songs, ariettas, from that time-honoured instrument!

Yes,

I knew it! I peeped at the index of the Pimlico Magazine, and saw-" To Spring. By D. W." It was like an old felled tree putting out buds! I feared he had completed his cycle and gone out; but here he was at the starting-point again, ready to take another round. His poetical clock was wound up, and was chiming its familiar numbers.

Have you not seen an obstinate poor thing of a cat—a cat of ninety-cat vitality-that defies hanging, drowning, and precipitation from garret windows? She may have been hunted yesterday, with a tin-kettle at her tail, by all the ragamuffins in the parish; kicked, plucked, beaten, and battered out of shape; and lo! looking from your bedroom window next morning, behold her sunning herself on the top of the wall (her accustomed perch), forepaws folded under her, eyes half closed, blinking lazily, as sleek a grimalkin as ever pulled a herring's backbone to pieces in a kitchen area.

So seemed D. W. redivivus. After writing for dear life-writing to escape the pinching grip of starvation, slaving for half the penny papers of his day, their drudge-of-all-work-scarce able at any period to keep his head above water, but flourishing his pen all the time, like Cæsar swimming with one hand while he brandished his Commentaries in the other; floundering through the mud of meanest penury, harassed by the bitter need of incessant pendriving; hackneyed, jaded, spattered; with, worst of all, a shrew of a wife at his elbow to make him mad

Just so did D. W. after all this, and more than this, whip me on a new coat, shave him, trim the grizzly curls of thin-worn gold, shift into a handsome lodging, and sun himself (wife on arm) lounging along Regent Street,-looking alert and jocund, as though his life had been one unbroken course of luck and fun!

With these symptoms of regeneration about him, I met D. W. last spring, a few weeks after that apparition of the Pimlico Magazine at my breakfast table. He seemed to have reached port. His circumstances were manifestly made easy. How was a mystery I cared not to search. Enough that he bore himself in the old careless, jaunty fashion, and looked as though the jade Fortune at length smiled on him.

He told me he had washed his hands of penny papers, and twirled his head with an air of recovered liberty, as Sindbad might have done after he had shaken off the old man that rode him so long. He was writing an Epic,-devoting himself to the completion of a Work that would do justice to his talents. Henceforth he contended for his true place among Standard Authors.

Six months from that day I found the following little note on my table one night, on my return from a friend's house. A little note,

whose familiar characters tried hard to strut along the paper jauntily as ever, but visibly trembled and staggered:

"DEAR OLD FRIEND,-Come and see me. but come.

"3, Beverly Place, Brompton,
(No date),

I am ill; not so ill as they think—
"Thine ever,

"D. W."

Even as I read, St. Pancras chimed midnight. Well, I could but go the next morning to poor D. W.

Next morning The Times was shaken from my hold by a great pang of grief and regret. In the fatal last division of the first column I had read :

'On the 12th inst., at Beverly Place, Brompton, D—— W——, Esq., aged 44.” By some irreparable carelessness his note had not been posted till a week after his death!

I could never learn much more about him than I knew already. I might conjecture that his latest literary hope having utterly failed, the final burden of disappointment had broken the back of his pluck; that he then sank, crushed, to rise no more. His wife chose that time to leave him and return to her own relations. He died in a respectable boarding-house, chiefly populated by middle-aged unmarried ladies; and a kind Samaritaness of them had tenderly nursed the beaten traveller-had, with many a holy text, sped his tired spirit to its infinite rest.

The servant, who had carried his forgotten note in her pocket for a fortnight, and posted it with tardy conscientiousness, cried remorsefully while she owned her crime to me.

"We all liked him," said the dear old maid who had held his hand when he died, and burst out crying too. .

Lately, on a still winter day, I stood by his gravestone in Brompton Cemetery. New fallen snow lay lightly on his grave-the delicatest of palls. Round about it burned some crocuses, flame coloured and shaped: methought it was a kind of lying-in-state for the poor poetaster.

And after "all his weary day-long chirping," after

"All his lavish waste of words, Remains the lean D. W.' on his tomb."

MARY BROTHERTON.

CLASSICAL JOTTINGS.

NO. I-MODERNISM.

EVERY now and then there arises a strange reaction against modernism, which is doubly strange amongst Christian people who hold that God's providence orders the course of things, and who must feel that modern ideas, modern feelings, modern aspirations, are the fruit of Christianity-its secondary fruit, so to speak; for herein Christ's religion is comparable to the fig tree,-it bears, at the same time, fruits of divers degrees of ripeness, the perfected fruit of a holy life among them that are converted and sanctified, the unripe fruit (which may either drop off untimely, or under favourable circumstances ripen like the former kind) of mere acquiescence in certain grand truths and of reference to a higher standard in judging of actions. The leaven leaveneth the whole lump of modern society, though sadly little of the resulting product is fine and pure, and meet to stand like shewbread before the Lord. But many of our new lights talk as if heathen society was, on the whole, as good as worldly society among ourselves. We are told that Juvenal was a prurient exaggerator, Suetonius a bitter partisan, fond of raking in the cesspools of history. Even Nero has his apologists; and not even the abominations discovered at Pompeii can convince these "liberal" bigots that besides its individual, or, so to speak, spiritual effect, Christianity has had an enormous influence on modern society, has raised it throughout, has humanized it, has made peace more wholesome and war less terrible and vindictive. A book that did a great deal of mischief in this way was one now well-nigh forgotten (as it deserved to be) Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's " Athens." His picture of the Athenians' every-day life, of the absence of abject poverty, of the high intellectual culture possessed even by the poorest, is eminently calculated to mislead. We forget that whatever was gained in intellectuality was at the expense of a slave population for whom no one cared, who were so degraded as even to be thought unworthy of having the same gods as freemen had. Mr. Grote's most valuable "History of Greece," again, surely gives far too high a picture of Athenian excellence, in the chapters in which he undertakes to white-wash, clear up, and explain the death of Socrates. Explain it as you may, Socrates, Diagoras, and others died for trying to bring light to bear on the moral sense of the people. The most revolting worships might be safely introduced,

nay, the importers of them would be honoured; Cybele, Dionysius, the Bona Dea would be hailed as additions to the Olympian Pantheon; but the moment anything like real truth was taught, its teachers found that "the highly gifted and critical population, among whom intellectual activity was not confined to a select few," became very puppets in the hands of those interested in perpetuating delusion and error. Just as in India the preaching of Romanism excited comparatively little opposition, it was when Bible truth came in, with progress as her handmaid, that the Brahmins and Moulvies felt the danger, and, stirring up the fanaticism of Hindoo and Mussulman, brought about the Sepoy war.

This is one of the great advantages of classical reading: many good men have been grieved at the filth of Aristophanes, the looseness of Horace, the low tone of ancient writers generally, and have proposed to substitute a selection from the Fathers and from early church poets for the books usually read. Mr. Ruskin has, in several places, some forcible remarks on this subject; but if properly taught-taught by Christian men to Christian youths, and if due care is taken that the sin-suggesting parts be not put before young boys who have never been guarded against them, we are convinced that the classics usually read bear such a witness to the truth as we could by no means afford to give up. They show that we are better, socially, than the men of old; and that not because we are more intellectual or more advanced in material progress—but because the Day-star from on high has arisen, and the whole national life gets glimpses more or less clear of His brightness. Take a play like the "Baccha" of Euripides: we need not enter into the question whether-written, as it probably was, to show that the poet had no sympathy with those whose views which he was suspected of sharing-written to save his reputation, perhaps his life, it contains the real expression of his feelings, or (as things written to order often do) is contrived to damage purposely the very cause which it professes to serve. What we want to point to is the fact that this most enlightened Athenian audience-these people, the meanest of whom could appreciate a difficult chorus, and detect a false accent, and pass judgment on a trilogy-could listen patiently, nay, approvingly, to the naked horror of such a story; could go on worshipping (we will not say reverencing, for there is no reverence but that of slavish fear in heathen worship) the foul, vindictive demon who is there described. Alas for the wilful blindness of the men who dare to whisper that the God of the Old Testament is even such a one as these creations of man's depraved fancy! who cannot see a difference in kind as well as in degree between the God of Abraham and David, and the deity who bends a pine tree, and, perching Pantheus on the top, left him to be torn in pieces by his mother and sisters; while the reflection of the eye-witness of the

fearful scene is simply, that "To be humble-minded, and respect the gods and their belongings, is the best thing men can do."

Has any one read Mr. Browning's last book, "Dramatis Persona"? We cannot accept the writer's theology as a whole; but we must say that his clear testimony for the truth, in his account of St. John dying in the desert, and in other poems, is in pleasing contrast with the sentimental pantheism which (whether the author himself means it or not) so many of our young people elaborate out of the Laureate's hints about theology. "Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in Prospero's Island," is, of all Mr. Browning's poems, the most remarkable for the way in which it brings out the impossibility of man's rising to higher things by internal development. The god of Caliban (a worse god than that of his mother Sycorax) is, mutatis mutandis, the very deity whom Herodotus describes as "full of envy, and fond of working confusion." In those words, true of unregenerate men all the world over, "Thou thoughtest that I am such an one as thyself," we have the key to all the foul and cruel worships which have been practised even by the most civilized people all the world over. And the result on society has always been the same. Kept somewhat sweet at first by the comparative purity necessary in early times, when material adjuncts to profligacy are few, all the great societies of old times, all those of modern heathenism, fell into foulness indescribable as soon as they began to be tried by wealthı and opportunity. "Ye are the salt of the earth." There have been times when in certain places it has seemed as if there were no salt,the whole a festering mass, which could not be purified, but must be swept away. This can never be in a Christian community. Bad as we are, full of shortcomings, sadly below the level of our privileges, we still have a standard of perfection which can never be lost, and to which (in spite of themselves) the most worldly do constantly look. God's work in the world is gradual, and we are by no means terrified at the word development, if Christian development is meant. There is the Word, true for ever, true for all peoples and nations alike. But for the understanding of it we have lights which the earlier people had not. It may offend many to say so, but we believe a well-taught, earnest Christian now-a-days is in a better condition for understanding the true meaning of much of St. Paul's epistles, for instance, than some of the Fathers have shown themselves to be. Bible Christians in this age have a great problem before them. They have to meet Romanism and Romanizers on the one hand, and they have, on the other, to maintain the truth against those who are perpetually sneering at the inflexibility of orthodox Protestantism, at its obstinate adherence to old formulas, at the impossibility of its modifying itself, so as to become a suitable creed for India, for instance. If by inflexibility is meant firm adherence to the written