Yet they say that pale Isabel stands
At the feet of our Lord in grace,
Pressing her innocent hands,

In shame, to her angel face.

Because that the man of her heart,
Of her maiden faith and desire,
Has forgotten his snow-white dove,
His innocent angel love,

And wallows and routs in the mire.

Because that a soul when lost

Can never be washed in the river
Which flows by the palace of God,
Where she weeps for ever and ever.

So they say: yet, it may be, she knows,
While she sobs in the blaze of light,
While she sobs in her robe of white,
That he never forgets-oh! never-
How Isabel died in the night.

Then the poetical extracts closed with this from Robert Browning's Prospice:

I was ever a fighter, so-one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it; fare like my peers,

The heroes of old;

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,

And the element's rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

The difference between these is, I think, the difference between our earlier and latest poetical taste; the first languid, morbid, and affected; the second terse, intense, breathing a high moral atmosphere, abating the natural dread of death, making us even eager to know 'the whole of it,' to 'fare like our peers,' to take our stand at the post of honour and of danger-of utter glory or discomfiture. 'To me, at least, no easy Enochlike translation. My heaven of joy upon her breast will be the fuller because, like her, I have passed through the peril and the pain of death.'

Not that Horace had been, even in poetical matters, a constant disciple. He was as fickle as Peter. One day he was eager for Milton and the Commonwealth; the next for Dryden and the Restoration. It was Prior to-night; and Pope in the morning. Then, wearying of the studied art and mechanical graces of the Augustan poets, he would return to the pure well of English undefiled, to the dim and ghostly visions of beauty in which Spenser and our early poets delight,

Women or unwedded maids

Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows

Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.

Such was the intellectual character and culture which this commonplace book disclosed. At least it was thus

that I read it. And my conclusion was that of Scripture -'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.' The great vice of our time-indecision, a want of fidelity to definite conviction-was stamped upon it. It manifested a highly-cultivated intelligence; but that was all the cultivation had led to nothing. And thus I did not obtain much comfort when I inquired, Are you fickle among your books only, or will you know your own mind better when you mix with real men and women?

6

Horace, of course, has an answer ready. You say that I have no decided convictions,' he observes. 'But, at present prices, can a man afford to keep decided convictions on less than 1,500l. a year?'

299

XI.

LADY GRISEL'S CAMPAIGN.

THE young people are out on the terrace.'

Do you mean that they should remain there till Doomsday? the indulgent reader inquires not prematurely.

At length we are ready to start. The procession is marshalled now. It is to be a rustic idyll-an idyll of hawthorn hedges and the milking pail-and we are to have shepherds with their oaten pipes, and sonsy wenches with their tubs on their heads, and strawberries and cream, and lamb and mint sauce, all the year round. This is the kind of adventure before us, and you know who the dramatis personna are to be. Not that our pastoral is to want its tragic side. Anchises dwells peacefully among the sheep-cots upon Ida, little dreaming of the hurricane of battle that is to sweep him and his people across the sea. Into our quiet life also an apple of discord has been cast. The siege of Troy, says Sir William Napier, has only been once repeated-at the siege of Sebastopol. But many a Juno has nourished her jealous ire, and Helen's beauty has crazed stronger

men than Paris, since the war-horses of Rhesus crossed Scamander.

Heroes, in the Heroic ages, fought for the hand of a woman. But we have no heroes remaining—at least since the Napiers died. Our greatest novelist could not find one, and his best novel in consequence was professedly without a hero.' So that, as Queen Victoria's laureate has said, the old order is inverted. Maidens, stiff with hoops and armed with ribs of whale,' enter the lists of love, and Briseis carries off the King of Men to her tent. There is a glut in the matrimonial market. A hundred blue-eyed slaves are at little Lord Lollipop's feet. But the ungallant little monster is more coy than a school-girl. Were he the Queen of Beauty he could not be charier of his smiles.

Letty had given her virgin heart, or at least a bit of it, to Horace. He, too, in his turn, had been taken captive. But no words of wooing had passed between them. And now a formidable competitor had entered the arena. On the croquet-green and at the butts, chaperoned by her grandaunt, Lady Grisel, Bell Baillie was a rival not to be despised. Yet, had there been no traitor in the camp, Lady Grisel might have sat down before our entrenchments in vain. But the shrewd old woman knew her cards, and played them dexterously. Horace himself was the weak point of our defence.

I am quite impartial; and I may own that Bell was an attractive girl in her way. Nay more, that there was much in such a girl to captivate Horace. Our pub