Chapter 3

It was not Laidley who entered, but Mrs. Combe, then the most-famous clairvoyant in the United States. According to statements of men both shrewd and honest she had lately succeeded in bringing the dead back to them in actual bodily presence. The voice was heard, then the spirit slowly grew into matter beside them. They could feel and see its warm flesh, its hair and clothing, and even while they held it it melted again into the impalpable air, and was gone. The account was attested by persons of such integrity and prominence as to command attention from scientific men. They knew, of course, that it was a trick, but the trick must be so well managed as to be worth the trouble of exposure. Hence, Mrs. Combe upon her entrance was received with silent, keen attention.

She was a tall pillar-like woman, with some heavy drapery of black velvet or cloth about her: there were massive coils of coarse black hair, dead narrow eyes of the same color, a closely-shut jaw: no point of light in the figure, but a rope of unburnished gold about her neck. She stood with her hands dropped at her sides, immovable, while her husband, a greasy little manikin with a Jewish face, turned on the light and waved the attention of the audience to her: "This is Miriam Combe, the first person since the Witch of Endor who has succeeded in materializing the shpirits of the dead. Our meeting here to-day is under peculiar shircumstances. A zhentleman unknown to me and Mrs. Combe, but who, I am told, is near death, desires to recall the shpirit of a dead friend. Zhentlemans will reconize the fact that the thing we propose to do depends upon the states of minds and matters about us. If these elements are disturbed by unbelief or by too much light or noise when the soul shtruggling to return wants silence and darkness, why--it cannot make for itself a body--dat's all."

"You compel belief, in a word, before you prove to us that we ought to believe," said a professor from a Baptist college in New Jersey, smiling blandly down upon him. "Scientifically--"

"I knows noting of scientifics. I knows dat my wife hash de power to ashist de souls to clode demselves wid matter. I don't pretend to explain where she got dat power, I don't know what ish dat power: I only know she hash it. If zhentlemans will submit to the conditions, they shall zhoodge for demselves."

"Now, the ignorance of this man impresses me favorably," said the professor to his friends. "He is evidently incapable of inventing a successful trick even of conjuring. If any great unknown force of Nature has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."

Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt, gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth century."

"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. "But the stage-properties are bad: the velvet is cotton, and the gold brass-gilt."

"Now, to me," said the judge emphatically, "there is a dreadful reality, a dead look, in her face. What Poe would have made of this scene! There was a man who could grapple with these supreme mysteries! No! that woman undoubtedly has learned the secret of life and of death. She can afford to be passive." The judge's very whisper was judicial, though pulpy.

It was not possible that the woman should have heard them, yet a moment after she lifted her eyes and motioned slowly toward them.

"God bless my soul, ma'am! You don't want me!" cried the judge.

Waring half rose, laughing, but with cold chills down his backbone, and then dropped into his seat, relieved: "You are the chosen victim, Miss Fleming."

Cornelia went up to the medium. She was confident the whole affair was a vulgar trick, but there was a stricture at her heart as if an iron hand had been laid upon it. The energy went out of her step, the blood from her face.

The woman laid her hand on her arm. "I need you," she said in a deep voice. "You have great magnetic force: you can aid this soul to return to life if you will. Sit there." She placed both her hands lightly on Cornelia's forehead. Miss Fleming dropped into the seat: she could not have done otherwise.

"Before we opens the séance," proceeded Combe, "zhentlemans can examine de cabinet and convince demselves dere is no trick."

The cabinet was a light triangular structure of black walnut, about seven feet in height, placed in one corner of the room, though with an open space between it and the wall. It moved on casters: the door was on the side facing the audience. Miss Fleming observed with amusement that the seat given her removed her to the farthest distance from this door.

"You will notish dat dere is absolutely noting in de cabinet but a chair--zhoost de walls and de floor and de chair. Miriam will sit there, and de door will be closed. When it opens you will see de embodied spirit beside her."

"Hillo!" cried the judge, "what's this behind the cabinet?"

"It is a window overlooking de garden: I had it boarded up to prevent you sushpecting me of trickery. But you sushpect mine boards, mein Gott! Exshamine dem, exshamine dem! Go outside."

The judge did so. "They are screwed on honestly enough," he said to the spectators. "A ghost had need of a battering-ram to come through that window. It opens on an area thirty feet deep."

The woman went into the cabinet and the door was closed. Steps were heard upon the stairs.

"It ish de zhentleman who calls for de shpirit to appear," said Combe in a whisper.

The door opened, and Laidley, supported by Captain Swendon, entered, giving a quick appealing look about him as he halted for a moment on the threshold. The dignity of approaching death was in his weak, ghastly face, and the judge rose involuntarily, just as he would have stood uncovered if a corpse had gone by. Laidley took the seat which the captain with his usual bluster placed for him opposite the door of the cabinet. Combe turned out the lights: the room was in absolute darkness. The judge moved uneasily near to Waring: "Don't laugh at me, Mr. Waring. But I really feel that there is a Presence in this room which is not human. I wish I had listened to my wife. She does not approve of this sort of thing at all: she thinks no good churchman should meddle with it. But there is _something_ in the room."

"Yes, I am conscious of what you mean. But it is a physical force, not spiritual. Not electricity, either. It is something which has never affected my senses before. Whatever it is, it is the stock in trade of these people."

They were ordered by Combe to join hands, and everybody obeyed excepting the captain's daughter, who stood unnoticed by one of the curtained windows.

A profound silence followed, broken by a stifled sob from some over-nervous woman. The low roll of an organ filled the void and died. After that there was no complete sound but at intervals the silence took breath, spoke in a half-articulate wail, and was dumb again.

Pale nebulous light shone in the cabinet and faded: then a single ray fell direct on Laidley's face. It stood out from the night around like a bas-relief--livid, commonplace, a presentment of every-day death. Each man present suddenly saw his own grave open, and the world beyond brought within reach through this insignificant man.

"The spirits of many of the dead are present," said the sepulchral voice within the cabinet. "What do you ask of them?"

Laidley's lips moved: he grasped the arms of his chair, half rose: then he fumbled mechanically in his pocket for his cigar-case, and not finding it sank back helplessly.

"What do you ask of them? Their time is brief."

"I'm a very ill man," he piped feebly: "the doctors give me no hope at all. I want advice about a certain matter before--before it's too late. It is a great wrong I have done that I want to set right."

"Can any of the dead counsel you? Or do you summon one soul to appear?"

"There is but one who knows."

"Call for her, then."

Laidley looked about him uncertainly: then he said in a hoarse whisper, "Virginie Morôt!"

The captain sprang to his feet: "My wife? No, no! for God's sake!"

The light was swiftly drawn back into the cabinet and extinguished. After several minutes the voice was heard again: "The spirit summoned is present. But it has not the force to resume a material body unless the need is urgent. You must state the question you would have answered."

"I must see Virginie here, in bodily presence, before I'll accept any answer," said Laidley obstinately. "I'll have no hocus-pocus by mediums or raps. If the dead know anything, she knows why I need her. I have had money to which she had a--well, a claim. I've not spent it, perhaps, in the best way. I have a mind now to atone for my mistake by leaving it to a charity where I know it will do great good."

An amazed whistle broke through the darkness from the corner where the judge sat. The captain caught Laidley's shoulder. "William," he whispered, "surely you forget Jane."

Laidley shook him off. "The money is my own," he said loudly, "to do with as I choose. But if Virginie can return from the dead, she shall decide for me."

"It's enough to bring her back," muttered the judge. "Do you hear that?" thumping Waring's knee--"that miserable shrimp swindling her child in order to buy God's good-will for himself!"

There was a prolonged silence. At last a voice was heard: "She will appear to you."

The organ rolled heavily, low soft thunders of music rose and fell, a faint yellowish vapor stole out from under the cabinet and filled the darkness with a visible haze. Captain Swendon stumbled to his feet and went back to his daughter: "I can't bear it, child! I can't bear it!" dropping into a chair.

She took his hand in her own, which were quite cool, and stroked and kissed it. But she did not speak nor take her eyes from the door of the cabinet.

It opened. Within sat Miriam, immovable, her eyes closed. Beside her stood a shadowy luminous figure covered with a filmy veil. It moved forward into the room. So thick was the vapor that the figure itself appeared but a shade.

Laidley stooped forward, his hands on his knees, his lips apart, his eyes dilated with terror.

The veil slowly fell from the face of the spirit, and revealed, indistinctly as the negative of a photograph, a small thin woman with eager, restless eyes, and black hair rolled in puffs high on the head in the fashion of many years ago.

"Virginie!" gasped Laidley.

The captain shuddered, and hid his face. His daughter, with a quick step backward, threw aside the curtains and flung open the shutters. The broad daylight streamed in.

Combe sprang toward her with an oath.

The young girl held back the curtain steadily. "We need fresh air," she said smiling resolutely in his face.

The rush of air, the daylight, the cheerful voice wakened the room as out of a vision of death. The men started to their feet; there was a tumult of voices and laughter; the materialized soul staggered back to reach the cabinet. The whole of the cheap trickery was bared: her hair was an ill-fitting wig, the chalk lay in patches on her face, the vapor of Hades was only salt burning in a dish: the boards removed from the window showed her snug hiding-place inside.

Dr. Dehr's fury made itself heard above the confusion: "You have brought Spiritualism into disrepute by your infernal imposture!" clutching the poor wretch by the shoulder, while another intemperate disciple called loudly for the police. The woman began to sob, but did not utter a word.

"Let her go, doctor," said Mr. Waring, coming up. "We paid to see a farce, and it was really a very nice bit of acting. This poor girl was hired, no doubt: she is only earning her living."

"What has she done?" cried Dehr. "Spiritualism in Philadelphia never has attracted the class of investigators that are here to-day, and she--" shaking her viciously--"she's an impostor!"

"Damnation! she's a woman!" wrenching his hand from her. She gave Waring a keen furtive glance, and drew quickly aside. While some of the seekers after truth demanded their five dollars back with New England obstinacy, and Combe chattered and screeched at them, she stood in the middle of the room, immovable, her sombre sallow face set, her tawdry stage-properties about her--the crown of false black hair, the sweeping drapery, the smoking dish with fumes of ghastly vapor.

Mr. Waring went up to a short, broadly-built man in gray who had been seated in the background during the séance. "I did not know that you were in town or here, Mr. Neckart," he said with a certain marked respect. "That is not an unpicturesque figure, I think. She would serve as a study of Night, now--a stormy, muggy town-night, full of ooze and slime." Mr. Waring's manner and rhetoric were uneasy and deferential. Mr. Neckart was a power in a region quite outside of the little fastidious gossiping club of men and women whom he was wont to call the World.

"Your Night, apparently, has little relish for the morning," he said.

The woman's threatening eyes, in fact, were fixed on the tall fair girl, the captain's daughter, who stood in the window, busied with buttoning her father's overcoat and pinning his empty sleeve to his breast. She was looking up at him, and talking: the wind stirred her loose pale-gold hair; behind her branches of white roses from a vine outside thrust themselves in at the window: the birds chirped in the rustling maples beyond.

"What a wonderful effect of light and color!" said Waring, who had lounged through studios and galleries enough to enable him to parcel out the world into so many bits of palette and brush-work. "Observe the atmosphere of sunshine and youth. Cabanel might paint the girl's face for the Dawn. Eyes of that profound blue appear to hold the light latent."

"There seems to be unusual candor in them," said Mr. Neckart, glancing carelessly at Jane again, and drawing on his gloves. "A lack of shrewdness remarkable in an American woman."

"The Swendons are Swedes by descent, you know. A little phlegm, a lack of passion, is to be expected, eh? Now, my own taste prefers the American type--features animated by a nimbler brain; as there, for example," looking toward Miss Fleming. "Ugly beyond apology. But there is a subtle attraction in it."

"No doubt you are right. I really know very little about women," indifferently. He nodded good-evening, glancing at his watch as he went out.

The captain was conscious of some malignant influence at his back, and turning, saw the woman, who had gradually approached, and now stood still. He hastily stepped between her and his daughter: "Good God! Stand back, Jane! This woman is following you."

"She looks as if she had the evil eye. But they are very fine eyes," said the young girl, inspecting her quietly, as if she had been a toad that stood suddenly upright in her way.

"I owe you an ill turn, and I shall pay it," said the woman with a tragic wave of the arms. "I had a way to support myself and my boy for a year, and you have taken it from me."

"It was such a very poor way! Such a shabby farce! And it was my mother that--" She stopped, a slight tremor on the fair, quiet face.

"Oh, I shall pay you!" The woman gathered her cheap finery about her and swept from the room.

In the confusion Judge Rhodes had sought out Laidley, full of righteous wrath on behalf of his friend the captain, against this limp fellow who was going to enter heaven with a paltering apology for dishonesty on his lips. Laidley, however, was reclining in the easy-chair with his eyes closed, and the closed eyes gave so startling an appearance of death to the face that the judge was thrown back in his headlong charge. "Why, why, William! I'm sorry to see you looking so under the weather," he said kindly.

Laidley's eyes began to blink: he smiled miserably: "It's too late to throw the blame on the weather, judge. Though I'm going back to Aiken next week. I came North too soon."

"This affair has turned out a more palpable humbug than I expected," trying to approach the point at issue by a gentle roundabout ascent. "I wish Van Ness had been here--Pliny Van Ness. There's a man whose advice I seek since I came to Philadelphia on all important matters. A man whose integrity, justice--God bless me, William! You must know Pliny Van Ness. Why don't you take his counsel, instead of meddling with these wretched mediums? Raising the dead to tell you what to do? Bah! If you had asked me, now--"

Laidley had drawn himself up in the chair, his watery eyes gathering a faint eagerness: "Sit down. Here. I wish to speak to you, judge. Nobody will hear us."

"Certainly. As you ask me now--I know the whole case. Don't try to talk: it only makes you cough. You want to say that the property--"

"I want to say nothing about the property. My will was made last week. I am determined to throw my means into that channel where it will best contribute to God's service. He will not scorn a late repentance. But Van Ness--it was about Van Ness I wanted to talk to you."

"If your will was made last week, why did you try to bring back poor dead Virginie to advise you?"

"I don't know," said Laidley, coughing nervously--"I don't know. I thought she would confirm me--I--I want to be just to her daughter, God knows!"

"What is your idea of justice?"

"Why this--this," eagerly, catching the judge's red, fat hand in his cold fingers. "Jane will be a woman whom Van Ness would be apt to approve. I know he's fastidious. But she's very delicate and fair--as fine a bit of human flesh as I ever saw. As for mind, she has none. A mere child. He could mould her--mould her. Eh? I think I could throw out an inducement which would lead him to look favorably on her--when she's of a marriageable age, that is. If the girl were married to such a man as Van Ness, surely she would be well placed for life. Nobody could blame me for not making an heiress of her."

"Jane? Van Ness?" said the judge thoughtfully. "Well, Van Ness is a man whom any woman in the country should be proud to marry. But he is impregnable to that sort of thing. And Jane is but a child, as you say. The scheme seems to me utterly unfeasible, Laidley. Besides, what has it to do with her claims on you?"

"It has everything to do with them. I give her instead of money a home and husband such as no money can buy. They must be brought together, judge. You must do it. I have a word to say to Van Ness that will open his eyes to her merits. I will plant the seed, as I might say. It will grow fast enough."

The judge was silent as he helped Laidley, still talking eagerly, down the stairs and into his carriage. The whole fantastic scheme was, as he saw, the cowardly device of the dying man to appease his conscience. That this poor creature should have any power to influence Van Ness, the purest and strongest of men, was a mere bit of braggadocio, which surely did not deceive even Laidley himself.

But what could he do? To stab with reproach, even to argue with this nerveless, worn-out man, flaccid in mind and body, seemed to the kindly old fellow as cruel as to torture a dying fish or other cold-blooded creature of whose condition or capacity for suffering he could have no just idea.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE SWEETENER.

Spring blossom, rose of June and autumn-cluster Appeal alike unto the bloom of health, In whose spontaneous, overflowing lustre Is half the secret of the season's wealth.

The pallid cheek may warm to apple-flushes, The fevered lip kiss fondly sweets of June, The languid palate leap to fruitage luscious, Yet weary of their day before the noon.

'Tis laughing Health, with an unhindered fountain Of joy upbubbling from her being's core, Whose lavish life embraces vale or mountain, And drains delight at every opened door.

MARY B. DODGE.

AN ENGLISH EASTER.

It may be said of the English as is said of the council of war in Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they _do_ agree their unanimity is wonderful. They differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the propriety of locking up the Reverend Arthur Tooth for his Romanizing excesses, the histrionic merits of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social observances on which Respectability has set her seal. England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing in the same way at the same time--using the same slang, wearing the same hats and cravats, collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of "polo," flocking into the same skating-rinks. The monotony of this spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's, propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles,--in this great exhibition there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these manoeuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his _entourage_ I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such a considerable affair.)

The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish," it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Théâtre Français, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions: and you may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-mosses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without reason, though at the moment I speak of their dullness must have been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity--the moment at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in which occasions for change and diversion are made use of. All this speaks to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more money, and they have a much higher relish for holiday taking. (I am speaking of course always of the "easy classes.") Leisure, fortune and the love of sport--these things are implied in English society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide Holidays, which I am told are even more of a festival than Easter, and from this point to midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The business men and the professional men partake in equal measure of these agreeable diversions, and I was amused at hearing a lady whose husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving town with her for ten days and though Easter was a very nice bit of idleness, they really amused themselves with more gusto in the later recess, which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly probable, and admired so picturesque a chiaroscuro of work and play. If my phrase has a slightly ironical sound this is purely accidental. A large appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this measure we Americans are rather ill-conditioned. Such holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy in our hands. Tribute rendered to English industry, however (our own stands in no need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons available for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of civilization. The young men who are preparing for the stern realities of life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms but one half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens, lawns and parks.

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder coloring and a sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row--a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a "bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas Day and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for another year. This information was given me apropos of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told that all the washerwomen were drunk, and that, as it would take them some time to revive, I must not look for a speedy resumption of these relations. I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One of the incidental _agréments_ of life in the latter city had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap which was an irresistible advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_ was _sober_ is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense hair and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talking, to the door and with a brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not strictly accurate and that at the end of three months I had another array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion however nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much _en évidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most unfavorable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weather-proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway stations overflowed and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the glutinous medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially the British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic hideousness. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curb-stone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker street--a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is picturesque in spite of details--from its dark-green, misty parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloudy skies, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to the picturesque this is a constant entertainment, and yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere, else is so much human life gathered together and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of every possible kind, and this is the interest of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from Piccadilly across the Green Park and through St. James's Park. The parks were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. You are a tight fit in your place wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and such perpetual familiarity contains the germs of contempt. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the parks in the midst of these "circumstances," and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without this impression being confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be woefully shaken in the presence of a small number. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper class I imagine this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery--an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree or other the traces of liquor, which is not a beautifying fluid. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-modeled faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

All this, I admit, is a description of the men rather than of the women; but to a certain extent it includes the women. There is much more beauty among English women of the lower class than strangers who are accustomed to dwell upon their "coarseness" recognize. Pretty heads, pretty mouths and cheeks and chins, pretty eyes too, if you are content with a moderate brilliancy, and at all events charming complexions--these seem to me to be presented in a very sufficient abundance. The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous--especially among the younger ones. Now the same distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are physically very well appointed. Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and remoter neighbors, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West-End pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have it at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilizations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them are almost handsome!

The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr. George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical agitator, of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens but to golden keys. But he was a useful and honorable man, and his own people gave him an honorable burial. I emerged accidentally into Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play. Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy; but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had the character of a great popular "manifestation." The hearse was followed by very few carriages, but the cortége of pedestrians stretched away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly, on a scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was broken by a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and were making a sort of solemn spree of it. Very solemn it all was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found in the whole affair something memorable. My impression rose not simply from the radical, or as I may say for the sake of color, the revolutionary, emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day the queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking straight down into Westminster and over the royal cortége, were gathered a group of banners and festoons, inscribed in big staring letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police-department might easily have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country. These portentous standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the police-department _is_ sensitive, and where revolutionary placards are not observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both of the occasions I speak of with the admirable English practice of letting people alone--with the good sense and the good humor and even the good promise of it. It was this that I found impressive as I watched the "manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans--the fact that the mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the excellent quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.

When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's friends--three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the unanimity I began by talking about), and to keep down as much as possible the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might have projected in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due cogitation I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous journey that I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an account. But I have dallied so much by the way that I have come almost to my rope's end without reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artistically, by relating that I put myself in the humor for remote adventure by going down the Thames on a penny steamboat to--the Tower! This was on the Saturday before Easter and the City was as silent as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my childhood, and having a theory, that from such memories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the Tower is very good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; very vast and grand, historical and romantic. I could not get into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the _genius loci_. I found this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town. "Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor travelers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment gratis and four pence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveler who avails himself of the testamentary four pence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover, to join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, crowded, in the dusk, as I measured it up and down, with specimens of the British soldier from the large garrison at Chatham; those trim and firmly-pacing red-coats who seem, to eyes accustomed to the promiscuous continental levies, so picked and disciplined, polished and pomatumed, such ornamental and yet after all, such capable warriors.

The cathedral at Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and breaks that long vista so properly of the very essence of a great church. Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of steps to pass through the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I remember something in the way of a quiet, weird deanery or canonry, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come circling and clamoring around it. Better than these things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a most noble and imposing ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive than this towering square of Rochester.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the rest of the structure it has a magnificent color--a sort of rich dull yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church--the side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of; the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea." From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a service in the choir, but it was well over and I had the place to myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his presence it was possible to feel a certain personal nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood there a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the darkness which seemed to deepen and flash in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell, made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of history. I emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to my inn and sat in a chair by the coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable "Memorials" of Canterbury, and wondering over the musty appointments and meagre resources of English hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose), the "Fleur-de-Lis." The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to let it take me to the inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered. I found compensation at Dover, however, where the "Lord Warden" Hotel struck me as the best inn I had encountered in England. My principal errand at Dover was to look for Miss Betsey Trotwood's cottage, but I am sorry to say I failed to discover it. Was it not upon the downs, overlooking the town and the sea? I saw nothing on the downs but Dover Castle, which, in default of Miss Trotwood's stronghold, I zealously visited. It is an establishment of quite the same character, bristling with offensive and defensive machinery. More seriously speaking, it is a magnificent fortress--a bequest of the Middle Ages turned to excellent account by modern engineers. The day was clear and beautiful, and I walked about for a while among the towers and the grassy bastions; then I stood and gossiped with an amiable gunner who talked to me of Malta, leaning against the rampart and looking across the wrinkled sea to the glimmering cliffs of France.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

THE ELIXIR.

"Oh brew me a potion strong and good! One golden drop in his wine Shall charm his sense and fire his blood, And bend his will to mine."

Poor child of passion! ask of me Elixir of death or sleep, Or Lethe's stream; but love is free, And woman must wait and weep.

EMMA LAZARUS.

LÉONIE REGNAULT: A STUDY FROM FRENCH LIFE.

In the pretty town of Macon, on the banks of the Saône, lived Léonie Regnault. She remembered no other home than the gray stone house with its balconied windows that overlooked the beautiful river and the long, somewhat formal promenades that stretch along its banks, with their green trees and many seats, but never a blade of grass--all dry, hard-beaten gravel, after the ugly French fashion, convenient enough, it must be confessed, for the evening loungers, gay or tired, whom the dewy green of Nature might incommode.

Léonie's father lived in Paris, and he had brought her when only three years old to the gray stone house and the care of his only sister, Madame Perrin, a childless widow, who gladly received the beautiful little girl to the large shelter of a loving heart. But Léonie never forgot her father. The little creature would sit on her low-cushioned chair and sing to herself, "Mon beau papa! mon beau papa! O comme je t'aime, mon beau papa!" I suppose every tender father appears beautiful to his little child, but Colonel Regnault was indeed a strikingly handsome man, with a perfect grace and dignity of manner which rendered him indispensable to the court of Louis Napoleon, where he had a prominent position on all days of ceremony. Once or twice a year he made his escape from court duties for a brief visit to Léonie, whose love for him grew more intense with years, concentrating in itself all the romance of her enthusiastic nature.

Madame Perrin saw few visitors, and scarcely ever went out except to mass. Every morning her good Louise took Léonie to the girls' school in the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Léonie had her inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so devoted to each other as were Léonie Regnault and Hélène Duprès. They sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new--the merest nothing has its poem and history. They had made their first communion together, which was the most important incident hitherto in Léonie's uneventful life. Her father had come down on this occasion, and when she came from the altar he had put aside her white veil and kissed her with tears in his eyes.

Léonie had completed her fifteenth year when she was thrown into great excitement by an unexpected piece of news. Her father was about to marry. The future Madame Regnault was a young widow of good family and large fortune. He had taken this step, he said, for Léonie's sake even more than for his own. He wished to have his daughter with him and to cultivate her talents; and how could this be done without a home in Paris? The marriage would take place early in September, and the first week in October he would come for Léonie. He looked forward with delight to having a home for his beautiful beloved child.

It was the last week in September. The rain was falling in a dull dreary way, as it had been falling all day and almost a week of days.

"I wish it would clear up," said Léonie. "I hate to have everything look so dreary just the last week I have to stay."

"Do you ever think, chérie, how dull it will be for me when you are gone? What shall I do without ma chère petite?" asked Madame Perrin tenderly.

"And what shall I do without you, chère maman? I am afraid I shall not like the new mamma that papa has given me. Or perhaps I am only afraid that she will not like me. You are my real mother," taking her hand caressingly. "I wish I could remember my own mother. Why have you never told me anything about her? I have asked you so many times."

"I never was acquainted with your mother. She lived in Paris, you know, and I lived here."

"But you have seen her. Was she beautiful? Am I like her?"

"Yes," said Madame Perrin with a little start--"so much like her that it frightens me." Then more deliberately, in reply to Léonie's astonished eyes, "I mean that it is sad to be reminded of one who is dead."

"Papa must have loved her very much. I remember when I was a little girl, and began to wonder why I had not a mother like Hélène, you said I must never ask papa about her, it would give him so much pain. But now I may, now that he has given her place to somebody else."

"By no means, Léonie--less than ever. If your poor father has at last succeeded in leaving his sorrow behind him, do you wish to drag him back to it, you thoughtless child?"

"Then you must tell me yourself, ma tante. It is very strange that you are so unwilling to tell me anything about my pretty mother who died when I was almost a baby."

"Why will you be so persistent? I do not like to give you so much pain."

"Why, dear aunt, I shall like to hear about her. It is very sad not to have any mother, but I can't feel as distressed about it as if I had known and loved her. She is only a beautiful dream to me. I cannot feel as I should if you were to die and leave me. You must tell me. I shall not let you have any peace till you do. You can't refuse me now, just when I am going away."

"Well, if I must, I must," said Madame Perrin with trembling voice. "What do I know? It may be for your salvation. The Blessed Virgin grant it! Your mother, Léonie, was a great beauty."

"I was sure of it. If I could only have seen her with my dear papa! He is so handsome always."

"She was a great singer too."

"I am glad of it. I shall be a singer when I have learned in Paris. I care more for the lessons in singing than for anything else in the great beautiful city, except being with my own papa."

"But, Léonie, your mother sang in the Grand Opera. She was the best singer in France, or in the world perhaps, and everybody was crazy about her."

"And so papa married an opera-singer? It is quite a romance."

"He did not marry her."

"Not marry her?" said Léonie with white face and great black, wide-open eyes.

"She was married already to one of the singers in the opera, and she left him to live with your father."

Léonie's white lips shaped rather than uttered the question, "What did he do, the husband?"

"He challenged your father, and, though he was so much his inferior, Léon was too generous to hurt his feelings by refusing to fight with him after doing him such an injury. He was so good a swordsman that he easily disarmed him with only a slight wound."

"This is terrible!" said Léonie. "My father such a wicked man!"

"That is not the way the world looked at it. All the men envied Léon, and the women flattered and spoiled him more than ever."

"I hate my father!" cried Léonie with quick, passionate sobs. "No wonder my poor mother died. I shall be her avenger: I feel it."

"You do not know what you are saying. Your mother avenged herself. She deserted him as she deserted her husband, and you too, my poor child, when you were just learning to say 'Mamma.' Poor Léon! he sinned, but he suffered too. Be merciful to him, Léonie, as you pray God to be merciful to you."

"Is my mother alive?" asked Léonie, shivering.

"No: she died three years ago. Your father never would see her again, but when he heard that she was sick and in want (she had entirely lost her wonderful voice), he gave her an annuity because she was your mother. Father Aubrey used to see her from time to time, and he said she was truly penitent before she died."

"Oh, what shall I do? I shall never be happy again--never, never! What made you tell me? How could you?" said poor Léonie, wringing her little hands and burying her face in the cushions.

"My child, you would hear it sooner or later in that great, wicked city, and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid--" here the poor little woman broke down and began to cry like Léonie, but less violently--"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera, Léonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself."

"I will die first," answered Léonie. "I wish I had never been born."

"Don't tell your father, Léonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the conversation ended.

"What's the matter with Léonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a welcome. What ails the child?"

"She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels sad at leaving Hélène and me," replied his sister.

"She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel.

The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and mobile as Léonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire. Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and direful headache _in terrorem_; and the colonel thought he was polite to me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and which heightened the beauty of Léonie, extinguished the delicate color and soft blue eyes of Madame Regnault, and were so little in harmony with her person and character as to have almost the effect of a discord in music.

A year passed, and her heart was made glad by a dear little son, who was named Léon for his father. The little fellow was six weeks old, and his mother had scarcely left the nursery, which was a bit of heaven to her, when Colonel Regnault startled her from her dream of bliss: "I have found just the nurse for the baby, the wife of a small farmer who lives close to Rosny Station. She will wean her child and take him. She is such a fresh, healthy-looking woman, and everything is so clean and tidy in her cottage, that you will be delighted with her, I am sure."

"Oh, Léon, may I not nurse him myself? I cannot give him up to anybody. Who will take so good care of my little precious darling as his own mother?"

"It is not to be thought of, Clémence: it would wear you out. See, you are crying now: it shows how weak and nervous you are. Besides, Léonie needs you. She is losing already, for nobody plays her accompaniments so well as you, and I do not like to have her go to the Conservatoire with a bonne when it can be helped: a girl so striking is likely to be watched and followed. I never feel safe about her unless you are with her. Don't be silly: the baby will be better off in the country."

Madame Regnault was very kind to Léonie: it was impossible for her to be otherwise to any one. She was devoted to her for her father's sake: she felt a thrill of delight in her beauty, in her wonderful talents; but she did not love her. She might have loved her perhaps--though there was not much in common between the ardent, high-spirited girl and the gentle, patient woman, except, indeed, the taste for music--but it is not in nature, and hardly in grace, for a woman thirsting for her husband's love to like being always postponed to some one else. Colonel Regnault seemed to have no perception of anything but his beautiful daughter: his ambition was centred in her even more than his affection. Léonie's talent developed rapidly, and his pride was fed by the praises of her masters and the more flattering compliments of friends and connoisseurs who were present at the musical soirées given from time to time at his own house.

But Léonie did not contribute to the peace of the household. Her aunt had not found it out, Madame Regnault never would have discovered it, but her father's despotic will roused one equally defiant in her, and when they came in contact it was the collision of flint and steel. Léonie often carried her point against her father, and he admired her only the more for it. The contests were quick and sharp--not very frequent, but very unpleasant to Madame Regnault. She grew thin and pale and spiritless. She was not yet thirty, and she had aged by half a score of years in the year and a half of her marriage.

Her mother, Madame Dumesnil, was indignant at what she considered the colonel's neglect of his wife, and mentally threatened to give him "a piece of her mind." She had not long to wait for an occasion.

"I am sorry to see Clémence looking so ill," said she to him as he entered his wife's dressing-room one day a little before breakfast--that is to say, about noon.

"I had not noticed that she was ailing," he rejoined with a quick glance at his wife.

"It is well that somebody has eyes," continued Madame Dumesnil. "I did not expect that my daughter was to become a governess when she married you. Her previous life had not prepared her for such arduous duties."

"My wife does not complain," said the colonel haughtily.

"Clémence complain! She would not complain if she suffered martyrdom." Madame Regnault looked imploringly at her mother, but she went on more sternly than before: "If Clémence had a spark of spirit she would never have had Léonie in the house. It is a shame for her to be made a slave to the opera-singer's girl, and I am not the only one who thinks so."

"Pardon me, madame," responded her son-in-law, "the conversation is too exciting for me. I have the honor to wish you a good-morning;" and he bowed himself out with the most exasperating courtesy.

"Oh, mother, what have you done?" cried Madame Regnault, trembling and tearful. "How could you make him so angry?"

"How _could_ I, indeed! I wish I were his wife a little while: he wouldn't find it so easy to tyrannize over me. I don't know where you got your disposition from: you didn't take it from me, that's certain."

"Jacques," said Colonel Regnault to the porter as he left the house, "when Madame Dumesnil calls to see your mistress hereafter, let me know it, and remember that I am never at home."

Léonie, though she felt a certain hardness in the manner of Madame Dumesnil when she happened to meet her, was wholly unaware of what was passing in the heart of Madame Regnault, who had a genuine sympathetic interest in the development of her remarkable powers, playing her accompaniments unweariedly for hours daily and giving her the benefit of her own delicate and highly-cultivated taste. They were happy years for Léonie. Her young soul, full of the inspiration and power of genius, felt its wings growing. There is an atmosphere of art in Paris which is powerfully stimulating to any one of æsthetic tendencies; and how exhilarating was this subtle atmosphere to Léonie! The Conservatoire, with its seventy professors and its thousand students, its competitions, concerts and public exercises, stimulated her zeal and inspired ever higher ideals that made close, hard study the play of her fresh and delighted faculties. Once a week her father took her to the opera. It happened that the first opera she heard was _Faust_, and she sat as if in a dream, white and scared, seeming to see in the scenes the spectre of her mother. But this impression wore away, and ere many weeks had passed her heart dilated, her eyes kindled with the triumphs of the singer, and she felt as Correggio when he looked on Raphael's _St. Cecilia_ and exclaimed, "I, too, am a painter!"

Thus the days went on, not too slowly, till Léonie had entered her nineteenth year and approached the close of her studies. The finest concerts of Paris and the most exclusive are those of the Conservatoire, six in number, which occur once a fortnight from the middle of January to the middle of April. Léonie had often sung in the small concert-hall at examinations and private exercises, but now she was to sing in the Salle de Spectacle for the celebrated Société des Concerts. This wonderful company is composed mostly of the professors and teachers at the Conservatoire, and it is a rare honor for a pupil to sing or play at these concerts; but Léonie was a rare pupil, and whatever may be said of the jealousy of artists, I hold that true genius always exults in the recognition of genius. Léonie sang in each of the six concerts of her last year at the Conservatoire, and her singing gave exquisite delight to the appreciative listeners: the applause was heart-felt, enthusiastic, inspiring. But on the last night her father's rapture and pride reached their height. The beautiful concert-hall, so refined and classic with its Pompeii-like decorations, was filled with the most brilliant audience of a most brilliant city. The symphony had ended, and Léonie was to sing some selections from the opera of _Fidelio_. The applause which greeted her as she advanced on the stage was perhaps a tribute to her superb beauty and perfect grace. She was paler than usual, her large black eyes were full of that intense light which only emotion gives, but she showed no embarrassment, and felt none. She saw not the faces, heard not the plaudits. She was alone with her art. Her soul went forth into the song, and one listened in rapture, touched with pain that aught so sweet should be so evanescent. When the wonderful voice seemed to die like a vanishing soul there was silence for a moment--silence most eloquent of eulogies--and then came a burst of applause, the most enthusiastic that ever relieved a listener's heart or charmed a singer's ear.

The concert ended. Her father, proud and exultant, clasped her in his arms. Did he hear the whispers that Léonie's quick ear caught? "Colonel Regnault's daughter, the opera-singer's child. You remember that old story?"--"Ah, indeed! Wonderfully like her mother: more distinguished manner. Something of her father too. Will Regnault let her go on the stage, do you think?"--"I cannot tell. Il est fou d'elle. He brings her up in his own family."--"Vraiment? Good wife, Madame Regnault." Léonie shrank involuntarily from her father's embrace.

The competitive examinations came, and naturally Léonie received the highest prize in singing.

"I do not envy you, mademoiselle," said one of the unsuccessful candidates with a look and tone that accentuated the sneer: "there are other things that people inherit besides their musical talents."

"There will be plenty of spitefulness for your children to inherit, whether there is any talent or not," retorted Léonie, her eyes flashing with resentful pride. It was the first time that any one had deliberately alluded to the taint upon her birth, and it stung.

"I have something to tell you," said her father to Léonie a few days after. "The director of the opera has been talking to me about you. He is only waiting for my consent to bring you out at the Imperial Opera."

Léonie's face lighted up with a quick gleam of surprise and pleasure, which was followed by a sudden terror.

"You may think it strange that I felt any reluctance: you are so young that you do not know enough of society to appreciate the objections. Not that there are any insuperable objections. In an art-loving community like ours the career of a great artist is prouder than a queen's."

The color had faded from Léonie's face, but her father did not notice it.

"The empress condescended to speak to me about it to-day. Her Majesty has the welfare of the opera very much at heart, and, as she says, one is responsible for a talent like yours. It is the rarest of gifts. Why not consecrate it to the elevation of art and the delight of the world? A vocation for art is as sacred as one for religion, and it would be almost a crime in me to hold you back from so manifest a destiny as yours. Well, what have you to say, child?" and he looked full into his daughter's pale, agitated face. "It is too much for you, my darling: you are quite overcome. Think it over and tell me to-morrow night." And he kissed her trembling lips with unusual emotion.

Léonie went to her room, but not to sleep. How short was that sleepless night, with its whirl of conflicting resolutions, its torrent of emotion, its ceaseless panorama of dissolving views! Opera after opera unrolled in magical splendor before her eyes, resounded in bursts of harmony in her ears and flowed in waves of delicious sweetness into her heart. And in all she was queen, and hearts rose and fell at her bidding as the ocean-waves beneath the strong and sweet compelling of the moon. It was intoxication, but underlying it was the deep satisfaction of a soul that has found the true outlet of its highest powers. "All the current of her being" surged and eddied into this one career that opened so invitingly before her. But she could not say "I will," though she wished to do so. The glories faded and another vision came. Her mother seemed to lie before her, dying, forsaken, remorseful, sinful. Was it her mother? was it herself? "Art thou stronger than I?" asked the voiceless lips.--"Yea, I am stronger," replied the soul of Léonie. And then a sudden revelation of incipient vanities and weaknesses and pride flashed across her consciousness as in the great light of God. Léonie shrank away self-abased. "Did my worship of art, which I thought so holy, hide all this?" she questioned.

The morning light came faintly through the curtained windows. Léonie rose, dressed herself quickly, and calling a bonne went to the Madeleine to early mass. After mass she entered the confessional of the white-haired father who had been her spiritual guide for the three years and a half of her life in Paris. On her return she locked herself into her room and passed the day alone.

"Well, my girl," inquired her father in the evening, "what am I to tell the director? Have you chosen the opera for your début already?"

"I shall never sing in the opera, father."

"Why, what is this, Léonie? If I have got over my scruples, I do not see that you need have any. I thought it would be just what you were longing for."

"I do long for it," said Léonie firmly, "and therefore I think it is not best."

"Don't speak in riddles," rejoined her father angrily. "Do you mean to tell me that you are going to throw away your glorious possibilities--certainties, I might say--for a whim?"

"Not for a whim, but because it is right."

"It is incomprehensible!" cried the colonel, walking the floor excitedly. "Here have you been for years in one rhapsody of music, nothing else in life--your mother and I and everything given up to help you on--and now, when such a prospect opens before you, a career that a princess might envy, when even the empress condescends to solicit it--'No, I am not going to sing. I'll throw it all away--my talent, my father's wishes.' Oh, it is insufferable! It is just like the perverse willfulness of women;" and he turned upon her in a white rage.

Léonie did not quail. "Father," said she, speaking very low, but with crystal clearness, "do you wish me to be like my mother?"

Colonel Regnault staggered back. "My poor child," he whispered faintly, "who told you that story? Who could have the heart?"

The next day Léonie, with her father's permission, went to Macon to spend some weeks with her aunt. Soon after her departure Madame Regnault asked, "Now that Léonie is gone, cannot we have the children home?"

"We will bring Léon home," replied her husband. "He is a fine little fellow, and will make the house cheerful, but the baby will be better off in the country a year longer. We will have him in for a few days if you like, and the nurse can come with him."

"I will go out this very afternoon," said the mother. "Jeanne will go with me."

"No, my dear, it is too hard a jaunt for you: I will go to-morrow."

"Let me go, Léon: I feel so uneasy about the children. I cannot tell why, but it seems as if something was going to happen to them."

"What could happen to them? and what difference will a day make? I am glad I am not a woman, to be so anxious about nothing," said the colonel, smiling.

About eleven o'clock on the morrow the colonel reached Rosny, and was startled as he approached the house by an appearance of unusual stir, persons going in and out in a hurried and excited way. He entered. The nurse rushed toward him in vehement anguish: "Oh, Colonel Regnault, you are here! John has told you. Where is he? Did he not return with you?"

"I have not seen your husband, good woman. What is the matter? Are the children ill? I came out for them."

"Oh, I cannot tell him! I cannot tell him!" sobbed the unhappy woman. "The dear beautiful babies! It breaks my heart!"

"May God help you to bear it, sir: it is a heavy grief," said an aged woman. "The little boys are dead."

"Dead!" cried the heartstricken father--"my children dead! One of them, you mean--not both, not both!"

It was true. The baby, a dear little fellow six or seven months old, had had for several days a cold which the nurse did not think serious: during the night he had been attacked by croup, and about eight o'clock in the morning, almost before the doctor had arrived, the child was dead. Absorbed in the grief and terror of this sudden death, the nurse forgot to mind Léon, and the restless, active child slipped out of the house unheeded, and, playing on the railway-track, had been killed by a passing train not an hour before his father came for him.

Colonel Regnault's grief was violent and remorseful. "I have killed my children," he would say to his pitying friends. "If I had but listened to my wife and had them brought up at home! What is the croup with a watchful, intelligent mother, and a skillful physician at the very door? and how could any accident have happened to Léon here? So many idle servants in my house, and my own child to die for lack of care!"

Madame Regnault never knew how Léon died. The little body was not mangled: it had been caught and thrown aside by something attached to the engine--I do not know exactly how--and the mother was left to believe that he had died of sickness like the baby. She bore her sorrow with the still meekness consonant with her character, and with wifely tenderness exerted herself to soothe her husband's violent grief.

A little later in the summer the war broke out. Colonel Regnault went gladly, even rashly, into danger, and found neither death nor wounds, but in his anguish for the desolation of his country he made a truce with his own remorse.

The last time I was in Paris--which was in 1874--General and Madame Regnault called on me at my old friend's, Madame Le Fort's. A charming little girl about three years old was with them, a blue-eyed, fair-haired child--very beautiful, and as much like her father as a little girl can be like a man approaching fifty. I was not surprised to see that she was, as her mother said, "une petite fille gâtée." I inquired for Léonie.

"Can you believe that Léonie has not been in Paris since you saw her here?" replied her father. "She is a thorough little provincial. She has been married more than a year now."

"Ah, I congratulate you! I hope her marriage was pleasing to you," I added, as he did not respond immediately.

"Assez. Her husband is a very worthy young man for a provincial--Théophile Duprès, the brother of a little school-friend of hers. I went down to the wedding, not to grieve Léonie, but I shall never be reconciled to it--never! To think what that girl threw away! Such talent! and to have it lost, utterly lost! It is inexplicable. Every motive that could influence a girl on the one hand, and--But I give it up. Let us not talk of it," he concluded with a little wave of his hand, as if dismissing Léonie and all that pertained to her.

But I could not turn my thoughts from her so quickly. Even now, when I am, so to speak, in another world, she causes me not a little perplexity. Was she right? was she wrong? Can one ever be happy in suppressing a great talent? How it strives and agonizes for some manifestation of itself! and when it slowly dies, stifled in its living grave, must not one feel a bitter regret for having slain the nobler part of one's self?

But is it not heresy to doubt that a woman can sacrifice genius for love, and be content--yea, glad--with an infinite joy? And why not have love and genius too? Alas! most lives are opaque planets, like the earth on which they are evolved, and can have only one bright side at a time.

Madame Regnault was little changed: she preserved the old sweet gentleness and quiet refinement of manner, but she seemed more at ease with her husband, and did not watch so timidly his least gesture. Colonel--or rather General--Regnault had changed more. He had grown quite gray: he was still a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with the same exquisite urbanity of manner, but the disappointment of his ambition for Léonie, the anguish which had smitten him for his children's death, and the great calamity which had almost crushed France, the idol of every Frenchman, had softened and humanized him. He was less like an Apollo exulting in his own divinity; and when I marked his tender thoughtfulness for his wife, his unwonted appreciation of her lovely character, and especially his indulgence of the caprices of little Aimée, who was almost always his companion, I was ready to believe in his entire conversion.

But can the Ethiopian change his skin? One morning Madame Le Fort's little dressmaker came rushing in in a very excited way: "Mon Dieu! I am so glad to get here! Quel homme terrible!"

"What is the matter?" asked madame.

"I have just been trying on Madame Regnault's new costume, the gray faille and velvet, you know, that she selected when she came with you. It is a charming costume, and she looked sweetly in it. The general came in before I got through. 'Do you call that a costume?' he asked in a passion. 'It makes her look like a fright. Take it away: never let me see it again.' Poor little madame hurried me to get it off. 'Take it away! out of the house with it!' cried he as if he were commanding a regiment of dragoons.--'I can't take it away,' said I. 'It was made to order--madame selected it herself--and you cannot expect me to take it back.' I was frightened to death, but I couldn't lose the money, you know. The window was open: he seized the unlucky costume, and giving it a little whirl, sent it flying out of the window over the balustrade. Madame was going to send her maid for it, but no; the wind caught it, and away it went out of the court, and where it lighted or who picked it up is more than I know, or madame either. It may be a fine thing to be a general's wife, but I'd rather be a dressmaker."

And the little dressmaker laughed till she cried to think of madame's handsome costume sailing out of the window over the Avenue Haussmann, and lighting like a balloon on the head of some lucky or luckless passer-by.

MARY E. BLAIR.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

For a long period, France, with her ancient university and her venerable scholastic institutions--which after the Renaissance drew to themselves the flower of the youth of Europe--may be said to have led the way as regards general education. It has only been in modern times that the progress made by the Anglo-Saxon and German nations has placed, at all events, primary instruction in France somewhat in the rear of other countries. As for her system of secondary and superior education, it has even within the last few years elicited many expressions of approval from foreigners competent to form a judgment on the subject. In the following pages we propose giving a succinct account of the actual system and position of primary and secondary education in France, speaking of what has been done since the close of the war in 1871, and of what yet remains to be done.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the determination of having primary schools built and of having every child taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which, swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it, and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the last war, instead of saying with Terence,

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto,

the French citizen might rather have cried, "I am a _Frenchman_, and that which is not French is foreign to me." A salutary reaction has set in since the war, and nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen observe that their country was conquered not by Moltke or Krupp, but rather by the German _Schullehrer_.

We shall not enter into the merits of the long-standing dispute in France as to the superiority of secular or of clerical education. The parable of the mote and the beam might probably be applicable to both parties, but no impartial observer can fail to recognize that the triumph of Romanism in France, consequent upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, has formed one of the chief obstacles to the development of public education in that country. Huss, Luther, Calvin--in a word, all the leaders of the Reformation--inculcated the sacred duty devolving upon every man of reading the Bible for himself in his own tongue. Hence we now find education far more advanced in Protestant than in Catholic countries--a fact which has not a little contributed to the decadence of the Latin races. Richelieu, who held that a hungry people was the most submissive, was also of opinion that an ignorant people obeyed the most readily. Louis XIV. and Louis XV., without saying as much, acted up to the cardinal's maxim, doing absolutely nothing for popular education. The instruction of the upper classes was at that time in the hands of religious societies or _congrégations_. The Revolution, displaying its usual iconoclastic zeal, upset this system, without reflecting for a moment that it might be as well to substitute some other system for it, and that it takes time to organize a body of teachers fit to undertake such a work. The Convention decreed that those parents should be punished who did not send their children to school, overlooking the fact that there were no schools to send them to. It proclaimed gratuitous instruction, but made no provision for the salaries of the teachers. These hastily instituted reforms were eminently characteristic of the feverish excitement amidst which matters affecting the most serious interests of the nation were disposed of. The First Empire and the Restoration saw but little done on behalf of primary education. Under Louis Philippe the question of gratuitous instruction and compulsory attendance got no farther, notwithstanding the fact of such men being in power as Victor Cousin, Villemain and Guizot.

The efforts of Jules Simon and of Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire to have the question settled by the Republican government in 1848 proved futile. Napoleon III., having found 44,000 schools in France at the commencement of his reign, left it with 54,000 at its close--a most insignificant rate of increase, as regards primary instruction, compared with the advances made in the same direction by foreign nations, and with the material progress of France itself during those eighteen eventful years. The Third Republic has, as was observed above, given to the question of education a prominent place among the reforms to be instituted. Scarcely had the most pressing financial and military questions been dealt with ere a searching examination into the educational system of the country was undertaken and its defects laid bare. In a report on primary and secondary education in different countries, read by M. Levasseur before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on the 29th of May, 1875, he establishes the fact that out of forty-five nations whose educational statistics he had examined, France only occupies the twentieth place--naturally a somewhat humiliating admission for a nation which has claimed to be the centre and radiating-point of modern civilization.

The map on which the departments figure tinged with black proportionately with the illiteracy of their inhabitants is in mourning to a most lamentable extent. It might be taken for the geological map of Pennsylvania, with the coal-regions indicated by black patches; and most assuredly the Lehigh Valley would appear no darker on such a map than does on the chart of ignorance the unfortunate department of the Ariége, with 66 per cent. of its inhabitants absolutely illiterate. Happily, since this map was issued matters have somewhat mended; nevertheless, the lack of appreciation of the benefits of education is still very noticeable in a large number of the departments.

The village schools are kept up by the communes, aided by contributions from the department and from the government. The total annual amount of the contributions from these three sources does not exceed 65,000,000 francs for the whole of France. Deduct from this paltry sum of $13,000,000 a certain quota for the construction and keeping in repair of school-houses, and it will at once be seen that what remains to be divided among the 54,000 teachers is scarcely sufficient to afford them even the barest subsistence. The recent reduction of school-teachers' salaries throughout the United States has given rise to much unfavorable comment, but happy indeed would teachers in France consider themselves were they to receive even anything approaching the reduced pay of their Transatlantic brethren. Of the school-teachers above spoken of, 26,000 receive 750 francs ($150) per annum, 14,000 receive 550 francs, and 10,000 but 450 francs, or less than the common farm-laborer, who has at least food and lodging provided for him by his master. True it is that many of the teachers receive a slight additional salary for acting as secretary at the _mairie_; but a much larger number of them have to eke out a scanty subsistence by manual labor during certain hours of the day, especially in harvest-time.

As for the school-houses, they are usually in such a dilapidated condition that the farmers would scarcely care to use them as cattle-sheds. We have visited schools--and they exist by the score, not to say by the hundred--without either benches or desks, blackboard or maps, and through the roofs of which the rain poured on teachers and pupils. On entering one of these schools and seeing the little fellows in their torn blouses, their feet simply encased in great wooden sabots, their lunch-baskets with coarse bread and a few nuts by their side, the stranger can hardly realize that he is in that country where there is a more even distribution of property, and where the peasantry are more prosperous and conservative, than anywhere else. Among the efforts made to improve things may be mentioned the frequent inspections, not only by government inspectors, but also by gentlemen called _délégués cantonaux,_ who are usually chosen from among the landed proprietary of the neighborhood by the prefects.

"Paris is not France," is a remark frequently uttered by French conservatives, and one which certainly holds good as regards education. The department of the Seine actually expends some $6,000,000 annually on education, which is something over 46 per cent. of the total expenditure for all France under this head. Considering that the population of the department of the Seine does not exceed 2,400,000, it will be seen that the expenditure there for educational purposes is not inferior to that of our own representative States. At the Vienna Exhibition of 1873 it may be recollected that Paris, conjointly with Saxony and Sweden, was awarded the diploma of honor for primary instruction. This branch of education is absolutely gratuitous, and, in view of the experience of other countries, is likely to remain so, in spite of the outcry that parents able to contribute toward the education of their offspring should be compelled to do so. Ink, paper, pens, books, models and maps are supplied free of charge to each pupil. During 1876 not less than 330,000 books, 1,490,000 copy-books and 1,440,000 steel pens were thus supplied in the primary schools of the capital. In Paris there are some 260,000 children of both sexes old enough to go to school. Of this number, 104,000 get some kind of education, either at home or at the boarding-schools, and 134,000 attend the public schools--either under secular or clerical management--and the _salles d'asile_, of which we shall presently speak. The great capital thus contains some 22,000 children who cannot read or write, and this will account for the fact of the educational status of the department of the Seine being inferior to that of many of the eastern departments, and occupying a far lower place on the list than might otherwise have been expected. Up to the age of two years the infants of parents too poor to watch over their offspring in the daytime are admitted into the _crèches_. In these admirable private institutions--founded some thirty years ago by M. Marbeau--the infants are washed, fed and tended with maternal solicitude. Between the ages of two and six years the children are admitted into the _salles d'asile_, or children's homes, of which there are over a hundred in Paris. There it is first sought to develop the child's intellectual faculties, prepare it for school, inculcate habits of cleanliness and morality, and instruct it in the rudiments of reading and writing. Between the ages of six and fourteen children are admitted into the schools, and, nominally at least, go through the plan of study drawn up by the board of primary education, and which is as follows: Reading, writing, geography, spelling, arithmetic, compendium of sacred and French history, linear drawing, singing, the rudiments of physics, geometry and natural history, and calligraphy. Were this programme carried out in its integrity, education in France would, it need hardly be said, be considerably further advanced than it is at present. Even in Paris, however, the material obstacles are not slight. Most of the schools are far too cramped for space, especially in those wealthy and crowded parts of the city between the Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevards, for instance, where every foot of ground and every breathing-space are worth large sums of money. In a city where the people are so closely packed, and where a family is content to live on a flat, how is room to be found for spacious, airy school-buildings, with a detached seat and desk for each pupil, a large central hall and a play-ground adjoining? Such establishments must inevitably cost immense sums of money, but Paris, if we may judge by the annual increase in the educational appropriations, seems determined not to let this difficulty stand in the way of her children obtaining a good education.

A word as to the teachers. The female lay teachers are, it must be acknowledged, very greatly inferior to the lady teachers in the United States. It is said that in England when a man has failed at everything else he becomes a coal-merchant. We should not dream of applying this remark to French ladies as regards school-teaching. At the same time, it is an established fact that the French girls' schools which are managed by nuns, and especially those of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, are far above the other female educational establishments. Most of the male lay teachers are appointed from the primary normal schools which exist in the chief town of every department; and it is a noteworthy fact that the majority of them are ardent Republicans, notwithstanding the fact that during the Empire every effort was made to win them over to the imperial side. In every normal and primary school was the bust of Napoleon, and a liberal distribution took place of the famous _Journal des Instituteurs_, every paragraph of which, political or educational, was dressed up in Napoleonic attire. Possibly, some of the lay primary school-teachers may have adopted republicanism out of a spirit of natural opposition to their old adversaries and competitors, the _instituteurs congréganistes_. Of these, too, a word must be said. While in the secondary clerical schools most of the instructors are Jesuits, in the primary schools most of the teachers belong to the confraternity of the _École Chrétienne_, the members of which, without taking the vows and assuming a lifelong engagement, agree nevertheless to remain single, to submit to the discipline of the society and to wear the ecclesiastical dress. Strict Ultramontanists, these brethren have been somewhat unjustly nicknamed the _frères Ignorantins_. Living as they do in common, with but few wants, and receiving, whenever they require it, pecuniary aid from the wealthy party to which they belong, they are satisfied with a rate of pay less than one-half that of the lay teachers, and are thus preferred in a large number of communes on the simple ground of economy. Their plan of instruction is the same as that adopted in the secular primary schools, except that religious instruction and exercises of course play a larger part with them than with their lay brethren. The ultra radicals, who in a large measure control the educational appropriations in the town-council, are bitterly opposed to any portion of the public instruction remaining in the hands of the clerical element, and their most strenuous efforts are used to have all these _congregational_ schools of both sexes closed. They would concentrate the entire national educational system under the control of a body of lay teachers to be paid by the towns and by the state. In these views they are supported by the Republican party, while the clergy have on their side the majority of the Senate. Whether the absence of clerical competition would be likely to prove advantageous or not to the secular educational establishments, we shall not attempt to say, but certain it is that the long continuance of this bitter feud between the two parties has been anything but conducive to the educational progress of France.

At the age of fourteen the Parisian youth not intended for one of the learned professions leaves school to learn a trade. Should he desire to increase his stock of knowledge and have a taste for study, he can, after passing an examination, enter the excellent École Turgot, wherein the programme of the primary schools is somewhat extended, without, however, embracing the study of Latin and Greek. At the Turgot the course comprises mathematics, linear and ornamental drawing, physics and mechanics, chemistry, natural history, calligraphy, bookkeeping, French language and literature, history, geography, English and German. All the pupils are day scholars. There could probably be no better devised programme for developing and exercising the intellectual faculties of those who have gone through the primary schools, and it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that for most of the pupils the training received at the École Turgot is of lifelong value.

If a youth aim yet higher, he can apply for admittance at the Collége Chaptal, where he may eventually obtain gratuitously a classical education, and at its close a university degree. From the Chaptal school--the new building devoted to which forms a conspicuous feature on the Boulevard des Batignolles--the pupil may, on passing an examination, enter either of the two higher colleges, the Central or the Polytechnic. Then, too, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers may be looked on in the light of a magnificent annex to the schools of primary instruction. The idea of such an institution originated with the celebrated mechanician of the last century, Vaucanson, who bequeathed to the government his splendid collection of models, drawings, tools, machines and automatons. The Convention decreed the establishment of the Conservatoire, which now contains some 12,000 models in its industrial museum. Among them may be mentioned Pascal's arithmetical machine, Lavoisier's instruments, the first highway locomotive constructed by Cugniot in 1770, a lock forged by Louis XVI., clocks and watches of historic interest, and those patents which have run out by lapse of time. The machinery is set in motion at certain hours of the day, during which the public is admitted free. The library, rich in works of science, art and industry, is always open. In the evening there are gratuitous lectures delivered by men of science on such subjects as geometry, mechanics and chemistry applied to the arts, industrial and agricultural chemistry, agriculture, spinning-looms, dyeing, etc. The Conservatoire turns out the best foremen and heads of workshops to be found in Paris. It occupies the fine old building once used as the abbey of St. Martin des Champs, which has been tastefully restored in the original style, and takes up one of the sides of a handsome square laid out with flowers and fountains.

Nor must we pass over entirely unnoticed the admirable gratuitous lectures given by the Polytechnic Association--_not_ the Polytechnic School--on such subjects as hygiene, linear drawing, French grammar, bookkeeping and geometry. These lectures are held in some twenty different buildings, so as to be within the reach of the working-classes, no matter what part of Paris they may reside in. Among the lecturers in recent years are to be found such names as those of Ferdinand de Lesseps, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Barral and Batbie.

We have thus rapidly seen what Paris does for her poor youth. The city has often been called the focus of light and the centre of intelligence. Without going quite so far as this, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that with her public schools, her splendid libraries, her museums, her natural history and art collections, and her very numerous and valuable institutions open free to all, Paris affords unusual facilities for boys, taken even from the lowest strata of society, to rise by dint of hard study, a firm will and exemplary conduct to the very highest positions.

SECONDARY EDUCATION.

In France, children of parents in easy circumstances do not go to the primary schools at all. Every man occupying a higher social position than that of a mechanic does his utmost to procure for his children an education which shall place them above what the French call "the common people." Even a small farmer, with but a few thousand dollars at his command, strives to place his son in an institution where the higher cultivation of the intellectual faculties, the dress worn, and the very bearing, shall distinguish him from one of "the people." It need hardly be said that such a system as this, so diametrically opposed to that which prevails in the United States, tends to foster somewhat of jealousy and bitterness among the lower classes. As for those who have received this higher education, they would, as a general rule, consider it derogatory to their dignity ever in after life to perform any manual labor: this they leave to the illiterate and to those who have only attended the primary schools. The result may be imagined in the case of those whose parents, having paid their eight or nine years' schooling, are unable to do anything more for their offspring when they leave college. They cannot all earn their living in a professional capacity, or in the literary field, or as government employés, or, to be brief, in one of those situations which a graduate _can_ accept; and those who fail, insensibly and by degrees fall into the ranks of the _déclassés_. The common workman may occasionally and for a short period suffer privation and want, but that becomes the chronic condition of the poor graduate. He becomes a misanthrope, hates his fellow-beings and resorts to petty shifts in order to live. Gradually his sense of honor and his moral feelings get weaker and weaker, and finally disappear altogether. Then he becomes one of those men who, like the conspirators denounced by Corneille,

Si tout n'est renversé ne sauraient subsister.

These men take a prominent part in every _émeute_, haranguing the populace, propagating socialistic theories, and gaining a baneful influence over the uneducated and the discontented among the workingmen, thus causing that bloodshed and destruction of which Paris has so often been the scene. Probably no more vivid picture of the life of these unfortunate persons has ever been drawn than that which Jules Vallès has given us in his _Réfractaires_. Most eloquently does he describe the vain hopes and reveries by which these men are elated, and the poignant misery they suffer. Vallès, it will be recollected, was a Communist, a member of that revolutionary government which contained so many of these _déclassés_.

Far be it from us to desire to limit the higher education to the children of the rich. By all means let every man in a position to do so give his sons the benefit of the secondary education. The fittest will always survive, the weakest inevitably go to the wall. At the same time, there are certain modifications which all will admit may be introduced with advantage into the present system, and these will become apparent as we proceed.

Secondary education is imparted in the national lyceums, which are established and governed by the state, and which now exist in eighty out of the eighty-six departments; in the municipal colleges, which are established and governed by the towns; and in the private colleges, the majority of which are kept by religious fraternities.

The most celebrated of the private colleges are Arcueil and Sorèze, both of which belong to the Dominicans. The principal professors at Arcueil were, it will be recollected, taken to La Roquette in 1871, and there shot with Archbishop Darboy and the other hostages. Sorèze will not be forgotten so long as the memory of Lacordaire lives. The Fathers of the Oratory own the college of Juilly, where Berryer and Montalembert were educated. It was to this order that belonged the illustrious Massillon a century and a half ago, and Father Gratry in our own time. As for the Jesuits, their colleges are distributed over the whole of France, and are distinguished for their comfort and elegance, their spacious halls, their fine grounds and the excellent gymnasia attached thereto. Their superiority over the national lyceums leads to the fact of their being as well attended as the latter, although pupils at the Jesuits' colleges pay three times as much as at the government schools. The large college of the Jesuits in the Rue des Postes at Paris furnishes a heavy contingent to St. Cyr and the polytechnic schools. The Stanislas College, although a private institution, has its corps of professors appointed by the Minister of Public Instruction, and its pupils are privileged to take part in the general examinations of the lyceum pupils. M. John Lemoinne, the eminent writer for the _Journal des Débats_, was educated at the Stanislas College, all the pupils of which, it may be mentioned, are day scholars. At the Rollin College only boarders are admitted.

There are quite a number of foreign colleges at Paris, such as the Egyptian, the Japanese, the Armenian and the Polish colleges. The former Irish college, now called _Collége des Fondations britanniques_, is under the patronage of the French Minister of Education. It is here that young men speaking the English language are specially educated for the priesthood, the whole of the instruction being given in English and the management being in the hands of British and Irish ecclesiastics. About 15,200 scholars attend the private colleges in Paris.

Proceeding now to speak of the actual condition of the _lycées_, or lyceums, it may at once be stated that boarders at one of these establishments in Paris pay from $200 to $300 annually, and in the provinces from $150 to $200, according to age. Considering that this one charge covers board, instruction, books, washing, clothes, writing materials, medical attendance and medicine, it will readily be understood that the income from this source is totally inadequate to meet the outlays. The government, besides providing a large number of gratuitous scholarships, makes up the deficit, whatever it may be, and thus really maintains the lyceums. There are in Paris five national lycées, besides the lyceum at Vanves, situated at a little distance to the south of the capital, at what was once the villa of the prince de Condé, on the Vaugirard route. At Vanves the younger pupils have the opportunity afforded them of pursuing their studies in the country, and only entering one of the Paris lycées when they have worked themselves into the fifth class. The most famous as well as the largest of the lyceums of Paris is the Lycée Descartes, formerly called the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. It stands in the Rue St. Jacques, on the spot formerly occupied by the Jesuits' Collége de Clermont, which was founded in 1563, and confiscated when the Jesuits were expelled from France by the duc de Choiseul in 1764. As is well known, Molière and Voltaire, two of the bitterest enemies of the Jesuits, were educated at the Collége de Clermont. At Louis-le-Grand were also educated Crébillon, the author of the _Sopha_; Gresset, the writer of _Vert-vert_; Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Crémieux, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo; the eminent surgeon Dupuytren; Jules Janin, Villemain, Littré and Laboulaye. At present 540 of its 1200 pupils are day scholars.

Sainte-Barbe, the most celebrated of the free colleges of Paris, sends its pupils to the course of instruction at the Lycée Descartes. Sainte-Barbe was founded in 1460 by the Abbé Lenormand, and reorganized after the Revolution by Delaneau: it stands in the Place du Panthéon, on a small plot of ground, and is so thickly surrounded by buildings that the play-ground is not even large enough for the pupils to move about in. The younger among them are therefore sent to the branch of the school at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a stately château with spacious grounds. Both Ignatius Loyola, who founded the order of Jesus, and Calvin, who did his best to destroy it, were educated at Sainte-Barbe, as were also in more modern times Eugène Scribe, the singer Nourrit, the celebrated painter in water-colors Eugène Lamy, and General Trochu. The present director of Sainte-Barbe is M. Dubief, formerly inspector of the Academy of Paris, and who succeeded in 1865 the lamented M. Labrouste, to whose untiring exertions Sainte-Barbe owes in great part the high reputation it has enjoyed in recent times.

On the Boulevard St. Michel, on the spot where once stood the old Collége d'Harcourt, is the Lycée St. Louis, now called, after the famous mathematician, the Lycée Monge. Although the Lycée Monge is specially devoted to scientific training, it has numbered among its pupils Charles Gounod the composer and Egger the Hellenist.

In the rear of the Panthéon, on the site of the abbey of Ste. Geneviève, founded by Clovis in 510, stands the Lycée Corneille, formerly called the Lycée Napoléon, and before that the Collége Henri IV. To the archæologist the cellars, the kitchens, the chapel and the old tower of the twelfth century cannot fail to prove of the greatest interest, while the remainder of the structure, built during the reign of Louis XIV., makes this unquestionably the finest of the lyceums of Paris. At the Lycée Corneille were educated Casimir Delavigne (whose bust by David d'Angers adorns the interior), Sainte-Beuve, Haussmann, Alfred de Musset, St. Marc Girardin, Émile Augier, Remusat, the prince de Joinville and the dukes of Nemours, Aumale, Montpensier and Chartres. The three lyceums above mentioned are on the left bank, the remaining two on the right bank, of the Seine.

In the Rue Caumartin, near the Havre railway-station, on the site of the Capuchins' convent, stands the Lycée Condorcet, or, as it was called until recently, the Lycée Bonaparte. All the pupils are day scholars, and most of them come from the adjacent wealthy district of the Chaussée d'Antin, the Boulevards and the Madeleine. Among the pupils of this aristocratic educational establishment may be named J. J. Ampère, Alexandre Dumas _fils_, Adolphe Adam the composer, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt the novelists, Alphonse Karr, Henry Monnier, Nadar, Taine, Eugène Sue; the mulatto Schælcher, now Senator of France; the celebrated Jesuit Father Ravignan, and the poet Théodore de Banville.

The Lycée Charlemagne is in a building in the Rue St. Antoine, formerly used as the Jesuits' convent. Being situated in one of the poorest sections of Paris, the children from which as a rule do not get beyond the primary schools, it receives most of its scholars from the numerous boarding-schools of the Quartier du Marais. Among the many well-known names formerly on the roll of the Lycée Charlemagne are those of Gustave Doré, Théophile Gautier, Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, Michelet; the dramatic critic Francisque Sarcey; Got the comedian, and Buffet the statesman.

These five lyceums of Paris, with their 7500 day scholars and boarders, and the eighty lyceums in the provinces, have precisely the same programme and rules of government throughout. The boarders are divided into three sections, the first being for the _petits_--viz., boys averaging from seven to twelve, who are instructed in the elementary course, comprising the eighth and seventh classes; the second is for the _moyens_, who receive instruction in the grammar course, comprising the sixth, fifth and fourth classes; the third is for the _grands_, who, taking their place in the third and second classes, proceed with the higher course, embracing rhetoric, philosophy, and, if desired, special mathematics. Although at playtime the boys meet in a common play-ground, during school-hours they are distributed in different rooms or studies (_études_), one class generally corresponding to a study. There is thus the eighth, fourth or second study, just as there is the eighth, fourth or second class. The professors--of whom there are from fifteen to thirty, the number of boys ranging from three hundred to twelve hundred--superintend the classes, while the dozen poor, ill-paid ushers have to keep order in the _études_. The scholars signify their contempt for the ushers--officially known as _maîtres répétiteurs_--by nicknaming them _pions_ or watch-dogs. Yet not an usher but is appointed, like all others engaged in the lycée, by the minister. Each one of them has obtained his degree as bachelor, and many only accept the situation as a means of economically pursuing their studies toward the higher degrees and fellowships. Where the class is a large one, the corresponding study is usually divided into two, so as to reduce the number in one _étude_ to about thirty. The lads making up each _étude_ sleep in one dormitory on little iron bedsteads, only separated from each other by the width of the bed. The usher in charge sleeps at the extremity of the dormitory, his bed being the only one provided with curtains.

A boy entering the lyceum at seven or eight years of age has already learned the rudiments, and is accordingly placed in the eighth class. In those exceptional cases where the boy comes to school unable to read or write he passes the first year in the preparatory class. In the eighth class, and the next year in the seventh, he is taught French grammar, spelling, arithmetic, sacred history and elementary Latin exercises and translation. In the sixth and fifth and the fourth classes the Latin authors the boy has to study become gradually more and more difficult. The professor of history who accompanies the students throughout their lyceum course, instructs them as they advance each year to a higher class, in Greek and Roman history and modern and ancient geography. So also the professors of English and German, of physics, natural history and mathematics keep up with their pupils, and guide their studies, each in his special branch, until they graduate. Drawing and music are also taught without extra charge two hours a week, but those children whose parents really desire them to make progress in these special branches have to take--and pay extra for--private lessons called _répétitions_. In the third and second classes, as also when the pupils are going through the course of rhetoric, Greek as well as Latin is studied, together with the French classic authors, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Bossuet, Boileau, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, Fénelon, Massillon and some of Voltaire's works. The history of France is also studied, but scarcely with that thoroughness which characterizes the study of history in the German gymnasia.

The pupil's last year is passed in the philosophy class, formerly called the logic class, which is specially devoted to the study of the human understanding; thus, as Mr. Matthew Arnold well puts it, "making the pupil busy himself with the substance of ideas, as in rhetoric he busied himself with their form, and developing his reflection as rhetoric developed his imagination and taste." During this last year, however, classic studies are pursued with none the less vigor, for on his proficiency in these branches depends very largely the student's success at the second and final examination for his degree. It is only since 1874 that this examination has been divided into two parts--the first at the close of the year of rhetoric, the second at the close of the year of philosophy, the student being required to pass on both occasions. Each of the two examinations is divided into the _épreuve écrite_ and the _épreuve orale_. In the latter the candidate is examined generally on all the subjects studied. The épreuve écrite consists, the first year, of a translation and Latin discourse--the second year, of a Latin dissertation and a French dissertation. Those educated in Paris have to pass their examination at the Sorbonne, while those educated in the provinces are examined by one of the sixteen faculties of France, at Poitiers, Caen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, etc. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the bachelor's degree confers no sort of privilege in France. The diploma which attests to its recipient having passed through a regular course of classical study opens up no career to him, but _with_ this diploma he can study law or medicine or qualify for the special schools, such as the Polytechnic, St. Cyr and the normal schools, and on leaving these his position is assured.

The life led by the boarders at the _lycées_ is as follows: At six o'clock in summer, and at half-past six in winter, the pupils get up at the sound of the drum. Ten minutes are allowed for dressing, and then they all march in procession to the preparation-room. One of the lads recites a short prayer in Latin, after which the boys study till half-past seven. They then proceed to the refectory, where all the pupils breakfast together, ten minutes being allowed for the meal. Thence the boys go into the play-ground, where the ranks are broken and a quarter of an hour is allowed for play and talk. (Out of the play-ground conversation among the pupils is prohibited by the rules, and not infrequently those caught talking are punished.) From eight to ten the boys are in school; from ten to half-past ten, at play; from half-past ten to twelve, in the study, writing exercises, getting ready for classes and solving problems. At twelve o'clock, dinner, then play till one; from one till two, in the study, learning by heart lessons for recitation; from two till four, school; from four to five, play; from five to half-past seven in the study, where the exercises for the following morning are written. At half-past seven, supper, then another prayer in Latin, and then to bed. On Thursdays and Sundays there are no classes, but the boys have their hours of study as on other days, and fill up the time by a two-hours' walk in marching array, either in the city or (if weather permit) in the country. Once a week in Paris, once a fortnight in the provinces, a boy may go out for a holiday if his parents or persons authorized by his parents come and take him from school. He is allowed to see his parents or those representing them any day between four and five P.M. in the _parloir_. On Sundays attendance at mass and at vespers in the chapel of the lycée is compulsory for pupils of the Roman Catholic faith. Pupils belonging to other faiths have in Paris every opportunity for attending the services of their religion, but in the provinces this is naturally not so easy. The regular holidays are the 1st and 2d of January, a week at Easter and two months in summer, commencing about the 10th of August. All corporal punishment is strictly prohibited. The lads are punished by being kept in in play-hours and on holidays, and in grave cases by being confined _en séquestre_. It is very rarely that a pupil is expelled--a punishment which may in extreme cases entail expulsion from every lyceum in France.

As will have been seen, the life led by the boarders at the lyceums is pretty irksome and severe. If a boy's parents live in the city, he can simply attend the classes as a day scholar, which experience has proved to be the better of the two plans. From a sanitary point of view the lyceums do not stand high by any means. Few among them were built on any proper model, or, as will have been noticed, even constructed for their present use. About four-fifths of them were old colleges belonging to religious corporations confiscated at the Revolution, or they were formerly convents, and have now been fitted up as well as possible for purely educational purposes. The rooms are for the most part so small that the lads are crowded and huddled together. On some of the benches they have to sit on one side when they want to write. Every lyceum has an infirmary, to which are attached two or three Sisters of Charity, and the infirmary is often fuller than could be wished. The play-grounds are in general miserably small, rarely planted with trees, and ill adapted for boys to run about and play in. Some of the boys who are always kept in do not get even this poor exercise. The contributions of the government for the maintenance of the lyceums being on a somewhat parsimonious scale, every kind of economy is practiced. The food, without being unwholesome, is far from being agreeable. The lighting of the buildings by oil lamps, not by gas, is often insufficient, and may possibly explain the fact of so many Frenchmen being short-sighted. The rooms are warmed in winter by small stoves, which send out noxious vapors.

At the head of every lyceum is a provost (_proviseur_), who is assisted by a _censeur_ or superintendent of instruction, by an inspector of studies, and by a bursar (_économe_), who controls the finances of the establishment. Toward the end of each scholastic year, about July, ten or a dozen of the brightest youths are selected from each of the classes in the lyceums of Paris, and are made to undergo an examination in composition at the Sorbonne. At its close prizes and _accessits_ are awarded, and these are distributed about the 15th of August in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, and in presence of a distinguished assemblage under the presidency of the Minister of Public Instruction. The minister, having opened the proceedings with a speech in French, is followed by one of the professors, who, in accordance with a custom more than a century old, makes a speech in Latin. Since 1865 the provincial lyceums have competed among themselves, and as the subjects of composition are the same as those in the Paris lyceums, an opportunity is afforded for observing how very much farther advanced are the Parisian establishments than those in the interior. Not only has Paris the best professors, but also the best boys, many having been sent thither by their parents from the provincial lyceums on their displaying marked ability and intelligence. Thus the standard of the Paris lyceums is raised. Upon the result of the general examination undergone by the pupils of a public or private school depends the estimation in which that institution is held by the public. The more prizes taken by a lyceum or by an institution sending its pupils to the lyceum examinations, the greater will be the number of parents sending their children thither. The successful participants who have carried off the prizes of honor in special mathematics, philosophy and Latin are exempt from military service, while the professors of the class to which they belonged are often rewarded with the cross of the Legion of Honor. It will therefore be apparent that the heads of the educational establishments are, to say the least, quite as much interested in the results of the contest as are the pupils themselves. The natural consequence is, that the professors devote themselves to cramming those pupils whose assiduity and superior intelligence mark them out as fit partakers in such a contest. There are sometimes as many as sixty pupils in a class in the Paris Lycée, and yet the professor's attention may be confined to barely a dozen among them. The rest of the class read novels, go to sleep or remain listless during the lesson. The well-known writer M. Maxime du Camp may possibly have slightly exaggerated the evil when he asserted that "Ceux-là seuls travaillent qui se destinent aux écoles spéciales;" but we have no difficulty in believing his statement that on one occasion M. Émile Saisset--since a member of the Institute, then professor at the Lycée Henri IV.--left the platform, and taking a seat facing the front row, where he had got together the six best (_plus forts_), began reading to them in a low tone. When one of the other pupils began talking too loud, the professor cried out, "Ne faites donc pas tant de bruit: vous nous empêchez de causer."

But, although these general examinations may operate somewhat disadvantageously toward the duller members of the class, it must be acknowledged that they have had the effect of inducing many a youth to put forth his best efforts in order to attain special distinction, and have thus laid the foundation of future success. Among those with whom such has been the case may be mentioned the names of Delille the poet, La Harpe the critic, Victor Cousin the philosopher, Adrien de Jussieu the naturalist, Drouyn de Lhuys, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, now president of the Agricultural Society of France; Taine, Edmond About, Prévost Paradol, etc.

Within the last thirty years the plan of study in the lycées has undergone many changes. Each successive Minister of Education has instituted some modifications, and the result has generally been an improvement. The most thoroughgoing revision took place under M. Jules Simon, who was Minister of Public Instruction in 1872. A well-known member of the Institute and professor of philosophy, M. Paul Janet, in defending the reforms instituted by M. Simon, makes some bold remarks on the subject. Secondary education in France is now composed of two branches of instruction mingled, which if separated might, according to M. Janet, each for itself furnish the materials for a very thorough and wide-reaching education. On the one hand is the classical course, consisting of Greek and Latin, and on the other what may be termed the modern course, composed of French, living foreign languages, history, geography, science and physical exercises,--these last embracing fencing, gymnastics, gun-practice, etc. Society at the time of the Renaissance had to be steeped once again in the study of classical literature in order to weld anew the links of that chain which had been broken by the invasion of the barbarians. So also, reasons M. Janet, it is necessary now for us to be prepared for the new conditions of modern and contemporary civilization. This civilization, he goes on to say, is marked by three distinguishing characteristics: the prodigious development of science and industry; the establishment of political institutions more or less liberal; the extension of the means of communication between various nations. Therefore he holds that the study of science should occupy a more prominent place in the system of French instruction. History, useless in a country despotically governed, becomes more and more necessary in a free country. Foreign languages and the literature of the Teutonic and English-speaking nations must occupy a larger place in the new plan of studies.

But the question arises, How can place be found for new studies when some of the old ones have to be crowded out? Evidently this can only be done by circumscribing within narrower limits classical instruction. Now-a-days, says M. Jules Simon, "on apprend les langues vivantes pour les parler et les langues mortes pour les lire." The day is past when Santeul gained for himself a reputation by his Latin verse, and when Cardinal de Polignac refuted Lucretius in his own tongue. Latin compositions have become purely artificial exercises, and the art of writing Latin must be sacrificed, just as the art of speaking Latin was sacrificed a century ago. Therefore it was that M. Simon did away with Latin verse. He retained for the present Latin speeches and dissertations, but contemplated abolishing these too in the future; and he proposed that there should be two kinds of exposition of Latin texts in the classes--the one very profound, and where much time should be given to but a few lines; the other, on the contrary, very rapid and extended, having for its object to exercise the pupil in reading and readily understanding what he reads. Since the reforms of 1872 the pupils read Latin with not less facility than before; which seems to show that Latin verse was not indispensable. It should also be mentioned that under M. Simon's auspices a law was made in 1872 requiring every pupil to pass an examination before being promoted from a lower to a higher class in the lycée. Those who fail in this examination, and who do not care to return to the lower class, are transferred to the so-called _classes de science_, where the subjects of study are mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry and natural history.

M. Jules Simon retired from his post as Minister of Public Instruction under M. Thiers on the 24th of May, 1873, and the reforms he had instituted were overthrown by the clerical ministry which followed. The Republican elections of the 20th of February, 1876, having been the means of once more placing the government in the hands of M. Simon's friends, he himself was on the 12th of December last made president of the Council of Ministers, while M. Waddington resumed the portfolio of Public Instruction. M. Waddington, who besides being a Rugby and Cambridge man, has, like M. Simon, taken the doctor's degree at the Sorbonne, at once took measures to carry out the liberal and progressive reforms we have spoken of. His efforts were, however, frustrated by the enforced retirement of the Jules Simon ministry on the 16th of May, 1877, and the accession of the conservatives to power. There can be little doubt that the new ministry will set aside all the reforms planned and executed, and will return to the old paths until the seesaw of public opinion in France shall once more re-establish the Simon-Waddington reforms.

As has been shown, the progress made in the system of secondary instruction in France is but slow: indeed, it may be compared to that of certain pilgrims, who in fulfillment of their vows take three steps forward and two backward. Nevertheless, these party struggles and tentative efforts cannot fail in the end to result in a marked definitive improvement in the educational system. Before all things, it was necessary that the fallibility of the old system and of the antiquated shibboleths of instruction, which had hitherto exercised undisputed sway, be recognized. The rest will follow in due time. Whether minister or not, M. Jules Simon may justly claim the credit of having brought about a salutary educational crisis, the effects of which will be felt by the next, if not by the present, generation.

C. H. HARDING.

THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "MALCOLM."