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Selcover in money matters is notorious. If he has not inherited the apron of his shop-keeping grandfather, he has kept the calculating faculties and the grasping disposition of that immediate ancestor unimpaired."

I felt myself going hot and cold. No wonder that I had been cut at the club and passed unnoticed in the London streets. I cast my eye to the top of the page, and saw printed there, "The diary and recollections of the late Thomas Rodney."

This then was my great work, and the one by which I was to be known to the world! It had had a large sale; I understood now why my wife had a full pocket; but it must have alienated from me every friend I had in the world. I had prided myself on my shrewdness of observation, on my quickness in detecting the faults of my acquaintances, and I had amused myself by noting these down for my own edification, and for my consolation in moments when I realised that I was undervalued by the world. Now they were all printed and published: my comments on Mrs. Simpson's bad dinners, my references to Lucinda's false hair and scheming ways, my disgust at my son-in-law's bad manners and want of polish. I turned over page after page, and read with a terrible interest all that I had recorded there. Most of the names were disguised by the use of initials only, but the disguise was a very transparent one. The greater the reputation of any person whom I mentioned, the severer was my criticism upon that person's character. I showed up the heroes as disguised cowards, and the philanthropists as secret cheats. I revealed to a delighted world the strong provincial accent of an elegant writer, and I pleasantly horrified serious people by some telling anecdotes regarding the early life of an eminent divine. No man's Greek was safe from me, and no man's home was sacred. There was nobody whom I had ever met, of any consequence in the world, about whom I had not put

on record something which he would have desired to be forgotten. If any man succeeded in escaping my criticism himself, he had some one belonging to him whom I had dragged forward into unpleasant publicity. A fastidious father had a daughter who made herself ridiculous; an over-scrupulous mother had a son whose morals were too lax for a continued residence in his native country. Everybody's cupboard-door was thrown open by my nimble fingers, and his household skeleton stood revealed on my caustic pages.

I was so much absorbed in my reading that I did not notice the entrance of my friend, and I was only aroused by the remark, "Terribly interesting, is it not? Everybody

finds it so."

I looked round with a start, and saw that my friend had taken a seat behind me, and was watching me with an expression of intense amusement. I stared at him blankly. I did not know what to say, for I had just read an anecdote to the effect that his house was dirty and his habits inhospitable. "He ought to be thought of with indulgence," so I had concluded, "because he so seldom asks any one to taste his very bad wine." My thumb was on the paragraph, and I had not the presence of mind to remove it.

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'Ah, I see where you are-page 216, vol. i. Capital fun, isn't it? My copy always opens there. Everybody's copy has a place where it opens. naturally, and they are all different. Our friends look it up when they come to see us. I put a marker in mine to save time. It's had a roaring sale, that book has. Everybody recommended it to somebody else; it was a revenge and a relief to one's own feelings. Have you seen Rodney's book, and how he cuts into So-and-so?' Then the fellow would get it in a hurry and find himself there. Ha! ha!"

I put the book down slowly and with difficulty. It seemed to stick to

my fingers, so that it followed them as I took them away, and fell with a crash to the floor. "It was never intended for publication," I succeeded in saying.

"For publication! of course not. But nobody knew that you had it in you to do it at all- a feeble sort of good-natured fellow like you! Your wife's made money by it, I suppose; paid the mortgage off your house and invested a lot, so they say."

"Then Lord Selcover did not find the money?"

"No, Lord Selcover had a row with them to begin with; kept your journal and papers all to himself, said it was in the contract. Your death and those journals sold his book fast enough, but this one has quite put it out of court."

"He deserves what I said of him," I declared; "but there was nothing in those journals like this!"

"No, there wasn't. Well, how do you enjoy your welcome home? Everybody glad to see you?" And the fellow grinned in an ecstasy of enjoyment.

"I have only just discovered this," I answered abruptly, with my hand on the second volume, "and I think I had better go home."

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'Perhaps you are wise; I can't ask you to lunch. I don't mind for myself, but my wife wouldn't stand it. She has never got over that about the dirty house. Our servants have had a sad time since; and it's the very same wine, I intend to stick to it now; famous brand." He showed me off the premises with the air of a man enjoying a capital joke.

When I reached home I sought an interview with my wife. I tore her abruptly from the occupation of superintending the removal of Lucinda's travelling-trunks from my dressingroom into which they had mysteriously intruded.

"So you have published my diaries and private notes," I said to her with a groan.

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Yes, dear, and they have had such

a sale and brought us in heaps of money. When Lord Selcover behaved so badly about your African journals and got all the profit of them-a great deal more than he paid us altogether —people said to me it was such a pity that there was nothing else of yours to be published for my benefit. knew that you were always taking notes of things, and that they were so clever, so shrewd, as people say. So I showed them to a publisher, and he said they would sell like wildfire if brought out at once. And so they did, to be sure, and made you quite famous, and relieved me of all anxiety."

"But the personal allusions, those should have been left out."

"Well, some one did suggest it; but the publisher said the market value of the book would be destroyed. We were very careful not to print names when it was better not, and I am sure it is wonderful how nobody can contradict anything that is in the book. It was so clever of you to find out so much!"

"Why was I not told at once, yesterday?"

"Well, Willie would have it that you would be angry, so I left it for a little. But I was sure you would not, because you never wrote anything, or could write anything, of which you would be ashamed."

I did not know what to answer, but I sighed a little.

"You always intended to write a great work," my wife went on, "and now it is done, and no trouble, and it has made a little fortune for us; and you ought not to mind what jealous people say. People are always jealous of a great man.'

"I am afraid my success has driven me out of England for ever," was all I could answer her.

And so it proved to be. I had not a real friend left, but I had made a thousand enemies. Every opening was closed to me, every door was kept shut in my face. There was not a house except my own in which I could sit

down and feel that I was welcome. Even my son turned sulky because Lucinda quarrelled with him on my account. They had a stormy interview before her departure, which took place the day after my return.

"I forgave him when I thought he was dead, but now that he is alive I ca-an't." So I heard her sobbing through the open door as I went down the passage.

write of him in that way-for his nose is hardly crooked at all and his manners quite good-I don't think mamma ought to have let that sentence be published. But she is so blind and so careless, she never notices anything!"

Many people who had forborne to quarrel with my wife on my account now turned their backs upon both of us. Sundry threats reached me of

"He didn't mean you," said Willie, impending prosecutions for libel, and valiantly.

"Who could he mean by the calculating little simpleton with somebody else's hair,' except me?" wept Lucinda.

"It's uncommonly hard on a fellow to have to go through this sort of thing," Willie said to me reproachfully afterwards. "I don't know anybody else whose father ever put him into such a hole. When people go in for being dead and all that, they don't usually make any bother after

wards!"

I thought the remark unfeeling, but I was prepared to make allowance for the awkwardness of the boy's position.

My married daughter Clara came over to see me, and her visit did not give me unmitigated pleasure.

"I am very glad you are alive and at home," she assured me, with an air of injury, "but I can never ask you to my house any more. I had to make Edward promise to say nothing to you that first day in town. He is certain that that remark about the broken-nosed young man with the vulgar manners refers to him. And though I am sure you would never

my position was altogether an unenviable one.

I got out of it as soon as I could. My son-in-law bought my house in the hope of facilitating my departure from England; I sold my goods, left my son to be married to his Lucinda, and carried off my wife and younger children to Australia. The threats of prosecution came to nothing; nobody liked to take the initiative. My account of my late adventures in Africa sold well, following the masterpiece, and I was told by the publisher that further books of travel would be favourably looked upon.

I shall have to spend the rest of my life as a traveller. Nobody who knows me will have anything to do with me. Wherever I go my book follows me, both visibly in its stout volumes, and invisibly in its influence. It is only as a nameless stranger that I can get welcome or admittance anywhere. No beauty is so certain of her charms, no sage is so confident of his wisdom, as voluntarily to risk an interview with me. My book has brought me fame and fortune certainly; but it seems to have made me, for the rest of my life, a social outcast.

PROSE-POEMS.

THE poetry of prose and the poetry of verse must not be compared together. Their laws of expression are different. That the magic of the power of verse is, in its own domain, immensely greater than that of prose, is indisputable. Nevertheless, the poetry of

prose has a very real existence. Without aspiring to the peculiar power of verse it has its own perfections; it has its own curiosa felicitas of words, its own delectable and haunting melodies. It is true that instances of its perfection are extremely rare. Yet these are sometimes to be found; instances

in which a poetic thought is perfectly expressed; so that although verse might say it differently, it could not in that instance say it better, or with more telling power.

Such an instance is the brief but exquisitely beautiful prose-poem which Landor puts into the mouth of Esop. He, desiring that in the life of Rhodope "The Summer may be calm, the Autumn calmer, and the Winter never come," and being answered with a fond remonstrance, "I must die then earlier?" replies

"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. There are

no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."

What verse, except the rarest, was ever sweeter or took the ear more surely captive? And this of Landor's also may compare with it. It may called the Depths of Love.

be

"There is a gloom in deep love, as in deep water: there is a silence in it which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice

shakes its surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song."

There is not much in our language which can really rival this. Landor himself rarely broke into such singing. In truth, the spirit of his prose was "vowed unto austerity;" it loved the hermit's cell, the vigil, and the Scourge of cords, better than the " 'gorgeous storms of music," and the glow of painted panes. His mind was of that curious cast, in this resembling Mr. Browning's, which has the gift of turning words to music, and which yet seems careless or disdainful of its power; in consequence of which misfortune we are accustomed to receive from these great men ten volumes of the words of Mercury to one of Apollo's songs. Let us remember, for our comfort, that the rarity of jewels makes them of a richer value, and be thankful even for what we have.

But such fragments of poetic prose are not, in the strictest sense, prosepoems; for a poem is a work of art, designed to stand alone, rounded, complete, and self sustained. Prosepoems of this finished kind are among the rarest forms which literature has taken in our language. The specimens which we possess are scattered through the works of a few great writers. we attempt to reckon up the list of them, we shall find the task before us only too brief and easy; for in truth, we possess no more than a few scattered jewels. It will not, alas! take long to count them, though we count as slowly and as gloatingly as a miser tells his hoard.

If

In such a summary as that proposed, the three Dreams of Landor stand almost at the head, 'The Dream of

Euthymedes,' 'The Dream of Petrarca,' and, above all, The Dream of Boccaccio.' The last, which is too long for purpose of quotation, and too fine to be disjointed, contains a "Dream within a Dream,"-the scenes which passed before the eyes of Boccaccio when first he drank the waters of forgetfulness from the vase of Fiammetta. One passage may be cited from the introduction to this Dream, as an apt illustration of what prose can do, and of what, except in its last perfection, it cannot do. It is spoken by Petrarca to Boccaccio

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"Poets know the haunts of poets at first sight and he who loved Laura-O Laura! did I say he who loved thee?-hath whisperings where those feet would wander which have been restless after Fiammetta."

The very spirit of poetry is in these words, and yet they seem to fail of full perfection; they do not fill the soul with music, as does the finest verse; they have not the sweet and haunting charm, for instance, of these,

"I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick of love."

Nothing in Landor's work quite equals this. But then-what does?

Among English authors of prosepoems, three names, after Landor's, stand out pre-eminent, the names of De Quincey, Poe, and Ruskin. Each of these writers is possessed of a power and charm peculiarly his own. Neither has much in common with the others. The change from Landor to De Quincey is immense; from Landor's idiom, brief, self-restrained, even when (too rarely) "musical as is Apollo's lute," to De Quincey's Nile-like overflow, at times in its diffuseness spreading like waste waters, yet rising (at its best) into a movement almost like the "solemn planetary wheelings" of the verse of Milton. Compare a Dream of his with one of Landor's. Both are noble; but the difference is worldwide.

"The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams-a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dire extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whom, -a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, -was evolving like a great drama or piece of music. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms: hurryings to and fro trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the bad darkness and lights: tempest and human faces and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! And with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! And again, and yet again reverberated -everlasting farewells!"

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De Quincey's Dreams, it must not be forgotten, though now embedded in the substance of other work, were separately written, and designed to stand alone. The one above given, together with the three from 'Suspiria de Profundis' - the Mater Lacrymarum' above all-touches the highwater mark of poetic prose. And, like Landor's, De Quincey's highest flights are dreams; a fact which leads one to remark the curious fondnesscurious, that is, in extent, though in. itself most natural-which minds of great imaginative power have felt for embodying their conceptions in the form of dreams and visions. In all ages has this been the case. In a vision Isaiah saw the Seraph flying with a coal from off the altar. In a vision the Spirit stood before Job. In a vision the author of the Apocalypse saw the woman clothed in scarlet, and Apollyon cast into the pit, and Death on the pale horse. So also

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