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emotion, intended merely to gratify cu- | mourning, he heard the tolling of bel's;

riosity. Such was the story told by the Algonquin Indians to Father Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary of the seventeenth century.

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I asked them what caused eclipse of the moon and the sun; they replied that the moon was eclipsed and appeared dark because she took her child into her arms, which obscured her brightness. "If the moon has a child," I said, "she is married, or has been so. Certainly," they answered; "the sun is her husband, who marches all day, and she all the night, and when he is eclipsed it is because he has taken the child into his arms." But," I argued, neither sun nor moon has arms. Oh, you have no imagination," they re

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joined; “they hold their bows always bent before their faces, that is why you can't see "And what do they intend to shoot at ?" I asked. "Ah, how can we tell?" said they.

their arms.

there came funeral processions; the graves
could not hold the dead. He passed on,
and coming near each village heard the
shriek of the dying, saw all faces white in
the desolate houses. But high on the hill
stands his own hamlet; his wife, his little
children are there, and the aged parents.
His heart bleeds as he draws near. With
strong gripe he holds the maiden fast and
plunges with her beneath the waves.
sank; she rose again, but she quailed be-
fore a heart so fearless and fled far away to
the forest and the mountain.

He

Now in this story a long advance has been made in one respect from the primitive nature myths towards the spirit of the modern novel. Sympathy is aroused on behalf of the hero; one feels impatient to know whether he rose again as well as the Pest Maiden, and lived to rejoin his family in the vilNext in order comes the narrative lage which he had saved, and the unmyth, in which the listener is intended satisfactory feature in the narrative is not only to receive instruction on mat-that we are left in doubt on that point. ters exciting his curiosity, but to be in- But in another respect this legend terested in the incidents of the story. predicates a less abstract art than those fables which, though here placed in a The mediæval Slavonic legend of the third group, are often, in point of time, mysterious advance of the plague is a vivid instance in point. Mr. Tylor has found in earlier stages of human develgiven a translation of a greatly con-opment than the others. In myths of densed version, in the original of which the interest would be intensified by minute details of scenery, features, and language.

There sat a Russian under a larch-tree, and the sunshine glared like fire. He saw something coming from afar; he looked

this third class there are many con

nected with the daily spectacle of sunrise and sunset. Some of them are elaborate and beautiful, implying a high degree of sensibility both in the teller and his hearers; but sometimes the incidents recorded are such as could not have taken place more than once,

and therefore can never have been accepted as literally true even by simple and easily satisfied intellects. People might believe that the stir, the hues,

again; it was the Pest Maiden, huge of stature, all shrouded in linen, striding towards him. He would have fled in terror, but the form grasped him with her long outstretched hand. "Knowest thou the Pest?" she said; "I am she. Take the balmy odors of morning were me on thy shoulders and carry me through caused each day by Tithonus leaving all Russia; miss no village, no town, for I the embraces of Aurora, for that might must visit all. But fear not for thyself; be repeated daily throughout eternity; thou shalt be safe amid the dying." Cling- but the North American legend of the ing with her long hands, she clambered on Red Swan, which Longfellow has the peasant's back. He stepped onward, woven into his poem of "Hiawatha," saw the form above him as he went, but t no burden. First he bore her to the though purporting to explain the disThey found there joyous dance plays of sunset, can never have been song; but the form waved her linen accepted as anything but figurative, ud, and joy and mirth were gone. As for it involves the death of some wretched man looked round he saw of the characters in it. Those who

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listened to the Russian myth of the Pest Maiden very likely believed it, for it explained an exceptional occurrence, and professed nothing except what happened on a single occasion. But in the story of the Red Swan we trace evidence of something akin to the mental condition of modern novel-readers, who prefer amusement to exact information. Only the novel-reader, while willing to dispense with a faithful explanation, will not put up with an incredible narrative.

tavern, beckoning us aside from the dust and fatigue of travelling, and we can easily choose those who are sure to bring us among amusing and instructive people.

But it is not safe to tarry too long with this phantom company, or we shall find ourselves out of tune with real men and women; unbraced for the stern difficulties, the dark perplexity which, at one time or another, we all have to encounter.

The dilemmas of real life are never The truth about the popularity of so artistically arranged as they are in a novels is that most people, being dis- novel or a drama; the living characters contented with their environment, find move awkwardly enough sometimes; relief in contemplating an ideal society they fail to satisfy our critical sense, where tedium is unknown and disap- made excessively fastidious by the perpointment is generally circumvented; fect adjustment of parts in fiction. One and, on the other hand, there is afforded is often in doubt whether living charto those who are moderately virtuous acters are good or bad; but it is easy to and prosperously at ease the pleasure of decide between Cinderella and her siscontrast in narratives of crime, hard-ters, or the three daughters of King ship, or disaster, without the responsi- Lear. The novelist keeps the seamy bility of relieving or the exertion of side of the character of his hero or sharing these conditions. The hedonist who is not so well off as he feels he ought to be tickles his imagination with the power and pleasure derived from wealth by the Count of Monte Cristo. The man who finds himself unable to derive much exhilaration in the conversation of his own valet takes much enjoyment in reading the quaint sentences in which Sancho Panza or Sam Weller framed their philosophy. Has a woman been denied the gift of beauty? she is free to identify herself for the time with the fortunes of Di Vernon or Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Is a man tied to the colorless routine of a countinghouse? what a stirring playground is open to him in the never-flagging adventures of Dumas's "Trois Mousquetaires." And for all of us it is delightful to trace the action of lifelike characters exposed to the same temptations, predicaments, losses, and apprehensions which it has been our own lot to

heroine carefully out of view; those
who feed their judgment chiefly on
romance are prone to forget how truly
speaks the nameless lord in
"All's
Well that Ends Well: "
"The web
of our life is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together; our virtues would be
proud if our faults whipped them not,
and our crimes would despair if they
were not cherished by our virtues."

The fact is that, minutely as novelists affect to paint character, there is a great deal that must not even be sketched in. It is part only of a few of real lives that endure being put on the canvas at all; over the rest a discreet veil must be drawn.

It is all very well, then, to be moved to tenderness by the misfortunes of Effie Deans, and to glow sympathetically over the devotion of Jeanie; but how many an Effie Deans there is who earns nothing but reproach, condemnation, and avoidance because no friendly hand has intervened to keep out of sight For all such harmless illusion we can- her unlovely or ungraceful attributes. not but be grateful to those who pro- Many a lass may have borne a part not vide such abundant entertainment to less noble, not less worthy of admirawile the journey through life. They tion than Jeanie Deans, but has failed stand, each at the door of his wayside of her meed of praise because she

encounter.

squinted, or dropped her h's, or picked | is incessantly lulled by the perusal of her teeth with a hairpin.

skilfully woven romance, how fiction is Reading a good novel is rather like read by some people to the exclusion of paying a visit to a friend who is much every other form of literature except richer than yourself; everything in his the daily papers-is it unreasonable to house is so luxurious and well ar- feel some apprehension lest the mental ranged; his wife and children lay them-faculties become enervated and the inselves out to find amusement for you; tellect hampered when the realities of his servants are all on their best behav-life come to be dealt with? The lesson ior; so that when you return home you of fiction is that life is nothing without are apt to be offended if things are not love and marriage; it brings people to so faultlessly adjusted in your own es- the threshold, where real anxiety and tablishment. trial begins, and leaves them there. But real life is not accomplished with the end of its love passages.

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It requires a conscious mental effort to remember that the most impressive characters in romance never had actual existence, but have been trimmed and furbished and posed into artistic perfection, with which frail and awkward human beings can never successfully compete. Even railway directors most material and humdrum class of men - bow before the sway of the unreal, and are so possessed of the actuality of Old Mortality as to advertise excursions, not to Craignethan on the Clyde, but to Tillietudlem.1 Not less astute in this than the priests of Buddha, who exhibit hair, bones, and feathers as veritable relics of the five hundred and fifty fabulous births of Guatama, each in the form of a different animal.

In fact, to enjoy fiction thoroughly one must throw himself so completely into the action of the plot as to believe, for the nonce, in the reality of the characters. "Harp and carp," said the Queen of Elfland to Thomas the Rhymer,

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It is little to a man's credit that he should act heroically when he is in love, for then, despite himself, he takes more thought for another than for himself.

You love no higher shall you go, For this is true as Gospel text; . Not noble then is never so

Either in this world or the next.

But to equip him for the real wear and tear of life his mind should be stored with examples of those who have encountered constant vexation, and have triumphed over disappointment, perplexity, failure, and even disaster. It is well for him to read the Waverley Novels, but it is far better to read Lockhart's "Life of Scott," for that marvellous biography brings him ac quainted with a life led as nobly in foul weather as in fair; of overwhelming losses surmounted by a stout spirit; and a kindly nature unsoured by disappointment or distrust.

One grudges to observe the amount of time spent on sentimental love-stosaid,ries, while such lives as those of the

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great artists Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini go unread. There is nothing in fiction more absorbing than the lives of these two men. Each of them, as a boy, had to encounter that most formidable of all external obstaclesan angry father armed with a rod; in vain were repeated floggings to dissuade each of them from entering upon that career upon which each was des tined to throw immortal lustre. Rivalries, jealousies, oppression, conflict form a series of vicissitudes with which it may profit a man better to store the

memory than with the rogueries of who conned the lists published a few Roderick Random or the dilemmas of years ago of the "hundred best books" David Copperfield. how many conformed to the instructions, and with what result?

Thousands of persons are familiar with the spiritual fumblings of Robert Elsmere, but comparatively few have followed the wondrous story of the Italian Renaissance -a movement only second to Christianity in its influence on modern life and thought, an era which Paul Bourget (himself a novelist) has epitomized in a single masterly sentence:

Cette minute de floraison unique où la créature humaine semble avoir été si complète, entre le moyen âge, qui fut le règne de la force trop forte, et notre siècle, où la culture confine sans cesse à la maladie.

If any young person of leisure were so much at a loss as to ask advice as to what he should read, mine should be exceedingly simple: Read anything bearing on a definite object. Let him take up any imaginable subject to which he feels attracted, be it the precession of the equinoxes or postage stamps, the Athenian drama or London street cries; let him follow it from book to book, and unconsciously his knowledge, not of that subject only but of many subjects, will be increased, for the departments of the realm of knowledge are divided Again, let it be said that if novel- by no octroi. He may abandon the reading is the surest as it is the easiest first object of his pursuit for another; means of intellectual recreation, there it does not matter, one subject leads to 'is no cause to interfere with or discour- another; he will have acquired the age it; but the true hedonist-he habit of acquisition; he will have whose avowed aim is pleasure-will gained that conviction of the pricelessfind it to his profit to consider whether ness of time which makes it intolerable he is getting good value for the time for a man to lie abed of a morning. spent in it, whether he is not neglect- Treasure turns up in the most unlikely ing other sources of delight not less places. A book of legal decisions is sure and more enduring. If he applies perhaps the last mine one would exto novels an infallible test of the value plore for amusement; but John Burton of any book is it worth reading note- has told how a student consulting the book and pencil in hand?—he will be index of such a volume came upon a surprised how few, how very few works piece of fun of the first water. Observof fiction stand the proof. That this ing the words, "Best, Mr. Justice, his test is infallible rests on the well-known great mind," he turned up the referfact that pleasure consists not in the ence, prepared to admire an instance of present, which is fleeting, but in an- magnanimity on the bench, and found ticipation and retrospect. Memory is the passage, "Mr. Justice Best said he treacherous and requires refreshing, had a great mind to commit the witness and, unless the recollection of what is for perjury.” read is ensured by notes, reading is a task as fruitless as that of the daughters of Danaus; it serves to spend our limited capital in time without enriching the ever-diminishing store of future.

But, to show that no disrespect is intended to our clever writers of fiction as guides to the higher pleasure, these observations may be brought to a close by reference to an early example of Perhaps it will be expected that, after that very class of literature in which deprecating excessive devotion to fiction the same lesson is more dexterously -after suggesting that the human in- conveyed-namely, the fable of the tellect has passed out of that stage in dying husbandman who bade his sons which it may worthily be much occu- dig in the vineyard for a hidden treaspied with myth-I should point out ure. They did so— most diligently, some other course that may be steered and, as they thought, in vain; but in with more profit through the sea of lit-after seasons the reward came in the erature. The attempt to do so has been tenfold produce of the vines. the task of abler hands, but of all those

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HERBERT MAXWELL.

102

From Temple Bar. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

"SHE quarrelled with Pope and had something to do with vaccination," is said to have been the concise reply of a Girton girl appealed to for an account of the subject of this paper.

the club forbidding the election of an unknown beauty, Lady Mary was sent for, and dressed in her smartest attire, had her first intoxicating draught of flattery and admiration. Her health was drunk, her claim allowed, her name engraved, according to custom, on a

of the hour. She afterwards spoke of
this day as the happiest of her life, and
said that her "sensations amounted to
ecstasy."
994

But there are other things worth re-drinking-glass. She was the little queen membering of the remarkable woman, who so justly predicted that in forty years' time her letters would be as well known as those of Madame de Sévigné, and who, it has been suggested, also Flat and tame must have seemed resembled her in lavishing affection the return to ordinary routine under and wit on a somewhat unresponsive the direction of a "humdrum old govdaughter. erness," good and pious indeed, but, according to her pupil, quite without capacity for her task. This disadvantage Lady Mary soon set herself to remedy. After her mother's death she was much at West Dean in the care of her grand-. mother, Mrs. Pierrepont, whose good memory she inherited, and who, doubtless, encouraged her taste for study. West Dean was a "solemn house,"

Mary, eldest child of Evelyn Pierrepont and Lady Mary Fielding,2 was born in 1689. She was allied through both parents to the aristocracy of intellect as well as that of birth. Her paternal grandmother was one of the Evelyns of West Dean, Wiltshire; Villiers, the witty Duke of Buckingham, was her great-uncle; the mother of Beaumont, the dramatist, was a Pierrepont; Henry with all the country pomp of stately Fielding was Lady Mary's second

cousin.

8

She lost her mother when she was only four years old, a misfortune which undoubtedly had an injurious effect on her future life, as her imperious and impetuous character more than ordinarily needed gentle and sympathetic control; and her father (said by Lady Mary to have been faithfully though unconsciously portrayed by Richardson in Sir Thomas Grandison) treated his four children with more than "a little wholesome neglect."

On one occasion, however, Lord Kingston somewhat whimsically evinced his pride in "the flower of the flock." A man of fashion, and a prominent Whig, he was necessarily a member of the Kit-Cat Club. At a meeting called to choose "toasts for the year," he nominated his daughter, then seven years old, alleging that she was prettier than any other candidate. The rules of

1 Afterwards fifth Earl of Kingston; made Earl of Dorchester by Queen Anne in 1706, and Duke of Kingston by George I. in 1715.

2 Daughter of the third Earl of Denbigh. 3 Her cousin, John Evelyn, notes in his "Diary" her "prodigious memory."

terraces, wide bowling greens, and secluded avenues, where the precociously thoughtful child could brood undisturbed over the ponderous romances of which to the end of her days she cherished an affectionate remembrance. Fiction naturally first attracted her, but did not satisfy her long; and she says that when she spent five or six hours a day in her father's library, and was supposed to be reading poems and stories, she was, amongst other studies, beginning to teach herself Latin. At a later stage she acknowledges some assistance from Bishop Burnet, but he was not her first confidant.

One of her most intimate friends was Anne Wortley, a beautiful and intelligent girl, in whose apartments Lady Mary met her elder brother, Edward Wortley Montagu." She is said to have

4 Lord Kingston perpetuated the memory of her triumph by having her portrait painted for the club-room.

They were the children of Sidney Montagu (son of the first Earl of Sandwich) and the heiress of Sir Francis Wortley, whose name he took. Lady Bute described Mr. Montagu (her grandfather) as "a large rough-looking man in a large flapped hat, talking very loud and swearing boisterously at his

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