the Courier dies, how is the sequestrated and unknown nobleman to be put out of the way? Passively, by letting him starve in his prison? No: the Baron is a man of refined tastes; he dislikes needless cruelty. The active policy remains. Say, assassination by the knife of a hired bravo? The Baron objects to trusting an accomplice also to spending money on any one but himself. Shall they drop their prisoner into the Canal? The Baron declines to trust water-water will show him on the surface. Shall they set his bed on fire? An excellent idea; but the smoke might be

seen.

No: poisoning is no doubt an easier death than he deserves, but there is really no other safe way out of it than to poison him. Is it possible, Henry, that you believe this consultation really took place?'

Henry made no reply. The succession of questions that had just been read to him exactly followed the succession of the dreams that had terrified Mrs. Norbury, on the two nights which she had passed at the hotel. It was useless to point out this coincidence to his brother. He only said, 'Go on.'

Lord Montbarry turned the pages until he came to the next intelligible passage.

'Here,' he proceeded, 'is a double scene on the stage-so far as I can understand the sketch of it. The doctor is upstairs, innocently writing the certificate of my Lord's decease, by the dead courier's bedside. Down in the vault the Baron stands by the corpse of the murdered lord, preparing the strong chemical acids which are to reduce it to a heap of ashes. —Surely, it is not worth while to trouble ourselves with decyphering such melodramatic horrors as these? Let us get on! let us get on!"

He turned the leaves again; attempting vainly to discover the meaning of the confused scenes that followed. On the last page but one he found the last intelligible sentences.

'The third Act,' he said,

seems to be divided into two Parts or Tableaux. I think I can read the writing at the beginning of the second Part. The Baron and the Countess open the scene. The Baron's hands are mysteriously concealed by gloves. He has reduced the body to ashes, by his own system of cremation, with the exception of the head

Henry interrupted his brother there. 'Don't read any more!' he exclaimed.

'Let us do the Countess justice,” Lord Montbarry persisted. 'There are not half a dozen lines more that I can make out. The accidental breaking of his jar of acid has burnt the Baron's hands severely. He is still unable to proceed to the destruction of the head—and the Countess is woman enough (with all her wickedness) to shrink from attempting to take his place—when the first news is received of the coming arrival of the commission of inquiry despatched by the Insurance Offices. The Baron feels no alarm. Inquire as the commission may, it is the natural death of the Courier (in my Lord's character) that they are blindly investigating. The head not being destroyed, the obvious alternative is to hide it—and the Baron is equal to the occasion. His studies

in the old library have informed him of a safe place of concealment in the palace. The Countess may recoil from handling the acids, and watching the process of cremation. But she can surely sprinkle a little disinfecting powder

'No more!' Henry reiterated. 'No more.'

'There is no more that can be read,

my dear fellow. The last page looks like sheer delirium. She may well have told you that her invention had failed her!'

'Face the truth honestly, Stephen and say her memory."

Lord Montbarry rose from the table at which he had been sitting, and looked at his brother with pitying eyes.

Lord Montbarry quietly took up the manuscript, and threw it into the fire. Let this rubbish be of some use,' he said, holding the pages down with the poker. The room is getting chilly—let the Countess's Play set some of these charred logs flaming again.' He waited a little at the fireplace, and returned to his brother. 'Now, Henry, I have a last word to say, and then I have done. I am ready to admit that you have stumbled, by an unlucky chance, on the proof of a crime committed in the old days of the palace, nobody knows how long ago.

With that one concession, I dispute everything else. Rather than agree in the opinion you have formed, I won't believe anything that has happened. The supernatural influences that some of us felt when we first slept in this hotel your loss of appetite, our sister's dreadful dreams, the smell that overpowered Francis, and the head that appeared to Agnes-I declare them all to be sheer delusions ! I believe in nothing, nothing, nothing!' He opened the door to go out, and looked back into the room. Yes,' he resumed, there is one thing I believe in. My wife has committed a breach of confidence-I believe Agnes will marry you. Good night, Henry. We leave Venice the first thing to-morrow morning.'

So Lord Montbarry disposed of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel.

A

POSTCRIPT.

LAST means of deciding the difference of opinion between. the two brothers was still in Henry'sHe had his own idea of possession.

the use to which he might put the false teeth, as a means of inquiry,. when his fellow-travellers returned to England.

The only surviving depository of the domestic history of the family in past years was Agnes Lockwood's old nurse. Henry took his first opportunity of trying to revive her personal recollections of the deceased Lord Montbarry. But the nurse had never forgiven the great man of the family for his desertion of Agnes: she flatly refused to consult her memory. 'Even the bare sight of my lord, when I last saw him in London,' said the old woman, 'made my finger-nails itch to set their I was sent on an mark on his face. errand by Miss Agnes, and I met him coming out of the dentist's door—and, thank God, that's the last I saw of him.'

Thanks to the nurse's quick temper and quaint way of expressing herself, the object of Henry's inquiries was gained already! He ventured on asking if she had noticed the situation of the house. She had noticed, and still remembered the situation-'did Master Henry suppose she had lost the use of her senses, because she had happened to be nigh on eighty years old? "The same day, he took the false teeth to the dentist, and set all further doubt (if doubt had still been possible) at rest for ever. The teeth had been made for the first Lord Montbarry.

Henry never revealed the existence of this last link in the chain of discovery to any living creature, his brother Stephen included. He carried his terrible secret with him to the grave.

There was one other event in the memorable past on which he preserved the same compassionate silence. Little

1

Mrs. Ferrari never knew that her husband had been-not as she supposed, the Countess's victim—but the Countess's accomplice. She still believed that the late Lord Montbarry had sent her the thousand pound note, and still recoiled from making use of a present, which she persisted in declaring had the stain of her husband's blood on it.' Agnes, with the 'widow's entire approval, took the money to the Children's Hospital; and spent it in adding to the number of the beds.

'

In the spring of the new year the marriage took place. At the special request of Agnes, the members of the family were the only persons present at the ceremony: the three children acted as bridesmaids. There was no wedding breakfast-and the honeymoon was spent in the retirement of a cottage on the banks of the Thames.

During the last few days of the residence of the newly-married couple by the riverside, Lady Montbarry's children were invited to enjoy a day's play in the garden. The eldest girl overheard (and reported to her mother) a little conjugal dialogue which touched on the subject of the Haunted Hotel.

'Did she say nothing about what she saw or heard, on that dreadful night in my room!'

Nothing. We only know by the event, that her mind never recovered the terror of it.'

Agnes was not quite satisfied. The subject troubled her. Even her own

brief intercourse with her miserable rival of other days suggested questions that perplexed her. She remembered the Countess's prediction. You have to bring me to the day of discovery, and to the punishment that is my doom.' Had the prediction simply failed like other mortal prophecies ? Or had it been fulfilled, on the memorable night when she had seen the apparition, and when she had innocently tempted the Countess to watch her in her room?

Let it, however, be recorded, among the other virtues of Mrs. Henry Westwick, that she never again attempted to persuade her husband into betraying his secrets. Other men's wives, hearing of this extraordinary conduct. (and being trained in the modern school of morals and manners) naturally regarded her with compassionate contempt. They always spoke of Agnes, from that time forth, as ' rather an old-fashioned person.'

Is that all? That is all.

Is there no explanation of the mystery of the haunted hotel?

Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death.-Farewell.

IT has frequently been said that it

is neither necessary nor wise, in passing judgment upon a poet's work, to consider either his personal character, private opinions, or the events of his life. If this be true at all, it is true only to a very limited extent. It is not only justifiable, but actually necessary to consider all of these, in so far as they have determined the nature of a poet's work, or the manner of its execution; to go beyond this were to be profane and sacrilegious, not to go so far were to neglect a most obvious means of learning to the full the lessons fit and proper to be learned from poetry.

It is, unfortunately, necessary to say here, to prevent the possibility of mistake, that we have no kind of sympathy with those literary ghouls, who make a business of the defamation at second hand of the illustrious and defenceless dead,' nor with those more harmless, but perhaps more foolish people, who, with meddling hand, venture to remove the dust of time and oblivion from the most sacred privacies of life. The events of a poet's life may have no visible connection with the work he does, and to argue that we should be guided either in receiving or rejecting a man's work, by the fact that he was moral or immoral, is, on the face of it, absurd. But there are some great poets whose writings have been so completely informed and inspired by the action, upon their character, of the accidents of life and the

usages of the world, that it is impossible to discuss their works altogether apart from their lives; and of such poets Shelley is undoubtedly one. To discuss Shelley's works without discussing Shelley would be to run the risk of grave injustice, both to the poetry and to the poet. We shall, therefore, consider how far Shelley's peculiar temperament and unconventional life determined the nature of his poetry, before we discuss the abstract merits of the glorious work he has done; or in other words, we shall endeavour to view him, first from the human, and then from the intellectual side. In attempting this it will not be necessary to give a detailed account of the poet's life; its incidents are too well known, or in any case within such easy reach of all, that it were superfluous to recapitulate them here.

A sensitive poetic genius can feel the torments that arise from a perception of the evil and misery of the world, at an age when most boys think of nothing but how to obtain enjoyment or avoid punishment. Imagine a child, with that sense of resistance to injustice, always so strong in childhood, abnormally magnified by the divine comprehensiveness of genius, until it extended, not only to his own petty woes, but also to the wrongs of all with whom he came in contact or of whom he had read or heard: imagine such a child, delivered at a tender age to the rough and brutal usage of a vulgar and undisciplined private school; imagine the proud and lofty spirit which even then refused to bend before persecution; imagine the tender heart which bled most freely at

another's sufferings tortured by the hourly sight of brutalities against which revolt was vain; imagine all this, and it is not surprising that Shelley entered on the second stage of his boyhood at Eton with a spirit already at war with a world in which he thought that injustice reigned supreme, and with a mind burning with desire to set wrong right, to brand the oppressor and to succour the oppressed. It has been truly said, that life at the great English public schools is but a miniature of life in the actual world, and Shelley's career at Eton is a remarkable example of this. His conduct there was the same as his conduct in after life-bold, defiant, and uncompromising to all he thought false or wrong, and the treatment he received there but too accurately forshadowed the treatment that awaited him in the wider arena of the world. Eton he had not to suffer from the unlicensed cruelty of a private school, but he found there, in the system of fagging, a legalized form of what he considered wholesale tyranny. He resolutely refused to fag, and was in consequence subjected to the most brutal cruelty, his persecutors being upheld and abetted by the authorities of the school. Shelley has left a most affecting record, not only of the sadness and misery of his school life, but also of the purifying influence upon his loving nature of the sufferIn the ining he so early endured.

At

troduction to the 'Revolt of Islam there occurs the following inexpressibly beautiful picture of a boyhood misunderstood and abused :—

'Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first

The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.

'I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why until there rose
From the near school-room voices that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes-
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

'And then I clasped my hands, and looked around; But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,

Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground.

:

So, without shame, I spake "I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check." I then controlled
My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and
bold,'

These well-known lines show how potent the events of Shelley's boyhood were in forming and determining his character. His school life did not alone foster and develop his inborn hatred of all things foul and wrong, but it also endowed him with the bitter knowledge that our social laws recognize sin and evil as permanent institutions, regarding them as fixed and unalterable parts of a divinely appointed universe. Against this knowledge, instilled into him so early, Shelley's soul rebelled; the cardinal point of his creed was that sin and suffering are not the necessary adjuncts of, but excrescences upon, existence here; he believed that it is within the power of man to remove these excrescences, to make himself perfect and all the world a paradise. In Queen Mab,' the crude, undigested work of youth, only partially redeemed in its excesses and faults of workmanship by some passages of exquisite music and burning eloquence, Shelley first gave passionate expression to this belief. This is the gist and aim of the poem, and is never lost sight of through all the fierce arraignments of religion and social law, until it finds full expression in the beautiful passage ending:

Thus human things were perfected, and earth,
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew
Fairer and nobler with each passing year.'

In 'Prometheus Unbound,' the magnificent monument of Shelley's maturity, perhaps the greatest poem given to the world in the years between Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, The the leading idea is the same. tortured Titan in his direst agony knew that the day of his release must

come :