the talk of his richer information. So far, so good. There was no great harm done here. The taste for tit-bits, however, becomes infectious. It soon developed into fashion to seek those papers whose news and comment were conveyed in brief, telling paragraph. The groundwork of so much social prattle was laid there that old men and maidens, young men and the rest, turned to the papers of pithy paragraph, and other editors found imitation a necessity. Journalism fell under the influence of its tyrant. We take up our morning paper now, and find it spotted with paragraph from title to imprint. The leaders are shorter and sharper than of old, and suddenly split into a column of paragraphs information which is half news, half comment, like a series of fragments of lost leaders, chipped up and demoralized. There are paragraphs on literature, on science, on finance, on "the army and the navy and the gallant volunteers." Everything is there in its place, labelled, docketed, and paragraphed; so that, even on his own subject, the reader can judge at once what he wishes to read and what neglect. We take up the evening paper, and there we find literary and dramatic criticism (appearing from the pens of writers of the highest repute) forced into pithiness, cramped into paragraphs, defiled and desecrated by headlines. The proceedings of the police courts are recounted in the form of humorous anecdote; the tragedies of life are rendered more tragic by the ghastly device that summarizes the agony into a couple of uncouth sentences for title.

A year or two ago all this was the exception; now it is the rule. Even the most conservative and most highly priced of the daily newspapers has at last been obliged to follow the fashion, and prelude its leaders by a summary of the news. For good or ill, the supremacy of the paragraph is universal.

In as short a space as possible, let us consider a few of its dangers. The most obvious is that appetite for the " new thing' which the paragraph breeds in us all. Having once had our palates tickled by the delicacies of journalism, we come to expect spiced meats with every meal. The paper is dull that has no little fillip of the unexpected; we are continually on the look-out for material for small-talk. The demand necessitates a supply; the energy

of editors is taxed; and it is becoming a kind of profession to go about touting for the wherewithal to contrive a paragraph. Even in the privacy of the club smokingroom free conversation is a rash, if not a dangerous, experiment. The journalist is always among us, taking notes; and any morning at breakfast, our own words may appear in print, to rebuke our indiscretion. Surely this is intolerable even when the news conveyed is accurate; but the very circumstance of its conveyance precludes infallibility. "To step aside is human,' and in the rush of the moment inaccuracy is inevitable. An airy rumor is whispered in the secret places, and the murmur reaches the journalist. In an hour it appears as a probable fact in the Extra-special edition. Next morning it wakes afresh in the provinces as a verified event. few days later, blown about by the four winds of report, it makes a goodly paragraph in the weekly edition of The Rutland and Oakham Courier (the name is, I trust, my own), encrusted with a thousand foreign bodies and alien arguments which have clung to it in its travels. Does this seem a little thing? It is not so insignificant when we reflect that the number of I read it in the paper, and by those words apprehend "I know it for a fact," is not yet abated from off the face of our earth.

those who

say,

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A

Again Observe the effect of the paragraph upon criticism. Our elders tell us of a time when newspaper-reviewing was an art, when every daily journal found room for scholarly criticism. We, of the younger generation, know too little of this. We have our exceptions, of course : there are daily papers still that maintain a high level of excellence in literary criticism; but for the majority the paragraph has proved too strong. A new fashion in reviewing has arisen-the direct outcome of the new fashion in journalism. It consists in a running analysis, or précis of the work under consideration, embellished by the verbatim reproduction of all the striking situations, and more commendable passages. Thus, without raising the cover of a volume, a newspaper reader can boast a fairly exact and exhaustive knowledge of every book of the hour. It is a bad system. It strengthens the power of secondhand information, and diminishes the desire for original research. The paragraph begins to affect the circulation of genuine literature.

The unliterary person often desires to pose as one familiar with letters. All the tiresome books cannot be read; but they must be talked about. The new system of reviewing renders the task of conversation easy. Why spend three days in reading a book of which all that is necessary can be learned from a newspaper in as many minutes? Thus, books are less and less bought, and we begin to hear rumors of the hardships of publishers, and of other distresses hitherto undreamed of in the philosophy of Portugal Street.

The danger of the paragraph does not stop here. The paragraph is beginning to permeate literature, to saturate it with its own individuality. That is the last and the worst danger of its tyranny. When Mr. Gosse asked of himself, in the article to which I have already referred, what books had made the sensation of the season, he found three novels confronting him with the guerdon of indisputable supremacy. Had he to ask that question of the publishing season just closing, he would, I think, confess that the books of the winter have proved to be-not novels, but-volumes of reminiscence: condensations of potted paragraph. We are overwhelmed with autobiography-with recollection and recapitulation. Every one who remembers anything, and many who remember nothing, are on fire with an anxiety to rush into print. Their productions are the very essence, the true reductio ad absurdum, of the paragraph system. They range from point to point; they flit from flower to flower, indolent, irresponsible, without form and void. They treat of everything by degrees and of nothing long; they demand no effort of attention, stimulate no course of thought; they are the idle matter of an idle day. To the reviewer they come as angel visitors. Their paragraphs are ready-made scissors and paste alone are needed to provide critic, editor, and reader with the most popular subject-matter conceivable. For weeks after such a volume is published, we can trace its contents filtering through the columns of the Press, oozing up from the least-expected hollows, percolating perennially. No sooner has the interest of one of these books abated than another is ready to arouse the jaded appetite. Of the making of such books there is no end: every one who lives among his fellows

must have had some experience, must have been entangled in some incidents which have interest enough to beguile half an hour of reading: but when these books pose as literature, when they come to be read as the most important product of the hour, it is time for the consideration of their futility to give us pause. What turn do they serve? They are of value simply as providing anecdote for the dinner-table (and a Philistine dinner-table enough at that); as an intellectual diversion for neuralgia; as something to make us forget without forcing us to think.

It is this that we are elevating into the literature of the moment. Is it to be the literature of the future? If so, it will not be stagnant. Its risks and fatalities must increase-vires acquiret eundo. The reader of next year will find the reminiscences of this season tasteless, vapid, uninspir ing the fiction ponderous, the belles lettres antiquated. There will be the need of something livelier, more concise, more rapid of acquisition. As the electric railway comes to be adopted on the Inner Circle, we shall learn to live a little faster in all things we shall need to know the nature of our books before we decide to read them at all: and so imagination may, perhaps, be indulged by a little treat, may become proleptic, and wonder where the paragraph will end. Books will, perhaps, be made in a different form, showing their contents at a glance. Literature will be as journalism-bearing its phylactery full to the view.

Without too curious a fancy, one may conjure up, I think, the bookstall of 1895, logically deduced from the instances before us. The traveller shall pause there for a moment, and pick up the one novel, half-bidden under the cheap editions of autobiography, and open it before purchase. A brief summary of the plot will serve for preface, and every page will be scotched and notched, like a carbonado, by the headlines which will lead the possible purchaser to the decision of his choice. At a glance he will comprehend the drift of the story, and elect to buy or leave. All new books will lend themselves to the new arrangement; many of the old will be re-edited to satisfy the craze. So might Mr. Thomas Hardy's masterpiece be decorated with journalistic jewels-and after this fashion

We, who change our taste so rapidly, may change it yet again before the paragraph debases us altogether. A few months may find us following some new gleam, forgetful of the old. It may then be the fashion to couch our causeries in verse, to enclose our "newslets" in a cryptogram, and enhance our special correspondence by the mystery of a missing word. Perhaps. Who knows? The new tyranny may be better than the paragraph's. It can scarcely be worse.-National Review.

THE Holdfast charter-chest is one of the institutions of Balmawhapple. When it was sent in to our office on the occasion of a famous lawsuit, the whole community turned out to inspect this masterpiece of a medieval artist. The fineness and intricacy of the decorative ironwork on lock and hinge and handle are only rivalled by the dexterous adjustment of the crowd of figures on the panels of carven oak. The incidents represented on the worm-eaten panels are taken from the old miracle-plays and moralities which served to amuse and edify the people in what Charles Kingsley has called the milky youth of this great English land"-Joseph of Arimathea, and the long-bearded Eastern sages, and the devil himself with horns and tail and cloven hoof. Rude snatches of verse in archaic characters are deftly inserted here and there, to aid the unlearned spectator in following the action of the play. A compendious history of the world from the time when Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden "stabunt nudi, et non verecundabuntur!" To Mark and myself, when boys, the exterior of the Holdfast charter-chest was as good as a story-book, and later on we found that when the lid was unlocked the contents were by no means so dry and musty as they looked. Even in the mere title-deeds the name of some long-forgotten Muriel, or Eufame, or Alyne, or Agatha, or Alicia, or Veronica, or Clare, or Ursula, came like a flash of light out of the past. There were, moreover, records of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Holdfasts, written by themselves in quaint little note-books of the time, which in spite of a certain grandiose gravity and stately deliberation were eager

ly perused by us. We knew that the holdfasts could wield their swords; it now appeared that more than one of the house had been as clever with the pen. But the story we liked best was the story of a girl who had lived as maiden and wife and mother through the wild times that followed the flight of Mary, who had been taken as a child to hear Knox preach in the great church in the High Street, and who in extreme old age heard in her northern home of that tragedy on the scaffold at Whitehall which revived the memory of the still more cruel tragedy at Fotheringhay. I had a copy made once, and Mark says that I may use it if I like. This is the story of Lilias Maitland and Gilbert Holdfast, as written out by Amias his brother, with some such slight modernizing of archaic phrases and obsolete modes of speech as will make it intelligible to the reader of to-day.

I.

We were twins-Gilbert and I-born in the year of our Lord 1660. We had lived together in the old house that our grandfather had built about the time of Flodden, ever since we could remember. Ravenscleuch it was called (more commonly "The Cleuch" for brevity), a simple square tower, with narrow slits which served for windows in the upper flats, and a strong oaken door below. Such towers are common all over Scotland; they are the homes of the gentry and lesser barons; and though not to be compared with Lethington or Craigmillar, or the vast castle that the Chancellor is building beside the Water of Lauder, they are fairly comfortable; ours is at least, especially in the

summer-time, when we take the air on the flat roof, and look across the estuary of the Whapple to the hunting-lodge which belongs to the king himself, and the rough moorland park where, as the twilight falls, the bittern booms and the stags bellow. Ravenscleuch stands high, and the view from the leads embraces all the country round about. Far away to the east there is the sea itself; then the white line of breakers along the bar; then the landlocked bay, noisy with screaming terns and black with waterfowl; then the sandbills clothed with yellow bent on either side of the estuary, which gradually narrows until it reaches the reef of rock on which the Cleuch is built; then the great park on the farther shore, golden in spring with the broom, purple in autumn with the heather, the turrets of the lodge half hidden by the group of giant firs which shelter it from the sea; then, on our side of the stream, dotted over the level carse, some half-dozen weatherbeaten keeps, with battlements and pepper-boxes like our own; then right under our feet the huts of a few poverty-stricken fishermen clustered round the ruins of the abbey, which had been swept by "the fiery besom" a month or two before we were born. The abbey of Balmawhapple had been famous in its day; but it was among the first that the iconoclasts wrecked; and the community which it had sheltered for five hundred years had been broken up, and driven into a world with which they were unfamiliar. The kirk of the Reformation was a low barn-like building, which, with the manse, stood in what had once been the orchard of the monastery. But the fertile fields which the monks had industriously tilled had been allowed to run to waste, and the whole monastic domain was in the meantime little better than a wilderness. pile of ruin was our favorite playground when boys. It had a fascination for us which we did not try to explain, though we rather avoided it after dusk, when the owls began to hoot, and the shadows cast by the moon took bodily shape, and moved in ghostly procession along the ruined aisle. It was here that the old lords of the district had been buriedHoldfasts, Maitlands, and Greys; but the carven slabs, on which knight and lady rested, had been cracked and blackened by the action of the fire, and epitaphs in

This vast

stately Latin were no longer decipherable. Our nearest neighbors (with the excep. tion of the Reverend Peter Gibson, who occupied the manse) were the Maitlands of that Ilk, who lived at Balmain, a mile or so up the river. Still farther inland, at the Cadger's Pot, where the salt water ceases to mingle with the fresh, there is Greystone-a seat of the Master of Grey, as the eldest son of the peer of that name is called among us, according to our Scottish usage. There was a bridge across the Whapple within a few hundred yards of Greystone-a venerable bridge, which had been built by the first James, when one of his train, crossing at the ford to Earlshall the royal hunting-lodge-had been carried away by the flooded water and drowned.

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There were only the two of us— -Gilbert and Amias Holdfast. Our mother died when we were infants; she had been the close friend of the Dowager-Queen, Marie of Lorraine, who had been loath to part with her favorite maid to Sir Martin Holdfast; for our father, she knew, had been infected with the heresies of his namesake, and it seemed probable, should civil war break out, that he would cast in his lot with the congregation of Jesus Christ," as the followers of Knox and the Lord James were pleased to call themselves. But his wife, as Knox sorrowfully complained, was more dear to him than his religion; and when the fierce band of iconoclasts swept down upon Edinburgh, he retired to the Cleuch, and declined to take any active part in the conflict with the dying queen. Marie of Lorraine breathed her last on the day that we were born; and from the double shock our mother never recovered. There was a vein of fanatical intemperance in our father's character; so long as he was allied with Knox he was persuaded that he be longed to the elect; and the deep gloom that settled upon him when his young wife had bidden him a tender, tearful farewell, was due in no small measure to the conviction that, for mere carnal gratification, he had forfeited his spiritual birthright. He lived for eight or ten years; but the shadows never lifted. Prayer and penance were in vain; night and day be was assailed by visionary fiends who would not. relent; and even when Knox solemnly assured him that his sin had been blotted out, and that his name was registered in

the book of life, he refused to be comforted. I cannot tell how he had come to persuade himself that he was guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost; but the vision of a jealous God, who hated the creatures He had made with more than mortal bitterness, haunted him to the end.

The gloom that had settled upon the Cleuch during my father's widowhood was not dispelled by his death. The two bewildered little fellows who crept noiselessly about the darkened rooms until the neighbors came and bore the black coffin to the niche in the abbey vault, which had been hastily prepared for its reception, could hardly have been left more lonely and friendless had they been gypsy-born. There was the clergyman, to be sure the Reverend Peter Gibson-who paid us an occasional visit; but he was tedious and pedantic, and his clumsy efforts at cheerfulness rather added to our depression. Gilbert, who was my senior by an hour, and consequently entitled to all the privileges of primogeniture, would abruptly disappear whenever he heard the strident voice on the stair; and but for an uneasy conviction on my part that the good man really wished us well, I would have followed the example that was set me. An hour afterward I would find Gilbert on the roof, gazing wistfully and dreamily into space.

For Gilbert was a dreamer, and in these visionary hours, when he escaped from the harsh environment of our ordinary life into an ideal kingdom, he was comparatively content. I was too matter-of-fact to follow him; and left behind, could only sit down by the dusty roadside and cry myself to sleep. There were compensations, however. Meg our ancient nurse, and Mathy our pompous major-domo, never thought of troubling Gilbert with the financial anxieties of the household; I was their confidant, and I was flattered by the preference. We were taught to ride and fish and shoot by the keeper; and our education otherwise was not entirely neglected. A lean and lanky divinity student from the College of St. Mary's was engaged by Mr. Gibson to introduce us to the "Etymologie" of Lilius and Hunter's "Nomenclatura ;" and though he was shy and nervous, and hardly capable of controlling a couple of able-bodied lads, who were growing out of their jackets, we made fair progress in the "hunianities." Then

there was a store of curious old poems and romances on a shelf in the great hall;"Lancilot de Laik," printed at Rouen in 1488, as well as the "Morte d'Arthur" of Sir Thomas Mallory, printed by Mr. William Caxton in 1485, and the strange story of Ogier, King of Denmark, who, going to the Court of Charlemagne, was enslaved by the fairy Morgana in her palace at Avallon, where, while the shades of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table passed before him as in a dream, the magic ring she had placed on his finger kept him from growing old, and "Le Livre de la Diablerie," and the "Garden of Pleasance," and the poems of Ronsard and Clement Marot, and Mr. George Buchanan's translation of the Psalms, with the elegant dedication to the Northern Nymph he had not yet begun to revilein all of which, but mainly in the romances, we read diligently. The life was sombre enough, but healthy, as an openair life must be, and, as the years went by, not altogether unhappy.

It was Lilias Maitland, however, who first shot a streak of radiant light through the more or less murky clouds that clung persistently to the Cleuch.

We had been out in our light skiff after wild-fowl on the half-frozen mere. The winter sun had set; but the western sky was still ablaze with light; a pale pure light such as comes before a bitter frost. There was the pallid ghost of a moon overhead; it had taken the place of the ruddy orb that had left us, and seemed indeed altogether more in keeping with the chaste serenity and solemnity of an icebound world. We were waiting on the other side of the water, just below Earlshall, for the evening flight of the ducks as they came down from the inland swamps to the sea.

Save for the occasional croak of a water-rail among the reeds, or the pensive plaint of a plover, the silence round us was absolute. Only high up in the frosty ether we could hear the beat of wings.

There is a low belt of wood along the margin of the water, hazel, birch, seedling oaks. Lying on our oars, we were suddenly startled by the sound of voices within a few yards of where we lay.

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John, what are we to do?" were the only words we could clearly distinguish before, through a break in the wood, the speaker appeared.