fades in the presence of the sympathetic hero; yet neither of them admits, or even understands, the position of affairs until the hero, unaware of his feelings, surprises himself by saying to her, 'I love you.' Held back by her principles, she refrains from responding to this avowal; nevertheless, in accordance with the diplomacy for which her more civilised sisters are famous, she agrees that, though not lovers, they will always remain dear friends. Not till the hero learns from an English newspaper that his mother is dying of grief on account of his unexplained disappearance, and not till he resolves, in consequence, to return to England instantly, does the reserve of the heroine give way and allow her to confess her secret. Even then she tells him that he must go away and leave her, and she adds, sadly, that he is certain never to come back again.

"I do not know why, dear friend," she says, "but this I feel—we must lose you for ever. No one returns here."

"Then let me never go away," I cried, rising, and clasping her to my heart."Let me live with you and be with you for ever, and forget all the world beside."

Once more I saw a beginning of that exquisite languor which had almost made her mine. The lips of the beautiful creature parted, the eyes closed. Once more my own lips approached them, when the girl moved herself by some mysterious exertion of will, tore herself from my embrace, and ran to the very edge of the cliff.

"Deep into the sea, beloved one, for ever beloved of my heart, if you come one step more. Go now, go from me. Leave me to say my prayers. I love you. Take that last word from Victoria; you will never hear her voice again."'

This scene, whatever its merits as literature-and we ourselves are far from thinking them slight-shows a knowledge, sympathetic and delicate, on Mr. Whiteing's part of a woman's deepest feeling; and the esteem in which we hold him on this account is corroborated by the sensitiveness to beauty which he often evinces in his descriptions of external nature. No one, for example, could have written the following passage unless he possessed the temperament, if not the pen, of a poet.

'I turn and look down on the island, north, south, and west, in all its heaving beauty-blue sea, patches of coral sand, silver cascades gushing from the rocks; glory of trees and flowers, of clear skies, and of rainbow-tinted mists, flecking here and there the background of perfect turquoise; glory of the soft beauty of grove and settlement, of the wild beauty of the hills, of the ordered beauty of the happy mean in the plantations beyond; all visible from this height it came up to me through every sense-in its odours from the groves and gardens,

the soft breeze sighing my way; in its sounds, from the tinkle of a tame goat's bell here and there, in far, faint echoes of the woodman's axe falling in due measure of seconds after the flash of the sunlight on the polished steel. And, for sight again, there was more of the exquisite human life in tiny groups, dotted all over the fields in leisure and toil, or in the opalescent green shapes in the water, off the far point, which I knew to be the bodies of diving girls.'

But the descriptions which have done most to bring Mr. Whiteing into notice are descriptions of scenes and events very different from the foregoing. They are his detailed descriptions of the life of the London poor, which he vaguely foreshadowed in his sketch of the City crowd before the Mansion House. For these we must turn from 'The Island' to Number 5 John Street.' Many of our readers are doubtless familiar with them already. They have been written about in a number of admiring newspapers. They have been preached about in perhaps a yet larger number of pulpits. Critics, clergymen, and congregations have hailed them as a new revelation. We do not propose ourselves to examine them at any great length, for our object in considering Mr. Whiteing's literary achievements is merely to exhibit to the reader his capacities and accomplishments as a man, in order that we may better estimate his significance as a social teacher. About these descriptions, however, it will be necessary to say something, and it will be necessary to say something also about their counterpart in the same volume-Mr. Whiteing's descriptions of the life of the London rich. Of these two performances we shall have to speak in very different terms.

His

We gather that, as a preparation for dealing with the life of the very poor, Mr. Whiteing himself followed the course which he attributes to his bero, and lived for some weeks in a squalid lodging-house such as he describes. description of it and of its inmates suggests, indeed, that this was the case. The scenes which he puts before us have all an air of reality-the unimpassioned precision of sketches made on the spot; nor are they, like so many descriptions of the same kind, overcoloured. The inmates. of the lodging-house are represented with the same conscientious skill, and the pictures which he gives us of them show that he has not merely an observing eye, but a something very much rarer-that faculty of an observing mind which has its roots in dramatic and imaginative sympathy. He presents them to us as living beings, who, like all others of their species, are partly good, partly bad,

ignorant about many things, shrewd about many others, and who find that life, even among the most unfavourable circumstances, has in it elements of interest, gaiety, and enjoyment. They have all of them, moreover, an individuality which is the stamp of truth, and which vividly illustrates the fact, so often forgotten, that the poor, like all other classes, are a very heterogeneous body; that they think about life and take life in very different ways; and that unity of feelings and opinions, social, moral, or political, is no more produced by a similarity of bare floors than by a similarity of floors covered with Turkey carpets.

When we turn, however, from Mr. Whiteing's picture of the lowest class to his corresponding picture of the highest, every one of the commendations which we have just bestowed on him must be withdrawn. He is himself very severe on the folly of those philanthropists who think that they know what the life of the poor is from occasional visits to the slum or the labourer's cottage. Such persons, he says, see poverty from the outside only. To understand it they must see it from the inside, and experience it as the poor themselves do. In dealing with the fashionable world Mr. Whiteing himself occupies the precise position which he attributes to these philanthropists. Whatever knowledge of the fashionable world may be his, it is obviously a knowledge that comes from the outside only-possibly from occasional glimpses of it, but mainly, we should be inclined to conjecture, from a study of gossiping newspapers and of Ouida's earlier novels. Many of our soldiers still remember, with amusement, a celebrated description by this really gifted writer, of the internal glories of the old barracks at Knightsbridge; and contrast that home of battered cocoanut matting, iron bedsteads, and the scantiest military furniture, with the statement that 'a young Guardsman in barracks is more ' luxurious than a young duchess.' Mr. Whiteing's pictures of the fashionable world, though less monstrous than Ouida's in their inaccuracy, show far less real acquaintance with it; and even if he should be able to plead that certain details were taken from life, they are details which in life are altogether exceptional, and disprove rather than prove the inferences he attempts to draw from them.

We are led to make this last observation by the account Mr. Whiteing gives us of the young fine gentleman, at once dandy and athlete, who is intended by him to represent the most complete result of the union of an old upper class, refined by the traditions of centuries, with a new upper

This

class founded on industrial and commercial wealth. young gentleman, whom Mr. Whiteing regards as a type of the fashionable eldest son, brought up at Eton and Balliol, occupies a suite of rooms, which have been apparently reconstructed for him, in some colossal hotel overlooking the Thames Embankment. He has balconies with tesselated floors, awnings of white and gold, and under the awnings 'a glory of fresh blossoms,' renewed every morning by an artist from Covent Garden, which frame the scene with their fabulously expensive petals. Two rooms will hardly hold the young gentleman's coats and trousers. He has half-a-dozen kinds of baths, which he perfumes with various essences. He touches a button by his bed, and some marvellous piece of machinery puts within reach of him spirits and The Sporting Times.' His sheets, his pillows, and his nightshirts are all of the finest silk. As he dresses

a manicurist attends at his bedroom door. When his dressing is finished, the chief trouble that awaits him is the trouble of inspecting, of buying, or refusing to buy, the cigars, the jewels, the lapis lazuli boxes, the Russia leather writing-cases, the exquisite green note-paper, which the tradesmen of Bond Street flock daily to offer to his notice. Every time he goes out of doors he is seriously retarded by the difficulty of deciding what necktie will suit his complexion best, which particular pin out of a tray-load will best suit his necktie, and what walking-stick will go best with both-an 'exotic' growth with a handle of exquisite tortoiseshell, or another capped with amber almost as pale 'as a pearl.' We regret that Mr. Whiteing is guilty of one piece of negligence; for, instead of providing his athlete with a dozen exotic buttonholes, brought with the flowers for his balcony, and laid on his dressing-table to choose from, he sends him out to buy one each morning at an ordinary flower shop in Piccadilly. For this lamentable lapse, however, from the true fashionable standard Mr. Whiteing makes his amends by never allowing him to spend less than twenty shillings on his luncheon, and never, we may reasonably assume, less than five pounds on his dinner. This monstrous creature, who sleeps between silk sheets, who bathes in an essenced bath, and sits in a bower of roses, Mr. Whiteing actually imagines to be a type of what men and women of good position to-day regard and admire as the finished product of civilisation.'

Mr. Whiteing, however, is even farther astray from reality in his attempts to describe the manner and spirit of

the well-bred world than he is in his account of the sheets in which the fashionable athlete sleeps. Here is a specimen of the way in which a highly placed Court official describes two visits he has just paid in the country:

'They did us fine at Chester Races, I can tell you. I was at Appleby's to meet the Prince, if you please. Our little fandango was rather stately, but they simply went the pace at the Towers. So they did at Rayner's. The Rayners have lived in France, you know, and they are up to all sorts of little dodges to make the evenings go-scratch hops, Jew-de-society-all that sort of thing.'

The pigeon English of a Chinaman is very much more like this sort of thing than this sort of thing is like the conversation of any possible groom-in-waiting. And a similar observation will apply to Mr. Whiteing's conversations in high life generally. They sometimes suggest what he might have seen at the bar of some gilded restaurant. They are utterly unlike anything he would hear at any West End club. But not only does he fail to reproduce the tone of fashionable conversation; he utterly fails, in describing his fashionable ladies and gentlemen, to invest them with anything like possible human character. They are merely so many mouthpieces for absurd and grotesque sentiments. In 'The Island,' for example, he introduces us to the most exclusive society of Paris, where the ladies habitually address each other as Comtesse' and 'Dear 'Marquise.' One of them, having described the delights of getting up on a cold morning, in an atmosphere warmed with 'little gusts of rose vapour,' says that she heightens her pleasure by looking out of the window and watching the poor jumping in the streets to warm themselves. A quiet little woman, of a sweet sedateness of expression,' whom the hero of Number 5 John Street' takes down to dinner at a London house so magnificent that it has a minstrels' gallery in the dining-room, says that the duty most incumbent on the Church of England to-day is to save the souls of persons in high life by having private services in their drawingrooms before they dress for dinner-services suited to their ultra-refined needs; and she points to an archbishop on the other side of the table as a person specially designed for this holy and apostolic work. The archbishop, at whom the hero, with characteristic high breeding, has just flipped a pellet of bread, begs the English aristocracy not to despise America, but to believe the best of everybody;' for the Americans know as well as the English how to keep the poor in their place; are infinitely more ready to shout them