work by this writer, that the poet is fully
+conscious of his powers and knows just how to use them. Any poem may
+be selected at random, and will be found a work of art.
+
+The same qualities that distinguish Gautier as a poet are to be found
+in his novels, narratives of travels, criticisms,--in short, in
+everything he wrote; intense love for the beautiful,--physically
+beautiful,--wonderful talent for describing it. Of his novels,
+properly speaking, there are four that stand out prominently, each
+very different in its subject,--a proof of Gautier's great
+versatility,--all perfect in their execution. The first is
+'Mademoiselle de Maupin'; it is an immoral book, but it is a beautiful
+book, not only because written with a rare elegance of style, but also
+because it makes you love beauty. Briefly, 'Mademoiselle de Maupin'
+may be called a paean to beauty, sung by its high priest Theophile
+Gautier.
+
+The other remarkable novels by this writer are 'Le Capitaine Fracasse'
+(Captain Smash-All), 'Le Roman de la Momie' (The Romance of the
+Mummy), and 'Spirite.' 'Captain Fracasse,' although not published
+until 1863, had been announced long beforehand; and Gautier had worked
+at it, off and on, for twenty years. It belongs to that class of novel
+known as picaresque--romances of adventures and battles. 'Captain
+Fracasse' is certainly the most popular of Gautier's works.
+
+'The Romance of the Mummy' is a very remarkable book, in which science
+and fiction have been blended in the most artistic and clever manner;
+picturesque, like all of Gautier's writings, but the work of a savant
+as well as of a novelist. Here more than in any other book by this
+author,--with the exception perhaps of 'Arria Marcella,'--Gautier has
+revived in a most lifelike way an entire civilization, so long
+extinct. 'The Romance of the Mummy' abounds in beautiful descriptions.
+The description of the finding of the mummy, that of the royal tombs,
+of Thebes with its hundred gates, the triumphal entrance of Pharaoh
+into that city, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, are all
+marvelous pictures, that not only fill the reader with the same
+admiration he would evince at the sight of a painting by one of the
+great masters, but give him the illusion of witnessing in the body the
+scenes so admirably described.
+
+'Spirite,' a fantastic story, is a source of surprise to readers
+familiar with Gautier's other works: they find it hard to conceive
+that so thorough a materialist as Gautier could ever have produced a
+work so spiritualistic in its nature. The clever handling of a mystic
+subject, the richness and coloring of the descriptions, together with
+a certain ideal and poetical vein that runs through the book, make of
+'Spirite' one of Gautier's most remarkable works.
+
+Theophile Gautier has also written a number of _nouvelles_ or short
+novels, and tales, some of which are striking compositions. 'Arria
+Marcella' is one of these; a brilliant, masterly composition, in which
+Gautier gives us such a perfect illusion of the past. Under his magic
+pen we find ourselves walking the streets of Pompeii and living over
+the life of the Romans in the first century of our era; and 'Une Nuit
+de Cleopatre' (A Night with Cleopatra) is a vivid resurrection of the
+brilliant Egyptian court.
+
+Of his various journeys to Spain, Italy, and the Orient, Gautier has
+given us the most captivating relations. To many this is not the least
+interesting portion of Gautier's work. The same qualities that are so
+striking in his poems and novels--vividness of description, love of
+the picturesque, wonderful power of expression--are likewise apparent
+in his relations of travels.
+
+As a literary and especially as an art critic, Gautier ranks high.
+Bringing to this branch of literature the same qualities that
+distinguish him in others, he created a descriptive and picturesque
+method of criticism peculiarly his own. Of his innumerable articles on
+art and literature, some have been collected under the names of 'Les
+Grotesques,' a series of essays on a number of poets of the end of the
+sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, ridiculed by
+Boileau, but in whom Gautier finds some wheat among the chaff. The
+'History of Dramatic Art in France for the Last Twenty-five Years,'
+beginning with the year 1837, will be consulted with great profit by
+those who are curious to follow the dramatic movement in that country.
+Of his essays on art, one is as excellent as the other; all the great
+masters are treated with a loving and admiring hand.
+
+Among the miscellaneous works of this prolific writer should be
+mentioned 'Menagerie Intime' (Home Menagerie), in which the author
+makes us acquainted in a most charming and familiar way with his home
+life, and the various pets, cats, dogs, white rats, parrots, etc.,
+that in turn shared his house with him; _la Nature chez elle_ (Nature
+at home), that none but a close observer of nature could have
+written.
+
+The last book written by Gautier before his death was 'Tableaux de
+Siege' (Siege Pictures, 1871). The subjects are treated just in the
+way we might expect from such a writer, from a purely artistic point
+of view.
+
+Gautier has written for the stage only short plays and ballets; but if
+all he ever wrote were published, his works would fill nearly three
+hundred volumes. In spite of the quantity and quality of his books,
+the French Academy did not open her doors to him; but no more did it
+to Moliere, Beaumarchais, Balzac, and many others. Opinions still vary
+greatly as to Theophile Gautier's literary merits; but his brilliant
+descriptive powers, his eminent qualities as a stylist, together with
+the influence he exercised over contemporary letters as the introducer
+of the plastic in literature, would seem sufficient to rank him among
+the great writers of France.
+
+                                     [Signature: Robert Sanderson]
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTRY OF PHARAOH INTO THEBES
+
+From 'The Romance of a Mummy'
+
+
+At length their chariot reached the manoeuvring-ground, an immense
+inclosure, carefully leveled, used for splendid military displays.
+Terraces, one above the other, which must have employed for years the
+thirty nations led away into slavery, formed a frame _en relief_ for
+the gigantic parallelogram; sloping walls built of crude bricks lined
+these terraces; their tops were covered, several rows deep, by
+hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, whose white or brightly colored
+costumes blazed in the sun with that perpetually restless movement
+which characterizes a multitude, even when it appears motionless;
+behind this line of spectators the cars, chariots, and litters, with
+their drivers, grooms, and slaves, looked like the encampment of an
+emigrating nation, such was their immense number; for Thebes, the
+marvel of the ancient world, counted more inhabitants than did some
+kingdoms.
+
+The fine, even sand of the vast arena, bordered with a million heads,
+gleamed like mica dust beneath the light, falling from a sky as blue
+as the enamel on the statuettes of Osiris. On the south side of the
+field the terraces were broken, making way for a road which stretched
+towards Upper Ethiopia, the whole length of the Libyan chain. In the
+corresponding corner, the opening in the massive brick walls prolonged
+the roads to the Rhamses-Maiamoun palace....
+
+A frightful uproar, rumbling, deep, and mighty as that of an
+approaching sea, arose in the distance and drowned the thousand
+murmurs of the crowd, like the roar of the lion which hushes the
+barking of the jackals. Soon the noise of instruments of music could
+be distinguished amidst this terrestrial thunder, produced by the
+chariot wheels and the rhythmic pace of the foot-soldiers. A sort of
+reddish cloud, like that raised by the desert blasts, filled the sky
+in that direction, yet the wind had gone down; there was not a breath
+of air, and the smallest branches of the palm-trees hung motionless,
+as if they had been carved on a granite capital; not a hair moved on
+the women's moist foreheads, and the fluted streamers of their
+head-dresses hung loosely down their backs. This powdery fog was
+caused by the marching army, and hung over it like a fallow cloud.
+
+The tumult increases; the whirlwinds of dust opened, and the first
+files of musicians entered the immense arena, to the great
+satisfaction of the multitude, who in spite of its respect for his
+Majesty were beginning to tire of waiting beneath a sun which would
+have melted any other skulls than those of the Egyptians.
+
+The advance guard of musicians halted for several instants; colleges
+of priests, deputations of the principal inhabitants of Thebes,
+crossed the manoeuvring-ground to meet the Pharaoh, and arranged
+themselves in a row in postures of the most profound respect, in such
+manner as to give free passage to the procession.
+
+The band, which alone was a small army, consisted of drums, tabors,
+trumpets, and sistras.
+
+The first squad passed, blowing a deafening blast upon their short
+clarions of polished brass, which shone like gold. Each of these
+trumpeters carried a second horn under his arm, as if the instrument
+might grow weary sooner than the man. The costume of these men
+consisted of a short tunic, fastened by a sash with ends falling in
+front; a small band, in which were stuck two ostrich feathers hanging
+over on either side, bound their thick hair. These plumes, so worn,
+recalled to mind the antennae of scarabaei, and gave the wearers an odd
+look of being insects.
+
+The drummers, clothed in a simple gathered skirt, and naked to the
+waist, beat the onagra-skin heads of their rounded drums with
+sycamore-wood drumsticks, their instruments suspended by leathern
+shoulder-belts, and observed the time which a drum-major marked for
+them by repeatedly turning towards them and clapping his hands.
+
+After the drummers came the sistra-players, who shook their
+instruments by a quick, abrupt motion, and made at measured intervals
+the metal links ring on the four bronze bars.
+
+The tabor-players carried their oblong instruments crosswise, held up
+by a scarf passed around the neck, and struck the lightly stretched
+parchment with both hands.
+
+Each company of musicians numbered at least two hundred men; but the
+hurricane of noise produced by trumpets, drums, tabors, and sistras,
+and which would have drawn blood from the ears inside a palace, was
+none too loud or too unbearable beneath the vast cupola of heaven, in
+the midst of this immense open space, amongst this buzzing crowd, at
+the head of this army which would baffle nomenclators, and which was
+now advancing with a roar as of great waters.
+
+And was it too much to have eight hundred musicians preceding a
+Pharaoh who was the best loved of Ammon-Ra, represented by colossal
+statues of basalt and granite sixty cubits high, whose name was
+written in cartouches on imperishable monuments, and his history
+painted and sculptured and painted on the walls of the hypostyle
+chambers, on the sides of pylons, in interminable _bas-reliefs_, in
+frescoes without end? Was it indeed too much for a king who could
+raise a hundred conquered races by the hair of their heads, and from
+his high throne corrected the nations with his whip; for a living sun
+burning their dazzled eyes; for a god, almost eternal?
+
+After the musicians came the barbarian captives, strangely formed,
+with brutish faces, black skins, woolly hair, resembling apes as much
+as men, and dressed in the costume of their country, a short skirt
+above the hips, held by a single brace, embroidered in different
+colors.
+
+An ingenious and whimsical cruelty had suggested the way in which the
+prisoners were chained. Some were bound with their elbows drawn behind
+their backs; others with their hands lifted above their heads, in a
+still more painful position; one had his wrists fastened in wooden
+cangs (instruments of torture, still used in China); another was half
+strangled in a sort of pillory; or a chain of them were linked
+together by the same rope, each victim having a knot round his neck.
+It seemed as if those who had bound these unfortunates had found a
+pleasure in forcing them into unnatural positions; and they advanced
+before their conqueror with awkward and tottering gait, rolling their
+large eyes and contorted with pain.
+
+Guards walked beside them, regulating their step by beating them with
+staves.
+
+Tawny women, with long flowing hair, carrying their children in ragged
+strips of cloth bound about their foreheads, came behind them; bent,
+covered with shame, exhibiting their naked squalor and deformity: a
+wretched company, devoted to the most degrading uses.
+
+Others, young and beautiful, with lighter skin, their arms encircled
+by broad ivory bracelets, their ears pulled down by large metal discs,
+were enveloped in long tunics with wide sleeves, an embroidered hem
+around the neck, and falling in small flat folds to their ankles, upon
+which anklets rattled. Poor girls, torn from country, family, perhaps
+lovers, smiling through their tears! For the power of beauty is
+boundless; strangeness gives rise to caprice; and perhaps the royal
+favor awaited one of these barbarian captives in the depths of the
+gynaeceum.
+
+They were accompanied by soldiers who kept away the crowd.
+
+The standard-bearers came next, lifting high the gilded staves of
+their flags, representing mystic baris, sacred hawks, heads of Hathor
+crowned with ostrich plumes, winged ibexes, inscriptions embellished
+with the King's name, crocodiles, and other religious or warlike
+emblems. Long white streamers, spotted with black, were tied to these
+standards, and floated gracefully with every motion. At sight of the
+standards announcing the appearance of Pharaoh, the deputations of
+priests and notables raised towards him their supplicating hands, or
+let them hang, palm outwards, against their knees. Some even
+prostrated themselves, with elbows pressed to their sides, their faces
+in the dust, in attitudes of absolute submission and profound
+adoration. The spectators waved their large palm-leaves in every
+direction.
+
+A herald, or reader, holding in one hand a roll covered with
+hieroglyphics, came forward quite alone between the standard-bearers
+and the incense-bearers who preceded the King's litter.
+
+He proclaimed in a loud voice, resounding as a brass trumpet, the
+victories of the Pharaoh; he recounted the results of the different
+battles, the number of captives and war chariots taken from the enemy,
+the amount of plunder, the measures of gold dust, and the elephant's
+tusks, the ostrich feathers, the masses of fragrant gum, the giraffes,
+lions, panthers, and other rare animals; he mentioned the names of the
+barbarian chiefs killed by the javelins or the arrows of his Majesty,
+Aroeris, the all-powerful, the loved of the gods.
+
+At each announcement the people sent up an immense cry, and from the
+top of the slopes strewed the conqueror's path with long green
+palm-branches they held in their hands.
+
+At last the Pharaoh appeared!
+
+Priests, turning towards him at regular intervals, stretched out their
+amschiras to him, first throwing incense on the coals blazing in the
+little bronze cup, holding them by a handle formed like a sceptre,
+with the head of some sacred animal at the other end; they walked
+backwards respectfully, while the fragrant blue smoke ascended to the
+nostrils of the triumpher, apparently as indifferent to these honors
+as a divinity of bronze or basalt.
+
+Twelve oeris, or military chiefs, their heads covered by a light
+helmet surrounded by ostrich feathers, naked to the waist, their loins
+enveloped in a narrow skirt with stiff folds, their targes suspended
+from the front of their belts, supported a sort of huge shield, on
+which rested the Pharaoh's throne. It was a chair, with arms and legs
+in the form of a lion, high-backed, with large full cushion, adorned
+on the sides with a kind of trellis-work of pink and blue flowers; the
+arms, legs, moldings of the seat were gilded, and the parts which were
+not, flamed with bright colors.
+
+On either side of the litter, four fan-bearers waved enormous
+semicircular fans, fixed to gilded staves; two priests held aloft a
+large richly decorated horn of plenty, from which fell bunches of
+enormous lotus blooms. The Pharaoh wore a mitre-like helmet, cut out
+to make room for the ear, and brought down over the back of the neck
+to protect it. On the blue ground of the helmet scintillated a
+quantity of dots like the eyes of birds, made of three circles, black,
+white, and red; a scarlet and yellow border ran along the edge, and
+the symbolic viper, twisting its golden coils at the back, stood erect
+above the royal forehead; two long curled feathers, purple in color,
+floated over his shoulders, and completed his majestically elegant
+head-dress.
+
+A wide gorget, with seven rows of enamels, precious stones, and golden
+beads, fell over the Pharaoh's chest and gleamed brightly in the
+sunlight. His upper garment was a sort of loose shirt, with pink and
+black squares; the ends, lengthening into narrow slips, were wound
+several times about his bust and bound it closely; the sleeves, cut
+short near the shoulder, and bordered with intersecting lines of gold,
+red, and blue, exposed his round, strong arms, the left furnished with
+a large metal wristband, meant to lessen the vibration of the string
+when he discharged an arrow from his triangular bow; and the right,
+ornamented by a bracelet in the form of a serpent in several coils,
+held a long gold sceptre with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his
+body was wrapped in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited,
+bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold
+plates. Between the band and the belt his torso appeared, shining and
+polished like pink granite shaped by a cunning workman. Sandals with
+returned toes, like skates, shod his long narrow feet, placed together
+like those of the gods on the temple walls.
+
+His smooth beardless face, with large clearly cut features, which it
+seemed beyond any human power to disturb, and which the blood of
+common life did not color, with its death-like pallor, sealed lips,
+enormous eyes enlarged with black lines, the lids no more lowered than
+those of the sacred hawk, inspired by its very immobility a feeling of
+respectful fear. One might have thought that these fixed eyes were
+searching for eternity and the Infinite; they never seemed to rest on
+surrounding objects. The satiety of pleasures, the surfeit of wishes
+satisfied as soon as expressed, the isolation of a demigod who has no
+equal among mortals, the disgust for perpetual adoration, and as it
+were the weariness of continual triumph, had forever frozen this face,
+implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls
+could not have had a more majestic and calm expression.
+
+A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws
+like a sphinx on its pedestal, and blinked its yellow eyes.
+
+A rope, attached to the litter, bound the war chariots of the
+vanquished chiefs to the Pharaoh. He dragged them behind him like
+animals in leash. These men, with fierce despairing faces, their
+elbows drawn together by a strap and forming an ungraceful angle,
+tottered awkwardly at every motion of the chariots, driven by
+Egyptians.
+
+Next came the chariots of the young princes royal, drawn by
+thoroughbred horses, elegantly and nobly formed, with slender legs,
+sinewy houghs, their manes cut short like a brush, harnessed by twos,
+tossing their red-plumed heads, with metal-bossed headstalls and
+frontlets. A curved pole, upheld on their withers, covered with
+scarlet panels, two collars surmounted by balls of polished brass,
+bound together by a light yoke bent like a bow with upturned ends; a
+bellyband and breastband elaborately stitched and embroidered, and
+rich housings with red or blue stripes and fringed with tassels,
+completed this strong, graceful, and light harness.
+
+The body of the chariot, painted red and white, ornamented with bronze
+plaques and half-spheres, something like the umbo of the shields, was
+flanked with two large quivers placed diagonally opposite each other,
+one filled with arrows and the other with javelins. On the front of
+each, a carved, gilded lion, with set paws, and muzzle wrinkled into a
+frightful grin, seemed ready to spring with a roar upon the enemy.
+
+The young princes had their hair bound with a narrow band, in which
+the royal viper was twisted; their only garment was a tunic gaudily
+embroidered at the neck and sleeves, and held in at the waist by a
+belt of black leather, clasped with a metal plate engraved with
+hieroglyphics. In this belt was a long dagger, with triangular brass
+blade, the handle channeled crosswise, terminated by a hawk's head.
+
+In the chariot, by the side of each prince, stood the charioteer, who
+drove it in battle, and the groom, whose business it was to ward off
+with the shield the blows aimed at the combatant, while the latter
+discharged the arrows or threw the javelins which he took from the
+quivers on either side of the car.
+
+In the wake of the princes followed the chariots, the Egyptian
+cavalry, twenty thousand in number, each drawn by two horses and
+holding three men. They advanced ten in a line, the axletrees
+perilously near together, but never coming in contact with each other,
+so great was the address of the drivers.
+
+Several lighter chariots, used for skirmishing and reconnoitring,
+marched at the head and carried one warrior only, who in order to
+leave his hands free for fighting wound the reins around his body: by
+bending to the right or the left, or backwards, he guided or stopped
+his horses; and it was really wonderful to see the noble animals,
+apparently left to themselves, but governed by imperceptible
+movements, keep up an undisturbedly regular pace....
+
+The stamping of the horses, held in with difficulty, the thundering of
+the bronze-covered wheels, the metallic clash of weapons, gave to this
+line something formidable and imposing enough to raise terror in the
+most intrepid bosoms. The helmets, plumes, and breastplates dotted
+with red, green, and yellow, the gilded bows and brass swords,
+glittered and blazed terribly in the light of the sun, open in the
+sky, above the Libyan chain, like a great Osirian eye; and it was felt
+that the onslaught of such an army must sweep away the nations like a
+whirlwind which drives a light straw before it.
+
+Beneath these innumerable wheels the earth resounded and trembled, as
+if it had been moved by some convulsion of nature.
+
+To the chariots succeeded the battalions of infantry, marching in
+order, their shields on the left arm; in the right hand the lance,
+curved club, bow, sling, or axe, according as they were armed; the
+heads of these soldiers were covered with helmets, adorned with two
+horsehair tails, their bodies girded with a cuirass belt of crocodile
+skin. Their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their
+movements, their reddish copper complexions, deepened by a recent
+expedition to the burning regions of Upper Ethiopia, their clothing
+powdered with the desert sand, they awoke admiration by their
+discipline and courage. With soldiers like these, Egypt could conquer
+the world. After them came the allied troops, recognizable from the
+outlandish form of their head-pieces, which looked like truncated
+mitres, or were surmounted by crescents spitted on sharp points. Their
+wide-bladed swords and jagged axes must have produced wounds which
+could not be healed.
+
+Slaves carried on their shoulders or on barrows the spoils enumerated
+by the herald, and wild-beast tamers dragged behind them leashed
+panthers, cheetahs, crouching down as if trying to hide themselves,
+ostriches fluttering their wings, giraffes which overtopped the crowd
+by the entire length of their necks, and even brown bears,--taken,
+they said, in the Mountains of the Moon.
+
+The procession was still passing, long after the King had entered his
+palace.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE MARSH'
+
+
+  It is a pond, whose sleepy water
+  Lies stagnant, covered with a mantle
+  Of lily pads and rushes. . . .
+  Under the creeping duck-weed
+  The wild ducks dip
+  Their sapphire necks glazed with gold;
+  At dawn the teal is seen bathing,
+  And when twilight reigns,
+  It settles between two rushes and sleeps.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'THE DRAGON-FLY'
+
+
+  Upon the heather sprinkled
+      With morning dew;
+  Upon the wild-rose bush;
+  Upon the shady trees;
+      Upon the hedges
+  Growing along the path;
+
+  Upon the modest and dainty
+            Daisy,
+  That droops its dreamy brow;
+  Upon the rye, like a green billow
+            Unrolled
+  By the winged caprice of the wind,
+  The dragon-fly gently rocks.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOVES
+
+
+  On the hill-side, yonder where are the graves,
+  A fine palm-tree, like a green plume,
+  Stands with head erect; in the evening the doves
+  Come to nestle under its cover.
+
+  But in the morning they leave the branches;
+  Like a spreading necklace, they may be seen
+  Scattering in the blue air, perfectly white,
+  And settling farther upon some roof.
+
+  My soul is the tree where every eve, as they,
+  White swarms of mad visions
+  Fall from heaven, with fluttering wings,
+  To fly away with the first rays.
+
+
+
+
+THE POT OF FLOWERS
+
+
+  Sometimes a child finds a small seed,
+  And at once, delighted with its bright colors,
+  To plant it he takes a porcelain jar
+  Adorned with blue dragons and strange flowers.
+
+  He goes away. The root, snake-like, stretches,
+  Breaks through the earth, blooms, becomes a shrub;
+  Each day, farther down, it sinks its fibrous foot,
+  Until it bursts the sides of the vessel.
+
+  The child returns: surprised, he sees the rich plant
+  Over the vase's debris brandishing its green spikes;
+  He wants to pull it out, but the stem is stubborn.
+  The child persists, and tears his fingers with the pointed arrows.
+
+  Thus grew love in my simple heart;
+  I believed I sowed but a spring flower;
+  'Tis a large aloe, whose root breaks
+  The porcelain vase with the brilliant figures.
+
+
+
+
+PRAYER
+
+
+  As a guardian angel, take me under your wing;
+  Deign to stoop and put out, smiling,
+  Your maternal hand to my little hand
+  To support my steps and keep me from falling!
+
+  For Jesus the sweet Master, with celestial love,
+  Suffered little children to come to him;
+  As an indulgent parent, he submitted to their caresses
+  And played with them without showing weariness.
+
+  O you who resemble those church pictures
+  Where one sees, on a gold background, august Charity
+  Preserving from hunger, preserving from cold,
+  A fair and smiling group sheltered in her folds;
+
+  Like the nursling of the Divine mother,
+  For pity's sake, lift me to your lap;
+  Protect me, poor young girl, alone, an orphan,
+  Whose only hope is in God, whose only hope is in you!
+
+
+
+
+THE POET AND THE CROWD
+
+
+  One day the plain said to the idle mountain:--
+  Nothing ever grows upon thy wind-beaten brow!
+  To the poet, bending thoughtful over his lyre,
+  The crowd also said:--Dreamer, of what use art thou?
+
+  Full of wrath, the mountain answered the plain:--
+  It is I who make the harvests grow upon thy soil;
+  I temper the breath of the noon sun,
+  I stop in the skies the clouds as they fly by.
+
+  With my fingers I knead the snow into avalanches,
+  In my crucible I dissolve the crystals of glaciers,
+  And I pour out, from the tip of my white breasts,
+  In long silver threads, the nourishing streams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The poet, in his turn, answered the crowd:--
+  Allow my pale brow to rest upon my hand.
+  Have I not from my side, from which runs out my soul,
+  Made a spring gush to slake men's thirst?
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST SMILE OF SPRING
+
+
+  While to their perverse work
+  Men run panting,
+  March that laughs, in spite of showers,
+  Quietly gets Spring ready.
+
+  For the little daisies,
+  Slyly, when all sleep,
+  He irons little collars
+  And chisels gold studs.
+
+  Through the orchard and the vineyard,
+  He goes, cunning hair-dresser,
+  With a swan-puff,
+  And powders snow-white the almond-tree.
+
+  Nature rests in her bed;
+  He goes down to the garden
+  And laces the rosebuds
+  In their green velvet corsets.
+
+  While composing solfeggios
+  That he sings in a low tone to the blackbirds,
+  He strews the meadows with snowdrops
+  And the woods with violets.
+
+  By the side of the cress in the brook
+  Where drinks the stag, with listening ear,
+  With his concealed hand he scatters
+  The silver bells of the lilies of the valley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Then, when his work is done
+  And his reign about to end,
+  On the threshold of April, turning his head,
+  He says, Spring, you may come!
+
+
+
+
+THE VETERANS
+
+From 'The Old Guard'
+
+
+  The thing is worth considering;
+  Three ghosts of old veterans
+  In the uniform of the Old Guard,
+  With two shadows of hussars!
+
+  Since the supreme battle
+  One has grown thin, the other stout;
+  The coat once made to fit them
+  Is either too loose or too tight.
+
+  Don't laugh, comrade;
+  But rather bow low
+  To these Achilles of an Iliad
+  That Homer would not have invented.
+
+  Their faces with the swarthy skin
+  Speak of Egypt with the burning sun,
+  And the snows of Russia
+  Still powder their white hair.
+
+  If their joints are stiff, it is because on the battle-field
+  Flags were their only blankets:
+  And if their sleeves don't fit,
+  It is because a cannon-ball took off their arm.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN GAY
+
+(1685-1732)
+
+[Illustration: JOHN GAY]
+
+
+"In the great society of the wits," said Thackeray, "John Gay deserves
+to be a favorite, and to have a good place." The wits loved him. Prior
+was his faithful ally; Pope wrote him frequent letters of affectionate
+good advice; Swift grew genial in his merry company; and when the
+jester lapsed into gloom, as jesters will, all his friends hurried to
+coddle and comfort him. His verse is not of the first order, but the
+list of "English classics" contains far poorer; it is entertaining
+enough to be a pleasure even to bright children of this generation,
+and each succeeding one reads it with an inherited fondness not by any
+means without help from its own merits. And the man who invented comic
+opera, one of the most enduring molds in which English humor has been
+cast, deserves the credit of all important literary pioneers.
+
+Kind, lazy, clever John Gay came of a good, impoverished Devonshire
+family, which seems to have done its best for the bright lad of twelve
+when it apprenticed him to a London silk mercer. The boy hated this
+employment, grew ill under its fret and confinement, went back to the
+country, studied, possibly wrote poor verses, and presently drifted
+back to London. The cleverest men of the time frequented the crowded
+taverns and coffee-houses, and the talk that he heard at Will's and
+Button's may have determined his profession. Thither came Pope and
+Addison, Swift and Steele, Congreve, St. John, Prior, Arbuthnot,
+Cibber, Hogarth, Walpole, and many a powerful patron who loved good
+company.
+
+Perhaps through some kind acquaintance made in this informal circle,
+Gay obtained a private secretaryship, and began the flirtation with
+the Muse which became serious only after some years of coldness on
+that humorous lady's part. His first poem, 'Wine,' published when he
+was twenty-three, is not included in his collected works: perhaps
+because it is written in blank verse; perhaps because his maturer
+taste condemned it. Three years later, in 1711, when the success of
+the Spectator was yet new, and Pope had just completed his brilliant
+'Art of Criticism,' and Swift was editing the Examiner and working on
+that defense of a French peace, 'The Conduct of the Allies,' which was
+to make him the talk of London,--Gay sent forth his second venture; a
+curious, unimportant pamphlet, 'The Present State of Wit.' Late in
+1713 he is contributing to Dicky Steele's Guardian, and sending
+elegies to his 'Poetical Miscellanies'; and a little later, having
+become a favorite with the powerful Mr. Pope, he is made to bring up
+new reinforcements to the battle of that irascible gentleman with his
+ancient enemy Ambrose Phillips. This he does in 'The Shepherd's Week,'
+a sham pastoral, which is full of wit and easy versification, and
+shows very considerable talents as a parodist. This skit the luckless
+satirist dedicated to Bolingbroke, whose brilliant star was just
+passing into eclipse. Swift thought this harmless courtesy the real
+cause of the indifference of the Brunswick princes to the merits of
+the poet; and in an age when every spark of literary genius was so
+carefully nursed and utilized to sustain the weak dynasty, most likely
+he was right.
+
+For this reason or another, indifferent they were; and in a time when
+court favor counted enormously, poor indolent luxury-loving Gay had to
+earn his loaf by hard work, or go without it. He produced a
+tragi-comi-pastoral farce called 'What D'ye Call It?' which was the
+lineal ancestor of 'Pinafore' and the 'Pirates of Penzance' in its
+method of treating farcical incidents in a grave manner. But the town
+did not see the fun of this expedient, and the play failed, though it
+contained, among other famous songs, ''Twas When the Seas Were
+Roaring.' In 1716 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of
+London,' put some money into the poet's empty pocket, thanks to Pope's
+good offices. A year later a second comedy of his, 'Three Hours after
+Marriage,' met with well-deserved failure. And now, as always, when
+his spirits sank, his good friends showered kindnesses upon him. Mr.
+Secretary Pulteney carried him off to Aix. Lord Bathurst and Lord
+Burlington were his to command. Many fine gentlemen, and particularly
+many fine ladies, pressed him to make indefinite country visits. In
+1720 his friends managed the publication of his poems in two quarto
+volumes, subscribing for ten, twenty, and even fifty copies apiece,
+some of them, and securing to the poet, it is said, L1,000. The
+younger Craggs, the bookseller, gave him some South-Sea stock which
+rose rapidly, and at one time the improvident little gentleman found
+himself in possession of L20,000. All his friends besought him to
+sell, but Alnaschar Gay had visions of a splendid ease and opulence.
+The bubble burst, and poor Alnaschar had not wherewithal to pay his
+broker.
+
+The Duchess of Queensborough (Prior's "Kitty, beautiful and young")
+had already annexed the charmer, and now carried him off to
+Petersham. "I wish you had a little villakin in Mr. Pope's
+neighborhood," scolds Swift to him; "but you are yet too volatile, and
+any lady with a coach and six horses might carry you to Japan;" and
+again:--"I know your arts of patching up a journey between
+stagecoaches and friend's coaches--for you are as arrant a cockney as
+any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into
+yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme which may take
+up seven years to finish, besides two or three under ones that may add
+another thousand pounds to your stock; and then I shall be in less
+pain about you. I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny
+coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole
+thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day." Gay went to Bath
+with the Queensberrys, and to Oxford. Swift complained to Pope:--"I
+suppose Mr. Gay will return from Bath with twenty pounds more flesh,
+and two hundred pounds less money. Providence never designed him to be
+above two-and-twenty, by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has
+as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as
+a girl of fifteen." And his dear Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,
+took him affectionately to task:--"Your head is your best friend: it
+would clothe, lodge, and feed you; but you neglect it, and follow that
+false friend your heart, which is such a foolish, tender thing that it
+makes others despise your head, that have not half so good a one on
+their own shoulders. In short, John, you may be a snail, or a
+silkworm; but by my consent you shall never be a hare again."
+
+He lived under other great roofs, if not contentedly, at least
+gracefully and agreeably. If his dependent state irked him, his hosts
+did not perceive it. To Swift he wrote, indeed, "They wonder at each
+other for not providing for me, and _I_ wonder at them all." Yet, for
+the nine years from 1722 to 1731 he had a small official salary, on
+which a thriftier or more industrious mortal would have managed to
+live respectably even in that expensive age; and for at least a part
+of the time he had official lodgings at Whitehall.
+
+In 1725 was published the first edition of his famous 'Fables,' which
+had been written for the moral behoof of Prince William, afterward
+Duke of Cumberland, of unblessed memory. The book did not make his
+fortune with the court, as he had hoped, and in 1728 he produced his
+best known work, 'The Beggar's Opera.' Nobody had much faith in this
+"Newgate Pastoral," least of all Swift, who had first suggested it.
+But it took the town by storm, running for sixty-three consecutive
+nights. As the heroine, Polly Peachum, the lovely Lavinia Fenton
+captured a duchess's coronet. The songs were heard alike in West End
+drawing-rooms and East End slums. Swift praised it for its morality,
+and the Archbishop of Canterbury scored it for its condonation of
+vice. The breath of praise and blame filled equally its prosperous
+sails, blew it all over the kingdom wherever a theatre could be found,
+and finally wafted it to Minorca. So well did the opera pay him that
+Gay wrote a sequel called 'Polly,' which, being prohibited through
+some notion of Walpole's, sold enormously by subscription and earned
+Gay L1,200.
+
+After this the hospitable Queensberrys seem to have adopted him. He
+produced a musical drama, 'Acis and Galatea,' written long before and
+set to Handel's music; a few more 'Fables'; a thin opera called
+'Achilles'; and then his work was done. He died in London of a swift
+fever, in December 1732, before his kind Kitty and her husband could
+reach him, or his other great friend, the Countess of Suffolk.
+Arbuthnot watched over him; Pope was with him to the last; Swift
+indorsed on the letter that brought him the tidings, "On my dear
+friend Mr. Gay's death; received on December 15th, but not read till
+the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune." So faithfully did
+the "giants," as Thackeray calls them, cherish this gentle, friendly,
+affectionate, humorous comrade. He seems indeed to have been almost
+the only companion with whom Swift did not at some time fall out, and
+of his steadfastness the gloomy great man in his 'Verses on my Own
+Death' could write:--
+
+  "Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
+  A week, and Arbuthnot a day."
+
+The 'Trivia' and the 'Shepherd's Week,' the 'Acis and Galatea' and
+even the 'Beggar's Opera,' gradually faded into the realm of "old,
+forgotten, far-off things"; while the 'Fables' passed through many
+editions, found their place in school reading-books, were committed to
+memory by three generations of admiring pupils, and included in the
+most orthodox libraries. Yet criticism now reverts to the earlier
+standard; approves the songs, and the minute observation, the nice
+phrasing, and the humorous swing of the pastorals and operas, and
+finds the fables dull, commonplace, and monotonous. Pope said in his
+affectionate epitaph that the poet had been laid in Westminster Abbey,
+not for ambition, but--
+
+  "That the worthy and the good shall say,
+  Striking their pensive bosoms, '_Here_ lies Gay.'"
+
+If to-day the worthy and the good do not know even where he lies, not
+the less is he to be gratefully remembered whom the best and greatest
+of his own time so much admired, and of whom Pope and Johnson and
+Thackeray and Dobson have written with the warmth of friendship.
+
+
+
+
+THE HARE AND MANY FRIENDS
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  Friendship, like love, is but a name,
+  Unless to one you stint the flame.
+  The child whom many fathers share
+  Hath seldom known a father's care.
+  'Tis thus in friendships: who depend
+  On many, rarely find a friend.
+
+  A Hare, who in a civil way
+  Complied with everything, like Gay,
+  Was known by all the bestial train
+  Who haunt the wood or graze the plain.
+  Her care was, never to offend,
+  And ev'ry creature was her friend.
+
+  As forth she went at early dawn
+  To taste the dew-besprinkled lawn,
+  Behind she hears the hunters' cries,
+  And from the deep-mouthed thunder flies.
+  She starts, she stops, she pants for breath;
+  She hears the near advance of death;
+  She doubles to mislead the hound,
+  And measures back her mazy round;
+  Till fainting in the public way,
+  Half dead with fear, she gasping lay.
+
+  What transport in her bosom grew,
+  When first the horse appeared in view!
+  "Let me," says she, "your back ascend,
+  And owe my safety to a friend.
+  You know my feet betray my flight;
+  To friendship every burden's light."
+
+  The Horse replied:--"Poor honest Puss,
+  It grieves my heart to see thee thus:
+  Be comforted, relief is near;
+  For all your friends are in the rear."
+
+  She next the stately Bull implored;
+  And thus replied the mighty lord:--
+  "Since every beast alive can tell
+  That I sincerely wish you well,
+  I may, without offense, pretend
+  To take the freedom of a friend.
+
+  Love calls me hence; a favorite cow
+  Expects me near yon barley-mow:
+  And when a lady's in the case,
+  You know all other things give place.
+  To leave you thus might seem unkind;
+  But see, the Goat is just behind."
+
+  The Goat remarked her pulse was high,
+  Her languid head, her heavy eye;
+  "My back," says he, "may do you harm:
+  The Sheep's at hand, and wool is warm."
+
+  The Sheep was feeble, and complained
+  His sides a load of wool sustained:
+  Said he was slow, confessed his fears;
+  For hounds eat Sheep, as well as Hares!
+
+  She now the trotting Calf addressed,
+  To save from death a friend distressed.
+  "Shall I," says he, "of tender age,
+  In this important care engage?
+  Older and abler passed you by;
+  How strong are those! how weak am I!
+  Should I presume to bear you hence,
+  Those friends of mine may take offense.
+  Excuse me then. You know my heart:
+  But dearest friends, alas! must part.
+  How shall we all lament! Adieu!
+  For see, the hounds are just in view."
+
+
+
+
+THE SICK MAN AND THE ANGEL
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  Is there no hope? the Sick Man said.
+  The silent doctor shook his head,
+  And took his leave with signs of sorrow,
+  Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
+    When thus the Man with gasping breath:--
+  I feel the chilling wound of death;
+  Since I must bid the world adieu,
+  Let me my former life review.
+  I grant, my bargains well were made,
+  But all men overreach in trade;
+  'Tis self-defense in each profession;
+  Sure, self-defense is no transgression.
+  The little portion in my hands,
+  By good security on lands,
+  Is well increased. If unawares,
+  My justice to myself and heirs
+  Hath let my debtor rot in jail,
+  For want of good sufficient bail;
+  If I by writ, or bond, or deed,
+  Reduced a family to need,--
+  My will hath made the world amends;
+  My hope on charity depends.
+  When I am numbered with the dead,
+  And all my pious gifts are read,
+  By heaven and earth 'twill then be known,
+  My charities were amply shown.
+    An Angel came. Ah, friend! he cried,
+  No more in flattering hope confide.
+  Can thy good deeds in former times
+  Outweigh the balance of thy crimes?
+  What widow or what orphan prays
+  To crown thy life with length of days?
+  A pious action's in thy power;
+  Embrace with joy the happy hour.
+  Now, while you draw the vital air,
+  Prove your intention is sincere:
+  This instant give a hundred pound;
+  Your neighbors want, and you abound.
+    But why such haste? the Sick Man whines:
+  Who knows as yet what Heaven designs?
+  Perhaps I may recover still;
+  That sum and more are in my will.
+    Fool, says the Vision, now 'tis plain,
+  Your life, your soul, your heaven was gain;
+  From every side, with all your might,
+  You scraped, and scraped beyond your right;
+  And after death would fain atone,
+  By giving what is not your own.
+    Where there is life there's hope, he cried;
+  Then why such haste?--so groaned and died.
+
+
+
+
+THE JUGGLER
+
+From the 'Fables'
+
+
+  A juggler long through all the town
+  Had raised his fortune and renown;
+  You'd think (so far his art transcends)
+  The Devil at his fingers' ends.
+    Vice heard his fame; she read his bill;
+  Convinced of his inferior skill,
+  She sought his booth, and from the crowd
+  Defied the man of art aloud.
+    Is this, then, he so famed for sleight?
+  Can this slow bungler cheat your sight?
+  Dares he with me dispute the prize?
+  I leave it to impartial eyes.
+    Provoked, the Juggler cried, 'Tis done.
+  In science I submit to none.
+    Thus said, the cups and balls he played;
+  By turns, this here, that there, conveyed.
+  The cards, obedient to his words,
+  Are by a fillip turned to birds.
+  His little boxes change the grain;
+  Trick after trick deludes the train.
+  He shakes his bag, he shows all fair;
+  His fingers spreads,--and nothing there;
+  Then bids it rain with showers of gold,
+  And now his ivory eggs are told.
+  But when from thence the hen he draws,
+  Amazed spectators hum applause.
+    Vice now stept forth, and took the place
+  With all the forms of his grimace.
+    This magic looking-glass, she cries
+  (There, hand it round), will charm your eyes.
+  Each eager eye the sight desired,
+  And ev'ry man himself admired.
+    Next to a senator addressing:
+  See this bank-note; observe the blessing,
+  Breathe on the bill. Heigh, pass! 'Tis gone;
+  Upon his lips a padlock shone.
+  A second puff the magic broke,
+  The padlock vanished, and he spoke.
+    Twelve bottles ranged upon the board,
+  All full, with heady liquor stored,
+  By clean conveyance disappear,
+  And now two bloody swords are there.
+    A purse she to a thief exposed,
+  At once his ready fingers closed:
+  He opes his fist, the treasure's fled:
+  He sees a halter in its stead.
+    She bids ambition hold a wand;
+  He grasps a hatchet in his hand.
+    A box of charity she shows:
+  Blow here; and a churchwarden blows.
+  'Tis vanished with conveyance neat,
+  And on the table smokes a treat.
+    She shakes the dice, the board she knocks,
+  And from her pockets fills her box.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    A counter in a miser's hand
+  Grew twenty guineas at command.
+  She bids his heir the sum retain,
+  And 'tis a counter now again.
+    A guinea with her touch you see
+  Take ev'ry shape but Charity;
+  And not one thing you saw, or drew,
+  But changed from what was first in view.
+    The Juggler now, in grief of heart,
+  With this submission owned her art.
+  Can I such matchless sleight withstand?
+  How practice hath improved your hand!
+  But now and then I cheat the throng;
+  You every day, and all day long.
+
+    [Illustration: _THE JUGGLER._
+    Photogravure from a Painting by L. Knaus.]
+
+
+
+
+SWEET WILLIAM'S FAREWELL TO BLACK-EYED SUSAN
+
+A BALLAD
+
+
+    All in the Downs the fleet was moored,
+      The streamers waving in the wind,
+    When black-eyed Susan came aboard:
+      Oh, where shall I my true love find!
+  Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true,
+  If my sweet William sails among the crew.
+
+    William, who high upon the yard
+      Rocked with the billow to and fro,
+    Soon as her well-known voice he heard,
+      He sighed and cast his eyes below;
+  The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands,
+  And quick as lightning on the deck he stands.
+
+    So the sweet lark, high poised in air,
+      Shuts close his pinions to his breast
+    (If, chance, his mate's shrill call he hear),
+      And drops at once into her nest.
+  The noblest captain in the British fleet
+  Might envy William's lip those kisses sweet.
+
+    O Susan, Susan, lovely dear,
+      My vows shall ever true remain;
+    Let me kiss off that falling tear;
+      We only part to meet again.
+  Change, as ye list, ye winds; my heart shall be
+  The faithful compass that still points to thee.
+
+    Believe not what the landmen say,
+      Who tempt with doubts thy constant mind:
+    They'll tell thee, sailors when away
+      In every port a mistress find.
+  Yes, yes, believe them when they tell thee so,
+  For thou art present wheresoe'er I go.
+
+    If to far India's coast we sail,
+      Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright;
+    Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,
+      Thy skin is ivory so white.
+  Thus every beauteous object that I view,
+  Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue.
+
+    Though battle call me from thy arms,
+      Let not my pretty Susan mourn;
+    Though cannons roar, yet safe from harms,
+      William shall to his dear return.
+  Love turns aside the balls that round me fly,
+  Lest precious tears should drop from Susan's eye.
+
+    The boatswain gave the dreadful word;
+      The sails their swelling bosom spread;
+    No longer must she stay aboard:
+      They kissed, she sighed, he hung his head:
+  Her lessening boat unwilling rows to land:
+  Adieu! she cries; and waved her lily hand.
+
+
+
+
+FROM 'WHAT D'YE CALL IT?'
+
+A BALLAD
+
+
+  T'was when the seas were roaring
+    With hollow blasts of wind,
+  A damsel lay deploring,
+    All on a rock reclined.
+  Wide o'er the foaming billows
+    She cast a wistful look;
+  Her head was crowned with willows,
+    That tremble o'er the brook.
+
+  "Twelve months are gone and over,
+    And nine long tedious days;
+  Why didst thou, venturous lover,
+    Why didst thou trust the seas?
+  Cease, cease, thou cruel ocean,
+    And let my lover rest:
+  Ah! what's thy troubled motion
+    To that within my breast?
+
+  "The merchant robbed of pleasure
+    Sees tempests in despair;
+  But what's the loss of treasure,
+    To losing of my dear?
+  Should you some coast be laid on,
+    Where gold and diamonds grow,
+  You'll find a richer maiden,
+    But none that loves you so.
+
+  "How can they say that nature
+    Has nothing made in vain;
+  Why then, beneath the water,
+    Should hideous rocks remain?
+  No eyes the rocks discover
+    That lurk beneath the deep,
+  To wreck the wandering lover,
+    And leave the maid to weep."
+
+  All melancholy lying,
+    Thus wailed she for her dear!
+  Repaid each blast with sighing,
+    Each billow with a tear.
+  When o'er the white wave stooping,
+    His floating corpse she spied,--
+  Then, like a lily drooping,
+    She bowed her head and died.
+
+
+
+
+EMANUEL VON GEIBEL
+
+(1815-1884)
+
+[Illustration: EMANUEL VON GEIBEL]
+
+
+The chief note in Geibel's nature was reverence. A spirit of reverent
+piety, using the phrase in its widest as well as in its strictly
+religious sense, characterizes all his poetical utterances. He
+intended to devote himself to theology, but the humanistic tendencies
+of the age, combined with his own peculiar endowments, led him to
+abandon the Church for pure literature. The reverent attitude of mind,
+however, remained, and has left its impress even upon his most
+impassioned love lyrics. It appears too in his first literary venture,
+a volume of 'Classical Studies' undertaken in collaboration with his
+friend Ernst Curtius, in which is displayed his loving reverence for
+the great monuments of Greek antiquity. He felt himself an exile from
+Greece, and like Goethe's Iphigenia, his soul was seeking ever for the
+land of Hellas. And through the influence of Bettina von Arnim this
+longing was satisfied; he secured the post of tutor in the household
+of the Russian ambassador to Athens.
+
+Geibel was only twenty-three years of age when this good fortune fell
+to his lot. He was born at Luebeck on October 18th, 1815. His poetic
+gifts, early manifested, secured him a welcome in the literary circles
+of Berlin. During the two years that he spent in Greece he was enabled
+to travel over a large part of the Grecian Archipelago in the
+inspiring company of Curtius; and it was upon their return to Germany
+in 1840 that the 'Classical Studies' appeared, and were dedicated to
+the Queen of Greece. Then Geibel eagerly took up the study of French
+and Spanish, with the result that many valuable volumes were published
+in collaboration with Paul Heyse, Count von Schack, and Leuthold,
+which introduced to the German public a vast treasury of song from the
+literatures of France, Spain, and Portugal. The first collection of
+Geibel's own poems in 1843 secured for the poet a modest pension from
+the King of Prussia.
+
+Geibel also made several essays at dramatic composition. He wrote for
+Mendelssohn the text of a 'Lorelei,' but the composer died before the
+music was completed. A comedy called 'Master Andrew' was successful in
+a number of cities; and of his more ambitious tragedies, 'Brunhild'
+and 'Sophonisba,' the latter won the famous Schiller prize in 1869.
+
+In 1852 Geibel received an appointment as royal reader to Maximilian
+II., and was made professor at the University of Munich. It was also
+from the King of Bavaria that he procured his patent of nobility. In
+the same year that he took up his residence in Munich he married; but
+the death of his wife terminated his happy family relations three
+years later, and the death of the King severed his connection with the
+Bavarian court. Moreover, his sympathy with the revolutionary poets,
+such as his intimate friend Freiligrath, his own enthusiasm for the
+popular movement, and the faith which he placed in the King of
+Prussia, led to bitter attacks upon him in the Bavarian press, and
+eventually to his resignation from the faculty of the university. He
+returned to his native city of Luebeck. The Prussian King trebled his
+annual income, and the poet was raised above pecuniary cares. The last
+years of his life were saddened, without being embittered, by feeble
+health. He died on April 6th, 1884.
+
+There was sometimes a touch of effeminate sentimentality in Geibel's
+work, but he did not lack force and virility, as his famous 'Twelve
+Sonnets' and his political poems, entitled 'Zeitgedichte,' show. He
+could speak strong words for right and justice, and in all his poems
+there is a musical beauty of language and a perfection of form that
+render his songs contributions of permanent value to the lyric
+treasury of German literature.
+
+
+
+
+SEE'ST THOU THE SEA?
+
+
+  See'st thou the sea? The sun gleams on its wave
+            With splendor bright;
+  But where the pearl lies buried in its cave
+            Is deepest night.
+  The sea am I. My soul, in billows bold,
+            Rolls fierce and strong;
+  And over all, like to the sunlight's gold,
+            There streams my song.
+  It throbs with love and pain as though possessed
+            Of magic art,
+  And yet in silence bleeds, within my breast,
+            My gloomy heart.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+AS IT WILL HAPPEN
+
+
+  "He loves thee not! He trifles but with thee!"
+    They said to her, and then she bowed her head,
+  And pearly tears, like roses' dew, wept she.
+    Oh, that she ever trusted what they said!
+  For when he came and found his bride in doubt,
+    Then, from sheer spite, he would not show his sorrow;
+  He played and laughed and drank, day in, day out,--
+    To weep from night until the morrow!
+
+  'Tis true, an angel whispered in her heart,
+    "He's faithful still; oh lay thy hand in his!"
+  And he too felt, 'midst grief and bitter smart,
+    "She loves thee! After all, thy love she is;
+  Let but a gentle word pass on each side,
+    The spell that parts you now will then be broken!"
+  They came--each looked on each--oh, evil pride!--
+    That single word remained unspoken!
+
+  They parted then. As in a church one oft
+    Extinguished sees the altar lamps' red fires,
+  Their light grows dim, then once more flares aloft
+    In radiance bright,--and thereupon expires,--
+  So died their love; at first lamented o'er,
+    Then yearned for ardently, and then--forgotten,
+  Until the thought that they had loved before
+    Of mere delusion seemed begotten!
+
+  But sometimes when the moon shone out at night,
+    Each started from his couch! Ah, was it not
+  Bedewed with tears? And tears, too, dimmed their sight,
+    Because these two had dreamed--I know not what!
+  And then the dear old times woke in their heart,
+    Their foolish doubts, their parting, that had driven
+  Their souls so far, so very far apart,--
+    Oh God! let both now be forgiven!
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+GONDOLIERA
+
+
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+  The air is soft as a lover's jest,
+      And gently gleams the light;
+  The zither sounds, and thy soul is blest
+      To join in this delight.
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+
+  This is the hour for lovers true,
+      Darling, like thee and me;
+  Serenely smile the heavens blue
+      And calmly sleeps the sea.
+  And as it sleeps, a glance will say
+      What speech in vain has tried;
+  The lips then do not shrink away,
+      Nor is a kiss denied.
+  Oh, come to me when through the night
+      The starry legions ride!
+  Then o'er the sea, in the moonshine bright,
+      Our gondola will glide.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+THE WOODLAND
+
+
+  The wood grows denser at each stride;
+      No path more, no trail!
+    Only murm'ring waters glide
+  Through tangled ferns and woodland flowers pale.
+      Ah, and under the great oaks teeming
+    How soft the moss, the grass, how high!
+    And the heavenly depth of cloudless sky,
+  How blue through the leaves it seems to me!
+      Here I'll sit, resting and dreaming,
+              Dreaming of thee.
+
+                               Translation of Charles Harvey Genung.
+
+
+
+
+ONWARD
+
+
+  Cease thy dreaming! Cease thy quailing!
+    Wander on untiringly.
+  Though thy strength may all seem failing,
+    Onward! must thy watchword be.
+
+  Durst not tarry, though life's roses
+    Round about thy footsteps throng,
+  Though the ocean's depth discloses
+    Sirens with their witching song.
+
+  Onward! onward! ever calling
+    On thy Muse, in life's stern fray,
+  Till thy fevered brow feels, falling
+    From above, a golden ray.
+
+  Till the verdant wreath victorious
+    Crown with soothing shade thy brow;
+  Till the spirit's flames rise glorious
+    Over thee, with sacred glow.
+
+  Onward then, through hostile fire,
+    Onward through death's agony!
+  Who to heaven would aspire
+    Must a valiant warrior be.
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+AT LAST THE DAYLIGHT FADETH
+
+
+  At last the daylight fadeth,
+    With all its noise and glare;
+  Refreshing peace pervadeth
+    The darkness everywhere.
+
+  On the fields deep silence hovers;
+    The woods now wake alone;
+  What daylight ne'er discovers,
+    Their songs to the night make known.
+
+  And what when the sun is shining
+    I ne'er can tell to thee,
+  To whisper it now I am pining,--
+    Oh, come and hearken to me!
+
+                     Translation of Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Library of the World's Best
+Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 15, by Various
+
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