seem, in proportion as men were in touch with the earth itself, in country life, in manual work upon it, above all by the open grave, as if, reminiscent of some older, deeper, more permanent ground of fact, it whispered oracularly a certain secret to those who came into such close contact with it. Persistent after-thought! Would it always survive, amid the indifference of others, amid the verdicts of the world, amid a thousand doubts? It seemed to have found, and filled to overflowing, the soul of one amiable little child who had a kind of genius for tranquillity, and on his first coming hither had led Gaston to what he held to be the choicest places, as being impregnable by noise. In his small stock of knowledge, he knew, like all around him, that he was going to die, and took kindly to the thought of a small grave in the little green close, as to a natural sleeping-place, in which he would be at home beforeband. Descending from the tower, Gaston knew he should find the child seated alone, enjoying the perfect quiet of the warm afternoon, for all the world was absent-gone forth to receive or gaze at a company of distinguished pilgrims.

Coming, sometimes with immense prelude and preparation, as when King Charles himself arrived to replace an image disfigured by profane huguenots, sometimes with the secrecy and suddenness of an apparition vanished before the public was aware, the pilgrims to "Our Lady under the Earth" were the standing resource of those (such there were at Chartres as everywhere else) who must needs depend for the interest of their existence on the doings of their neighbours. A motley host, only needing their Chaucer to figure as a looking-glass of life, type against type, they brought with them, on the one hand, the very presence and perfume of Paris, the centre of courtly propriety and fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to another age, curiosities of existence from remote provinces of France or Europe, from

distant, half-fabulous lands remoter still. Jules Damville, who would have liked best to be a sailor, to command, not in any spiritual ark, but in the French fleet-should half-ruined France ever come to have one-led his companions one evening to inspect a strange maritime personage, stout and square, returned, contrary to all expectation, after ten years' captivity among the savages of Florida, kneeling among the lights at the shrine, with the frankness of a good child, his hair like a mat, his hands tattooed, his mahogany face seamed with a thousand weather-wrinklings, his outlandish offerings lying displayed around him. Looking, listening, as they served them in the episcopal guest-chamber, those young clerks made wonderful leaps, from time to time, in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted, discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes present himself -a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station, like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered long over certain dim manuscripts in the canonical library, where our scholarly Gaston was of service, helping him directly to what he desired to see. And one morning early, visible at a distance to all the world, risen betimes to gaze, the Queen-mother and her three sons were kneeling thereyearning, greedy, as ever, for a hundred diverse, perhaps incompatible, things. It was at the beginning of that winter of the great siege of Chartres, the morning on which the child Guy Debreschescourt died in his sleep. His tiny body-the placid, massive, baby head still one broad smile, the rest of him wrapped round together like a chrysalis-was put to rest finally the same day, in a fold of the winding sheet of a very aged person, deceased about that time.

For a hard winter, like that famous

winter of 1567, the hardest that had been known for fifty years, makes an end of the weak—the aged, the very young. To the robust how pleasant had the preparation for it seemedthe scent of the first wood-fire upon the keen October air; the earth turning from gray to black under the plough; the great stacks of fuel, come down lazily from the woods of Le Perche, along the winding Eure; its wholesome perfume; the long soothing nights and early twilight. The mind of Gaston, for one, was touched by the sense of some remote and delicate beauty, like magicians' work, like an effect of magic as being extorted from unsuspected sources. What win

ter really brought however was the danger and vexation of a great siege. The householders of catholic Chartres had watched the forces of their huguenot enemies gathering from this side and that; and at last the dreaded circle was complete. They were prisoners like the rest, Gaston and the grandparents, shut up in their little hotel; and Gaston, face to face with it, understood at last what war really means. After all, it took them by surprise. It was early in the day. A crowd of worshippers filled the church of Sainte-Foy, built partly upon the ramparts; and at the conclusion of the mass the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the general consent, Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others proceed quietly before him, turning himself about to gaze upon the deserted place and church, and half tempted to remain, ere he too stepped forth lightly and leisurely, when under a shower of massy stones from the coulevrines or great cannon of the besiegers, the entire roof of the place sank into the empty space behind

him. But it was otherwise in a neighbouring church, in a similar way crushed with all its good people, not long afterwards.

And in the midst of the siege, with all its tumult about her, the old grandmother died, to the undissembled sorrow of Gaston, bereft, unexpectedly as it seemed, of the gentle creature to whom he had always turned for an affection that had been as no other in its absolute incapacity of offence. A tear upon the cheek, like the bark of a tree, testified to some unfulfilled hope, something wished for but not to be, which left resignation, by nature or grace, still imperfect, and made death at four-score years and ten seem after all like a premature summons in the midst of one's days. For a few hours the peace which followed brought back to the face a protesting gleam of youth, far antecedent to anything Gaston could possibly have remembered, moving him to a pity, a peculiar sense of pleading helplessness, which to the end of his life was apt to revive at the presence (it might be in an animal) of what must perforce remember that it had been young but was old.

That broken link with life seemed to end some other things for him. As one puts away the toys of childhood, so now he seemed to discard what had been the central influence of his earlier youth, what more than anything else had stirred imagination and brought the consciousness of his own life warm and full. Gazing now upon the "holy and beautiful place," as he had gazed on the dead face, for a moment he seemed to anticipate the indifference of age.

And when not long after the rude hands of catholics themselves, at their wits' end for the maintenance of the "religious war", spoiled it of the accumulated treasure of centuries, leaving Notre Dame de Chartres in the bareness with which we see it to-day, he had no keen sense of personal loss.

WALTER PATER.

LORD BYRON, we know, was under the impression that he hated Horace because that delightful classic had been forced so unmercifully down his throat by the instructors of his youth. The treatment of which he complains and the implied patience of his submission to it are not strikingly in accord with the earlier reputation either of the particular schoolboy or of the particular school; and one would like to have interrogated a few of the noble poet's contemporaries at Harrow on the point. But assuming the fact to have been as stated in the wellknown stanza of "Childe Harold," one may venture perhaps to dispute the inference. The truth is that the belief which Byron there avows is too suspiciously common to be accepted with ready credence. The man who believes that only injudicious training at school has spoilt a fine scholar in his person doth greatly abound. A little less insistence on the stock Virgilian cruces, and he would never, he thinks, have contracted his self-defensive passion for that particular athletic exercise in which he has subsequently achieved fame. A little more forbearance in the matter of corrupt choruses, and he might have risen on a masterly edition of Eschylus to the Bench of Bishops, instead of becoming merely an ornament of the Stock-Exchange. Such pleasing illusions of middle age it would be cruel to disturb, and humane men for the most part treat them with respect. The truth however, in at least ninetynine out of every hundred such cases,

1 Lucian's Dialogues. Namely, the Dialogues of the Gods, of the Sea-Gods, and of the Dead," &c. Translated with notes and a Preliminary Memoir, by Howard Williams, M.A., late Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge. London, 1888.

is that the early blighted scholar was not really any more disgusted with his youthful experiences of the Greek and Latin tongues than was the schoolfellow who has actually ripened into a Professor. It is an error to suppose that "the rudiments" of anything can be made agreeable to anybody, least of all to the young. What is true of the dead languages is equally true of the immortal game of cricket. Many excellent men of mature years no doubt entertain the firm conviction that they would probably have "played for the Gentlemen if com

pulsory "fagging out" had not early inspired them with a distaste for the noble game. They fail to explain how it is that the cricketer who has risen through his public school and university elevens to the deathless honour of being one of eleven amateurs selected to do battle with the Australians did his "scouting" too as a boy, and hated it: hated it at the time perhaps as much as many a now accomplished scholar detested his Latin Accidence and his Greek irregular verbs.

No; there is not often much in the complaint that the steady and tiresome drill to which the raw recruit of scholarship has to submit disgusts him out of all capacity for appreciating those beautiful and stately evolutions of thought and language which that training alone enables him to follow. Those who do not care for these things in mature years never would have cared for them, however their boyhood had been spent ; and those who do care for them know well how much of their pleasure they owe to the slow and laborious transit of their boyhood through the mill of the gerund-grinder. It will at any rate hardly be contended, I think,

of

that the keenest sensibility to the charm of the classical masterpieces is to be found (except in one such instance out of a thousand as that of Keats) in the man who has made his first acquaintance with them as an adult; though according to the theory I have been examining, he certainly ought to enjoy them the most. Keats, as we know, has imperishably recorded his emotions on first hearing" Chapman speak out loud and bold" (and one may add with a freedom amounting to licence) in his translation Homer. The poet felt like stout Cortez surveying the Pacific from a peak in Darien; but that was because he was a poet. And though I do not for a moment suggest that the average schoolboy feels at all like stout Cortez on first looking into the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey" in the original, I suspect that the like effect of Chapman's translation upon an average adult would be every bit as rare. The truth is that not only the vast Pacific of the Homeric poems, but even such a smaller matter as the sunny Archipelago of the Horatian Odes, by no means breaks upon most of us in the form of a sudden revelation. It is only by a gradual dispersion of the veiling mists of language, accompanied by as gradual an education of the imaginative eye, that most of us ever attain to any clear view of these great sights at all; and other things being equal, he whose faculty of literary vision has had the longest training is likely to see them best.

But though I do not admit that the strictly critical, or even the minutely grammatical study of the Latin and Greek classics which is or was exacted from schoolboys before they are or were of an age to appreciate the literary excellence of those works is really responsible for the consequences sometimes sought to be attached to it, I would not go so far as to deny that English scholastic traditions may somewhat too rigidly prescribe the selection of text-books. I would not take upon me to maintain

His

that they concede as much as they might to that natural desire of the student for what he can understand and in a great measure appreciate at the moment; and that they do as much as they might in the way of supplying him with that most potent of all incentives to the study of a language, a lively interest in the subject-matter of the work in which that language is being studied. Such a reflection solicits one with peculiar importunity at sight of the latest addition to Bohn's Classical Library, a translation of certain selected Dialogues of Lucian, by Mr. Howard Williams. Mr. Williams, having regard to what may be assumed to be the purpose he had in view, has acquitted himself fairly well. English rendering is clear, faithful, and sufficiently readable, if at times a little wooden; his notes opportune and serviceable; his prefatory biographical memoir concise and to the point; and his criticisms as a rule well considered. But the very sufficiency of the book for all the lawful purposes of a "crib" makes us wonder all the more at its late appearance in the familiar purple covers. How comes it, we ask ourselves, that so many schoolboys have been breaking their teeth for generations past over "craggy" bits of Thucydides, or plodding along uninterested through the Ionicisms of the Father of History, while these delightful colloquies, abounding, even for those who are too young to relish their inimitable satire, with the fascination of dramatic life and movement, have been permitted to slumber on the pedagogic shelves? For a slumber to all intents and purposes it has been, since it was never worth while to have disturbed the neglected humourist for the mere sake of the snippets of dialogue which I recollect as helping to furnish forth the school "Analecta " of thirty years ago. Why should not our schoolmasters have put their sixth forms through the whole three sets of Dialoguesthe Dialogues of the Gods, of the Sea Gods, and of the Dead, together with

"Zeus the Tragedian" and one or two, if not all, of the other pieces given in Mr. Williams's volume? Why, above all, should not the University of Oxford have long since opened the door of Moderations (let us hope it has done so by this time) to Lucian, as an author who may be "taken in" to the schools as a whole ? What indeed has excluded him? Not his unorthodoxy surely, for that can hardly shock any one but a Polytheist. Not his Greek, for it is excellent, a genuine Platonic revival, in the literary instead of the philosophical sense-a revival effected by that best of revivalists, the writer who has saturated himself with the thought and style of the original. And its stimulating power for a student of the undergraduate age would of course be much greater than it is for the schoolboy who, though he is or should be able to understand and appreciate a straightforward joke, is hardly at home with irony of the graver kind. Why too should not schoolboys be introduced to the "True History", first of human essays in the humorous-imaginative, archetype of so many a later effort of satiric fancy, founder of the family of which the immortal Captain Lemuel is the most illustrious son? Or why not to the Icaro-Menippus, that ironical Sindbad whose aerial flight on the borrowed wings of an eagle and a vulture would surely be as full of narrative charm even for the youngest reader as his sardonic survey of our ants'-nest of an earth is full of philosophic pungency for the adult? Many of us have found it difficult to determine whether the delight of Gulliver is greater for the young than for the oldgreater for those to whom Liliputians and Brobdingnagians are merely creatures of a new and wonderful world in no allegorical relations with our own, or to those who are of an age

to understand its inner meaning and to wonder at the triumphant art by which every fresh stroke of the fancy is made to drive home the barb of the satire. Lucian as a satirist

is not of course to be compared with Swift, but he possesses Swift's rare power of combining the fascinating story-teller with the grave humourist; and minor as is the degree in which he exhibits this combination, it is sufficient to give him an absolutely unique place among the writers of the ancient world.

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Let me here remark that in the foregoing sentence 'grave" is the emphatic word. There is nothing which SO pointedly distinguishes Lucian from all his predecessors, Greek or Latin, in the field either of poetic or pedestrian satire-nothing which more brings him into such close kindred with the greatest satirists of modern times, than the invincible gravity of his manner.

It is this

which makes his elaborate and pertinacious ridicule of the Polytheistic legends in his Dialogues of the Gods. and of the Dead so curiously effective. Unlike Voltaire, with whom he is often, though not always I think judiciously, compared, he never allows himself to interpolate any irrelevant witticism of his own in his exposure of the mythical absurdities of the decaying creed at which he mocked. Dramatic propriety is always strictly maintained. His Zeus, his Hera, his Aphrodite, his Hermes, are the Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Hermes of the "ages of faith." The admirable comedy of their presentment is produced and preserved by the simple but essentially artistic device of exhibiting these survivals of a childlike and unmoral period of human thought in all their gross and glaring repugnancy to the intelligence of a refined and cultivated and sceptical era. The amours of Jove, the jealousies of his consort, the miraculous births of Minerva and Bacchus, are recounted or commented upon in a demurely matter-of-fact fashion which is infinitely more effective for the purpose than the broadest burlesque. In so far as we may regard Lucian as writing with a deliberately rationalistic purpose, he could not have adopted a better method.