No. 1449. Established 1869.

The Literary Week.

ON Tuesday last an important first night was held at Christiania, the occasion being the initial performance of Ibsen's new play, "When We who are Dead Awaken." The performance, we learn, was an entire success, the first and third acts producing a strong impression.

THE play of "Hamlet," according to the printed copy of 1603 known as the First Quarto, will be acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, on Wednesday, February 21, at 8.30 o'clock, at the Carpenter's Hall, London Wall. The text of the play where corrupt and imperfect will be revised from the First Folio. The performance will be given on an Elizabethan stage in Elizabethan costume, and on this occasion the women's parts will be played by boys, as in Shakespeare's time. The original music will be revived on instruments of the sixteenth century under the direction of Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch.

MR. CONRAD's beautiful story, "Youth" (which appeared in Blackwood in 1898), his "Heart of Darkness" (which appeared in the same magazine last year), and "Lord Jim" (which is just ending) are about to be published by Messrs. Blackwood, under the title Three Tales.

MR. W. E. HENLEY's spirited verses, "England, my England," which we quoted recently, have been set to music by Mr. Ernest A. Dicks. The words and score are published by Messrs. J. Curwen & Sons.

A JOURNALISTIC situation of some interest is piquantly hit off in "The New Who's Who," a page contribution to Messrs. Hatchard's Books of To-day and Books of To-morrow:

INGRAM, Sir William, Proprietor of Illustrated
London News, Sketch, Spear, &c. Publication: Shorter
edition of 'De Amicitia,' 1900. Motto: Dum Sphereo
Spearo.'

SHORTER, Clement King, late editor of Illustrated
London News, Sketch, &c. Founded The Sphere, 1900.
Pseudonym: Nicholas Breakspear.

Price Threepence. [Registered as a Newspaper.]

names in anthologies of popular verse of this sort, for though there is at present a custom for strolling trovadores to sell printed copies of their songs (at halfpenny a sheet), great numbers of those now in books may have had to pass through a hundred mouths before finding themselves there."

MANY rumours are afloat as to the new morning paper which Mr. C. Arthur Pearson is about to establish. We can state with authority that it will be called The Daily Express, it will be ready in a few weeks, it will cost a halfpenny, and Mr. Pearson, not C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., will own it.

THE Competition among halfpenny morning papers shows signs of being as keen as that among sixpenny illustrated weeklies; for last Monday the Morning Leader, enlarged and improved, inaugurated a new series, with several interesting features.

THREE poets during the past week have expressed themselves on the War. Mr. William Watson reduced his opinion to the following parable which he contributed to the Morning Leader:

A certain man, quitting his own house, went to lodge in the house of another, and there demanded to have voice and authority in the ordering of the whole household.

And the other said: "No. You are free to remain or to depart, but this is my house, and I will suffer in it no second master out-mastering me."

So the lodger called unto his brave and gallant kinsmen to bludgeon that householder into submission.

MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS Sounds a larger note in the poem he sent to the Daily Chronicle. It is called simply "A Man":

O for a living man to lead!
That will not babble when we bleed;
O for the silent doer of the deed!
One that is happy in his height;
And one that, in a nation's night,
Hath solitary certitude of light!
Sirs, not with battle ill-begun

We charge you, not with fields unwon,
Nor headlong deaths against the darkened gun;
But with a lightness worse than dread:
That you but laughed, who should have led,
And tripped like dancers amid all our dead.
You for no failure we impeach,
Nor for those bodies in the breach,
But for a deeper shallowness of speech.
When every cheek was hot with shame,
When we demanded words of flame,

O ye were busy but to shift the blame!
No man of us but clenched his hand,
No brow but burned as with a brand,
You you alone were slow to understand!

O for a living man to lead!

That will not babble when we bleed;

O for the silent doer of the deed!

MR. WILLIAM ARCHER says that if he were a poet he would write an ode to Mr. Mauser. In an article in last Monday's Morning Leader he gives his reasons for this quaint aspiration. It has revealed to him a great deal about his country and himself. Nicholson's Nek was the eye-opening, heart-reaching incident. Mr. Archer concludes as follows:

That the blot of unredeemed disaster should blur back through all our military history-that it should appear to dim the glories of Wellington and Marlborough-was perhaps natural enough. But what have Shakespeare and Milton, what have Newton and Darwin, to do with Tommy Atkins and his fortunes? Do they not dwell in an ampler ether, a diviner air? They ought to, no doubt; but I found that, in my own instinctive conception, they did not. It was not only the existing generation that seemed to have suffered humiliation-it was the whole Pantheon of the past. Nay, in some still more inexplicable fashion, the physical beauties of England seemed to have fallen into eclipse-a light had vanished from her valleys, lakes, and woodlands; her castles, cathedrals, universities appeared less stately and less reverend. In short, I realised that the idea of 66 England was to me nothing but a many-faceted jewel of pride, whereof no one facet could be dimmed but the others must pale in sympathy. And this the Mauser bullet taught me.

But Mr. Archer does not tell all. Having learned these things, he straightway went out and enrolled himself in a corps of volunteers.

Mr. Hussey's amusing illustration follows:

The wind howled as it slammed the frout door behind me and left me to stour with its icy blast. Outwit led me to recollect that if I took a gyre the contest would at least be drawn, for then, in the latter portion of my short journey, I could spoom. As I entered the churchyard the rood upon the chancel roof stood out clearly cut against the sky; one tiny star gleamed above it like the wand-tip of some celestial fuy.

The black branches of the yew trees bent and skipped like some gigantic kitting. It was a lonesome spot; but

what matter? Was I not there to meet the buxom leman of my heart?

Still, human nature cannot thole everything. I was compelled to seek some cote, for in the calenture of anticipation I had, contrary to the rede of inwit, left my ulster at home.

I waited in the porch; it was lonesome, but I am ruly by nature, and knew well enough that Sophia was often late.

I pictured her with the rosy blee upon her face dwining as she stood before me with pleached fingers to beg forgiveness

(To be continued when a suitable supply of language is furnished. Impatient readers may as well know that, owing to cold weather, Sophia displayed her inwit by staying at home.)

MR. ANDREW LANG's recent observations on the shortness and uncertainty of literary reputations find an echo in the February American Bookman. The Bookman has just completed its fifth year. Reviewing one short lustrum of its existence, it heaves a sigh of fatigue and bewilderment:

During that brief time many literary reputations have risen and waned; men and women whose names were household words in 1895 have, in the beginning of 1900, reached a commonplace acceptance even more cruel than their original obscurity; books that two or three or five years ago stirred the female subscribers of the village library to wire pulling and intrigue, and the occasional male subscriber to blasphemy, now repose undisturbed upon the shelves. There is infinitely more downright irony in this, the commonplace record of half a decade, than Washington Irving put into his Mutability of Literature.

THE Bookman illustrates its remarks by stating that in a town library not twenty-five miles from New York the two copies of Trilby possessed by the library have not been borrowed for six months; and it adds:

A magazine writer was recently asked to contribute a paper on Bohemian Paris to a new review. The works suggested as deserving treatment in such an article included Henry Murger's La Vie de Bohême, W. C. Morrow's Bohemian Paris of To-Day, The Stones of Paris, and several others. But of Trilby, that book which brought home to American and English readers all the romance, the poetry, the charm of the southern half of the French capital as no other book has ever done, and probably as no other book will ever do, no mention was made. The slight was in no way intentional. Trilby had simply been forgotten.

BUT if books are short-lived, their writers commonly attain to longevity. Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, writing in the Forum, shows that the average age of literary men in the nineteenth century has been distinctly high. Take novelists, for instance. Mr. Thayer gives this table of twenty-six novelists and the ages they reached :

The average age of these writers is sixty-three years. Forty-six poets attained the average of sixty-six years. The ages of forty "men of letters" work out to the average of sixty-seven years. Historians live even longer; the average of thirty-eight of them was seventy-three years. Mr. Thayer includes musicians, philosophers, agitators, statesmen, and intellectual women in his survey; and his inference is striking:

The assumption has been that modern conditions are destructive to the vitality of just this upper class of brainworkers. The fact is, that these persons lived on an

average sixty-eight years and eight months that is, nearly thirty years longer than the population as a whole. Were we to double the number of names the result would not be very different.

AN inquiry of some literary interest concerns boys and girls. The following question, among others, was put to a large number of school children, and their answers, which were given in writing, have been examined and compared: "Which man or woman of whom you have ever heard would you most wish to be, and why?" The list of answers includes Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Lipton, and Mr. Kipling. The boy who wanted to be Kipling gave the sensible reason: "Because he writes about soldiers who fight now, and not historical pieces like Shakespeare and Scott."

THE adventures of a story. In the New York Literary Life of January appears the following paragraph:

KIPLING. During Kipling's illness Henry James was one night riding home in a cab from his club in London. The news had just come that the crisis was passed, and the great writer on the road to recovery. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, Mr. James handed the paper he had bought to the cabman. "Kipling's all right," he said. The cabman took the paper, and leaned down with a puzzled look on his face. "I don't seem to know the name o' the 'awse," he said.

Our readers will remember that this story first appeared in the ACADEMY. But the incident did not happen to Mr. Henry James. It was the personal experience of one of our staff-quite a humble person. The story flew to the ends of the earth-the New York version is a mere ricochet.

THE New York Bookman makes the following curious parallel between the late Mr. Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, and Mr. Edwin Markham, the author of "The Man with the Hoe":

When Mr. Bellamy wrote Looking Backward he wrote it simply as a good story, a bit of imaginative writing, and with no particular intention of promulgating a new form. of Socialism. But as soon as the book leaped to its extraordinary success, thousands upon thousands of impressionable persons insisted upon seeing in it a new sociological gospel. Then Mr. Bellamy himself began to feel that he had unwittingly done a great thing, and that he must have been inspired when he composed the pages of his novel. Then he practically gave up literature and started a crank paper, and gave his time and his talents to the foundation and encouragement of clubs for the propagation of the theories set forth in Looking Backward. What was the result? The faddists who took up the Bellamy craze soon grew tired and dropped both it and him; bis paper failed; and he himself died, a literary wastrel and a sociological joke.

same

And now here is poor Mr. Markham going the way. His "Man with the Hoe " was very good verse. He doubtless wrote it as he might at a less mature age have written about The Girl with a Beau. From a literary standpoint it is all right. But now he has become persuaded by his admirers that the poem is full of hidden meanings, of profound lessons, of unutterable things, and he is going about the country explaining to "social reform clubs" just what those hidden meanings are. No doubt he is enjoying himself hugely, and the people who belong to the clubs will for a day or two speak with bated breath of his soul-searching elucidations; but to us it is all so pathetic! Why cannot every human being have a little of the saving sense of humour? Poor Mr. Markham!

Mr. Edwin Markham's work is, of course, of a very different character from Bellamy's. "The Man with the Hoe," which America read as it has not read any new

poem for years and years, is an appeal to mankind to do something to lighten the burden of the agricultural slave, to widen his outlook and stimulate his higher feelings. The volume containing this and other of Mr. Markham's poems has just been published in England.

THERE lies on our table a book on which half a dozen visitors have already cast a longing eye. It is a large quarto, bound in a rich brown canvas, admirably stamped, with end-papers of a dusty old-gold; the edges are tinted in brick colour; and the whole appearance of the volume is excellent. It suggests a work on the stained-glass windows of Nuremburg; or a budget of Provençal songs, and their old-time musical scores; or a series of readings from Confucius for family use-in fact, anything grave and stately. It is, however, none of these things; but is the new illustrated Catalogue of the Boyle System of Ventilation. As a volume for the drawing-room table we commend it. Messrs. Boyle & Son should come into the book business at once.

WHEN receiving a testimonial at University College last week, Dr. Furnivall expressed the opinion that the English language was destined to be the universal language of civilisation. In face of the following statement, we take leave to doubt it:

The "Congregation" of the University of Chicago has adopted the following minute:

Resolved, That the adoption by the Board of the University Press, for use in the official publications and journals of the University, of the list of words with changed spelling, accepted by the National Educational Association, be approved.

The list of words thus " reformed" is as follows:
Program (programme).
Tho (though).
Altho (although).
Thorofare (thoroughfare).
Thru (through).

Thruout (throughout).

Catalog (catalogue). Prolog (prologue). Decalog (decalogue). Demagog (demagogue). Pedagog (pedagogue).

Seriously, this divergence of spelling between English English and American English is very unfortunate at a time when the two nations are, more and more, reading the same books, and when every notable author in the one country commands readers in the other.

But card

LIBRARIANS take their work seriously. catalogues and cross-references are not everything, and we feel some sympathy with a writer in Scribner's who complains that librarians are too mechanical and are apt to provide their libraries with everything except that atmosphere of peace and leisure necessary to the browser.

Let us suppose that the browser meets the cold glance of the young woman in shirt-waist and eye-glasses, who, at the circulating desk, is handling books with up-to-theminute movements that indicate that this is no world to moon in. The browser's mood changes, and with the result that he finds it difficult to draw the two ends of the magic circle that before encompassed him together again.

This clearly is not as it should be. The perfect librarian is a subjective being. . . He is subdued to the reverence of what he works in, and has the student's perceptions, discreet and catholic. He helps to create the ambient with which a library should be permeated, and even to those who have no feeling for the right spirit of the place his manners and personality are an instruction, unconsciously absorbed, and leading them to a humaner attitude. The humaner attitude is perhaps coming. At any rate, it is a good sign that librarians are becoming playful at their own expense. In the Library World a writer gives ten good stock statements useful to librarians who are suddenly called upon to explain a decrease of borrowings to their

committee. The last reason is worth quoting for its delightfully-mixed reasoning and probable success.

We have to draw attention for the first time since the opening of the library to a decrease in the total number of books circulated during the past year. This decrease, however, is entirely due to the fact that the demand has so far exceeded the supply that hardly any of the more popular books were to be found on the shelves, so that it has been a customary thing for borrowers to go emptyhanded away. This, though pulling down the issues, is an eloquent testimony alike to the zeal of our readers and the urgent need for more books.

A LITTLE magazine, bearing a close likeness to the Quartier Latin, has just been begun at Oxford under the title the Quad. Mr. Dent is the London publisher. The following neat and reasonable quatrain meets the reader's eye at the start : TO THE READER.

We ask you (as our labours' modest meed)
Firstly to buy, and, secondly to read:

Then, having bought and read with kindly eyes,
Thirdly, and not till then, to criticise.

MESSRS. WARD, LOCK & Co. will in future publish, from their offices in Salisbury - square, the Road, and its affiliated publications: The Road Coaching Album, The Road Coach Guide, and The Road Coaching Programme. The monthly periodical, the Road, will shortly enter upon its tenth year of existence, and the occasion will be celebrated by adding to its attractiveness and utility.

MR. QUILLER-COUCH thus dedicates his Historical Tales from Shakespeare to Mr. Swinburne :

ΤΟ

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

WHO WITH THE NEAREST CLAIM AMONG LIVING MEN
TO APPROACH SHAKESPEARE CONFIDENTLY
HAS WITH THE BEST RIGHT

SET THEM THE EXAMPLE OF REVERENT AND HUMBLE STUDY.

Bibliographical.

THE rumour that Mr. Bret Harte contemplates the publication of a second series of Condensed Novels is one that all lovers of prose parody will hope to find true. The first series, which came out in 1867, was called Sensation Novels Condensed; but it is to be assumed that the forthcoming travesties will have a wider range, the " sensation novel being by no means the most striking feature of our present-day fiction. No; what we want is parody of our Marie Corelli, our George Moore, our George Egerton, and so forth; and Mr. Harte might well give some of his attention to the younger persons of both sexes who have distinguished themselves lately by startling novelty of subject, style, and treatment. The field to be covered is broad and rich-much broader and richer than that in which Thackeray wrought in his Novels by Eminent Hands.

The last few years have witnessed an agreeable revival of interest in the verse written by the sisters Louisa and Arabella Shore-the "A. and L." of publications dating several decades back. The death of Miss Louisa Shore suggested the issue in 1896, by Mr. Lane, of the Poems of that lady, prefaced by a memoir from her sister's pen and an appreciation " from that of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Then came, in 1897, Poems by A. and L., issued by Mr. Grant Richards, and, in 1898, from the same house, Hannibal, the mammoth dramatic poem by Miss Louisa Shore. The forthcoming First and Last Poems of Miss

Arabella Shore will probably bring to a close this brief but interesting series of Shore volumes. The deceased sister had, I think, a genuine poetic vision, but very little of the "faculty divine." Her powers were not sufficiently cultivated.

The announced new edition of the third Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times should be welcome to many. It is by no means de trop. The work itself is one of those which are more often talked about than read. Few know, for example, that it is a collection of seven distinct literary efforts-including a "letter," an "inquiry," a "philosophical rhapsody,' "miscellaneous reflections," and so forth-published separately at varied intervals. It appeared as a whole in 1711 and again in 1713. Gray wrote about Shaftesbury as a philosopher in rather scornful fashion (see his Letters). Pope, who was a friend of Shaftesbury's, thought, it will be remembered, that the Characteristics "had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity put together."

A London morning paper, "noticing" a new edition of the works of Shakespeare, mentions that it has "a pleasant biographical introduction by Mr. Henry G. Bell." This "Mr. Henry G. Bell," were he living now, would be annoyed at the reduction of the second word in his name from "Glassford " to mere "G." There was a time when Henry Glassford Bell was a person of some potency in the literary world, and especially in that part of it which lies north of the Tweed. Some of us remember him best by a "poem " on Mary Queen of Scots, which used to be by far too great a favourite with the reciter-demon. Still, even the perpetration of this "poem" scarcely justifies one in describing him now as "Mr. Henry G. Bell.'

Mr. Wilson Barrett is rapidly acquiring a name in the literary as well as in the theatrical arena. That he turned his "Sign of the Cross" into a prose narrative we all know; then came his "novelisation" of his "Daughters of Babylon," but in that he had the co-operation of Mr. Hichens. Now he comes forward with a tale called In Old New York, in which he has collaborated with Mr. Elwyn Barron. This, I believe, is a "novelisation" of a play by Messrs. Barrett and Barron which has not yet faced the footlights. Mr. Barron is already known here through his Manders, published in this country about sixteen months ago.

Mr. Israel Gollancz was happily inspired when it occurred to him to reprint, along with In Memoriam, in the "Temple Classics" series, the poetical remains of Arthur Hallam. We must not forget, however, that the credit of reprinting these remains in recent years belongs to Mr. Le Gallienne, who, in 1893, republished not only Hallam's poems, but his essay on the poems of Tennyson. Mr. Le Gallienne's little volume, which was issued by Messrs. Mathews & Lane, is, indeed, the best possible companion to In Memoriam, and I hope it is still in the market. By way of motto to his new book, In the Valley of the Rhone, Mr. C. W. Wood prints the well-known lines:

Noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers.

These he attributes to "Spenser "-a rather unfortunate misprint. And yet how natural on the part of a compositor! Who reads nowadays the works of that Hon. William Robert Spencer whose vers-de-société were once in everybody's mouth? It is not the first time that the two men have been confused, as students of Charles Lamb will remember.

Studies in Dedications-the title of Miss Arnold-Forster's new book-is a little misleading. It makes one think at once of literary dedications, whereas it is of church dedications that the lady writes. It will be remembered that Mr. H. B. Wheatley contributed a pleasant little volume on The Dedication of Bocks to the "Book-Lover's Library." THE BOOKWORM.

Reviews.

Santo Virgilio.

The Unpublished Legends of Virgil. Collected by Charles Godfrey Leland. (Elliot Stock.)

BAYLE, in his article upon Virgil-a plague upon the probable accuracy of pedantry which writes Vergil!-remarks: "Il n'y a rien de plus ridicule que ce que l'on conte de sa magie, et des prétendus prodiges qu'il fit voir aux Napolitains." After which trenchant and terse verdict there follows, as usual, one of those delightfully colossal notes, which, for very wantonness of erudition, always remind us of Burton. But that magie and those prodiges have been the theme of laborious scholarship, and found to be of much significance. Signor Comparetti, of Florenceperhaps the most variously learned of living men—has, in his work on Virgil in the Middle Ages, given us once for all the finest word of scholarship upon the matter; and now there comes to us from Florence a little work, by way, as it were, of supplement to that masterpiece. Mr. Leland, creator of Hans Breitmann, translator of Heine, anthropologist among American Indians and European gypsies, has of late devoted himself to a singular, a fascinating, an (to put it Germanwise) in difficulties - and - doubtsabounding field of investigation. A few years ago he published his Roman Etruscan Remains in Popular Legend, wherein he claimed to show that in Italy there exists, side by side with Christianity, a most venerable and primitive Paganism; not the formal civic religion of ancient cultured Rome, but a thing of the villages and woods and fields and vineyards-a true product of lusty, wild Mother Earth-never spoken of in senatorial edicts, nor merged into the hierarchical order of State religion. Etruria that mysterious rogion of a vanished civilisation -was its chief home; and its practices remain, in the form of sorcery and magic, wizardry and incantation, witchcraft and necromancy, in the present Italy of to-day, dying, doomed to die, yet discoverable by research and patience still. In a word, that popular body of beliefs and superstitions, whereof the old classics, by tantalising glimpses, make us well aware as having prevailed in classic Italy, has never perished from the soil of Italy. Impoverished, contaminated, debased, jealously hidden out of sight, it is still there. Have patience and cunning, and you will find it in the hearts and upon the lips of withered crones, of peasants versed in ancestral folklore. It will reach you in the rudest of Italian dialects, and from the least modernised of Italian districts; but it also lurks even beneath the shadow of Santa Croce, at Florence, and of St. Peter's, at Rome.

Mr. Leland is incapable of dulness, but he has his defects. He is vivid, picturesque, dramatic, exciting, at the expense of orderliness, sobriety, method. He gives us a brilliant bundle of notes and sketches, rather than a finished book. He would sooner be careless than pedantic, inaccurate than dogmatic. He is a writer whose veracity one cannot question, but whose authority one hesitates to quote: he is more enjoyable than useful. It is sometimes hard to make up one's mind whether or not he wishes to be of real assistance to the scientific student of anthropology. His light-hearted indifference to precision infects his proof-reading: we shrink, in the present volume, from misprints which make Browning unmeaning, Martial both unmeaning and unmetrical. Another flaw, or fault, derogatory to any serious and courteous scholar, is his constant girding at the Christian religion, especially in its Catholic form, in a vein of humour which entirely fails to be humorous, and which would still be offensive even if successful. But let us turn from this, and come to the more alluring theme of Santo Virgilio.

Signor Comparetti devotes his great work to the study of the medieval Virgil as he appears in the literature

of the learned, and of that literature as applied to the amusement of the less learned and the illiterate. He speaks of little else but what can be read in extant MSS. or print, and gives but a few lines to the Virgil whose transmogrified phantom flits yet in living legend underived from literary sources-that is, of course, to say, not immediately and consciously derived, but traditional. Mr. Leland, struck by this fact, set himself to collect, by his usual methods, Virgilian legends alive among the people, with the result that he presents to us some fifty tales; and it is safe to say that many, if not most, of them are assignable to no known source in the mass of medieval Virgilian legend extant as literature. Obviously, the medieval writers, of whatever kind, who have preserved for us the fantastic Virgil of popular myth could not record all they knew or heard; and there came a time when such legends ceased to be collected. But they did not therefore cease to be handed down among the people; and the popular Italian memory, which is a museum of confused relics, and the popular Italian imagination, which is a factory of things fanciful or grotesque, have between them produced these extraordinary narratives, wherein the medley mediæval conceptions of history and science and the supernatural are in full vigour. Recorded at the close of the nineteenth century, they essentially belong to the ages which made "Virgil, Duke of Naples," the contemporary of Homer and of King Arthur and of the Soldan of Babylon: they descend in spiritual and imaginative lineage from the times when

Son nom, balbutié par les hommes nouveaux,
Fit se lever, dans les ténèbres des cerveaux,
Lauré d'or et de feu, le fantôme d'un mage.
Le peuple, qui vénère encore son image,
Broda sur sa mémoire un étrange roman

66

De sorcier secourable et de bon nécroman. Assuredly, it is as "sorcier secourable et bon nécroman " that this "translated" Virgil figures in Mr. Leland's books; he has still the "white soul" that Horace loved, and is still, despite his strange transformations, the Virgil over whose tomb at Puteoli, so they sang in the churches of Mantua, Saint Paul wept and said: Ah, what manner of man had I not made of thee had I but found thee living, O prince of poets!" True, he is frolicsome, prankish, as well as helpful and benevolent; but then, as Faustus felt, if you are a magician, the temptation to merry jests and practical jokes is irresistible. Here, with one exception, he does nothing quite unworthy of the Virgil whom primitive and later Christianity hailed as the herald of the Nativity, the first discerner of the Star of Bethlehem, the Virgil who chaunted in his inspired "Pollio" the Desire of the Nations, Him who should come. There is nothing of the Virgil whom harsher spirits accused of working wonders "by whitchcraft and nigramansy thorough the help of the devylls of hell." This, according to one of Mr. Leland's stories, was the fashion of Virgil's own coming, and it is exquisitely imagined of him whom Renan calls "le tendre et clairvoyant Virgile." There was a lady of Rome called Helen, the world's wonder for beauty, but she would not wed for terror of childbirth; she therefore fled to an impregnable tower far without the walls; but-and here, as Mr. Leland notes, we have the Danaë myth-Jupiter descended as a shower of gold-leaf, and it fell into her cup, which she had no fear to drink.

But hardly had Helen drunk the wine before she felt a strange thrill in all her body, a marvellous rapture, a change of her whole being, followed by complete exhaustion. And in time she found herself with child, and cursed the moment when she drank the wine. And to her in this way was born Virgil, who had in his forehead a most beautiful star of gold. Three fairies aided at his birth the Queen of the Fairies cradled him in a cradle made of roses. She made a fire of twigs of laurels, it crackled loudly. To the crackling of twigs of laurel was he born; his mother felt no pain. The three each gave him a blessing; the wind as it blew into the window