portico brings the cormorants and the falcons to the same spot in the same precipice, year after year, in the Culver Cliffs. There is a certain vaulted niche, in which the peregrine falcons sleep, winter and summer, in the white wall of the precipice, and every night at dusk the cormorants fly in to sleep on their special shelves and pedestals on another portion of the cliff. They come to these few square yards of perpendicular chalk, three hundred feet above the surge, as constantly as the fishermen return to their cottages at the Foreland. They regard this sleeping place as their fixed and certain home, where, safe from gun, cragsman or cliff-fox, they can sleep till sunrise sends them hungry to their business of fishing. But of all animal sleeping places, caves and caverns are most remarkable for ancient and distinguished habitation. Like prehistoric man, the animals alike of past ages and of the present hour have made caves their bedrooms, and that they regard these in the light of home is almost certain, for they return to die there. Whether the last English rhi. noceros slept in the Derbyshire cave where his bones were found can only be matter of conjecture. But caves are the natural sleeping places of nearly all nocturnal creatures, which need by day protection from enemies, and from the disturbing light. Hollow trees serve the smaller creatures. But the great caves, especially those of the tropical forest, whether on the Orinoco, or in Central America, or the Indian Archipelago, or in prehistoric Kentucky, have been the sleeping places of millions of creatures from the remotest ages of the earth. There sleep the legions of the bats; there the "dragons" and monsters of old dreamed evil dreams after undigested surfeits of marsupial prey or of prehistoric fish from vanished seas; and there the wolf, the bear, the panther

and the giant snake still sleep away the hours of day.

Other animals, in place of seeking and maintaining a private bedroom, prefer to sleep together in companies. Aristotle's remark that "carefulness is least in that which is common to most" holds good of these communal sleeping places. Even clever creatures like pigs and domestic ducks have no "home" and no permanent sleeping quarters. Like the Australian black who, when presented with a house, pointed out the peculiar advantages offered by square buildings, because they always offered a wall to sleep against, outside, whichever way the wind blew, they have to shift their quarters according to the weather. With these limitations, pigs are extremely clever in choosing sleeping quarters. The wave of heat during the second week of August was preceded by two days of very low temperature and rain. In a row of model pigstys, during these cold days, nothing was visible but a large, flat heap of straw in each. This straw was "stuffed" with little pigs, all lying like sardines in a box, keeping each other warm, and perfectly invisible, with the straw for a blanket. Then came the heat, and some hundred swine were let loose in a paddock. By noon the whole herd were lying in the shadow of a large oak, every pig being fast asleep, close together in the shade circle. In another meadow two flocks of Aylesbury ducks were also fast asleep in the grass, in the shadow of the oaks. But social animals, which live in herds and often move considerable distances in search of their daily food, are known to resort to fixed sleeping places on occasion. Among the wildest and least accessible creatures of the Old World are the wild sheep. Hunters in the Atlas Mountains commonly find chambers in

The Spectator.

the rocks which the aoudads, or Barbary wild sheep, use to sleep in. Some are occupied by a single ram, others are used by small herds of five or six, or an old sheep with her lamb. The ovine scent, so strong near domestic sheepfolds, always clings to these rock chambers of the wild sheep. The "big horn" of the Rocky Mountains is also found in holes in the hills, but these are believed to be made by the sheep eating salt-impregnated clay, until they burrow into the hill. They may be "bolted" from these holes like rabbits. Even park deer sometimes occupy bedrooms. In one old deer park in Suffolk some of the giant trees show hollow, half-decayed roots above ground, like miniature caves. Into these the young deer used to creep in hot weather, when the flies were troublesome, and lie hidden and cool.

Fish, which not only need sleep like other creatures, but yawn when drowsy, and exhibit quite recognizable signs of somnolence, sometimes seek a quiet chamber to slumber in. This is obvious to anyone who will watch the behavior of certain rock-haunting species at any good aquarium. The “lumpsuckers," conger-eels and rock-fish will retire into a cave in the grotto provided for them, and there go fast asleep; though as their eyes are open their "exposition of sleep" is only proved by the absence of movement, and neglect of any food which comes in their reach. Their comparative safety from attack when asleep in open water may be due to the sensitiveness of their bodies to any movement in the water. But pike are easily snared when asleep, probably because, being the tyrants of the waters themselves, they have less of the "sleeping senses" possessed by most animals which go in fear of their lives from hereditary enemies.

Dickens is a writer so singular, or rather so unique, that we always welcome a sincere and careful commentary on this popular master. Such a commentary, of the highest interest, is offered by Mr. George Gissing in his "Charles Dickens" (Blackie & Son). One would be glad to see this excellent volume published uniform with a new set of Dickens's works. Mr. Gissing, as far as I have read his own novels, is a "realist;" that is, one of the "idealists" who select and present the more disagreeable facts of life. Every artist, whether he knows it or not, is obliged to be an idealist. He has his theory of life as a whole, his idea, and he sets it forth in a set of selected observations. Nobody can display the whole of life in a work of art, "nobody can compete with life." Everybody must select, and he selects in accordance with his temperament, his theory, and his idea of the nature and limits of his art. Mr. Gissing, I believe, mainly selects unhappy things, and pushes to unhappy conclusions. Dickens. with plenty of squalid fact, adds abundance of cheerful details. He converts naughty people as rapidly as Shakespeare does, has a Shakespearian tolerance of rogues-Mr. Jingle or Parolesand of two possible conclusions prefers the less probable, the "happy ending." His conventions are not Mr. Gissing's conventions; his idealism is not Mr. Gissing's idealism.

Thus Bill Sikes, Nancy, the Dodger, do not offend the modest ear in their language. They never employ those words, mostly beginning with B or D, into which an uneducated love of emphasis commonly hurries the unrefined. Perhaps a realist would crowd his pages with the naughty words of Nancy and the Dodger. This expedient the

realist would call "art." But it would be no more "art" than is real water, or a real cab, or the real horses of "Cyrano" on the stage. We know very well what kind of terms Mr. Sikes actually employed. They may be left, as by Dickens, to our memory or fancy. An appendix full of oaths and obscenities au naturel might be added, though rather a luxury than a necessity.

One might have expected Mr. Gissing to be severe, in the modern way, on Dickens's failings. How cowardly not to make Mr. Sikes swear, "just like hisself!" How foolish that pandering to public frivolity which makes Mr. Micawber prosper and punishes Mr. Pecksniff beyond the probable! But Mr. Gissing is not severe. He sees, but declines to chastise with scorn, these failings of the master. He notes the tippling of the Pickwickians; very wrong, of course, but to be taken in a sense purely Pickwickian. I do not believe that people ever drank so much, and with such impunity. Our people were not so abandoned to milk punch in the 'Thirties. The liquor was as symbolical as anything in Maeterlinck. To be sure, it was a survival of our alcoholic traditions-perhaps a legacy of the Restoration.

Mr. Gissing even defends the "reality" of Dickens's characters. Here one can hardly follow him, or not always. Where there is "unreality" Mr. Gissing thinks that it arises mainly "from necessities of plot." I would rather attribute it to the essentially fantastic character of Dickens's imagination. Can Mr. Gissing defend the naturalness Quilp? Dickens invented fantasies, and sought for them in nature. He discovered the real Mr. Venus when he was some way into "Our Mutual Friend," and he simply inserted Venus

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just because he was fantastic. So he inserted Mrs. Gamp, an after-thought, into "Chuzzlewit." Mr. Gissing returns lovingly to our dear Sairey, that really Shakespearian masterpiece, whom Aristotle would have applauded. Voilà enfin de la vraie comédie! In real life we shrink from Sairey, and condemn her. In fiction we take her to our bosoms. For art is not life, and a "realistic" Sairey, or Squeers, would not be art, any more than is real water on the stage. "In what sense," asks Mr. Gissing, "can this figure in literature be called a copy of the human original?" Why, in the only sense-in the sense of art. The Gamp of actual existence, reflected in art, is Sairey. Art is not life, but a reflection of life under certain pleasurable conditions. Nature never made a Sairey, any more than she ever made a Clytemnestra or a Lady Macbeth. But she strove towards these ends; and art-in the forms of Dickens, Eschylus and Shakespeare— helped her to her aim. Mr. Gissing will find the root of the matter in Mr. Butcher's work on "Aristotle's Theory of Fine Art," including a translation of the "Poetics." Sairey, says Mr. Gissing, is "a sublimation of the essence of Gamp." In the same way Mause Headrigg is a sublimation of the essence of the Covenanting female. This sublimation is precisely what Aristotle demanded from art. Alice Marlow, on the other hand, in "Little Dorrit," is pure fantasy animated with a "moral purpose," with which art, as Aristotle justly argues, has nothing to do. In creating Miss Marlow, Dickens is the moral fantaisiste; in creating Mrs. Gamp he is the artist of genius.

Mr. Gissing chooses Mr. Pecksniff as Dickens's "finest satiric portrait." I confess that, to me, Mr. Pecksniff does not seem to be a "portrait" at all. I don't know what he is, except a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Nobody was ever like Mr. Pecksniff, and

it was a shame to punish him with ferocity, as if he had been a practicable malefactor.

Mr. Gissing is copious on Dickens's many types of the shrew; he takes them more seriously than did the master, and would convert them, not in Dickens's but in Orlick's manner. Perhaps, when married, they were kittens; they grow up into cats, with claws. The distinction is well taken in an epigram by Mr. James Boswell of Auchinleck.

About Dickens's boys

Mr. Gissing says little, but they are among his best things. Of course I do not reckon Paul Dombey as a boy. Bailey Junior, Pip, David, Traddles, Trab's boy, Young Herbert Pocket, these and others, such as young Master Jellyby at a very early age, when he beat the people who rescued him from the area railings, these really are broths of boys.

As to Dickens regarded as a constructor, as a story-teller, Mr. Gissing is not too severe. "Obviously he sat down with only the vaguest scheme." Too obviously he did. Then his work left him month by month-an impossible system. New ideas occurred; these demanded modifications in what had gone before; but that was already printed, and of the past-not to be recalled, not to be altered. "A great situation must be led up to by careful and skilful foresight in character and event, precisely where his resources always failed him. . . . Demand from him a contrived story, and he yields at once to the very rank and file of novelists." Occasionally he had laid out a scheme, like the fall of the crumbling house in the rather tedious "Little Dorrit," which Mr. Gissing defends. But he had to turn out some twenty-four "numbers;" his initial scheme had not stuff enough to fill the space; he poured into the mould any and all extraneous ideas that crossed his mind, and the result was an amor

how unique, how rich his best is, nobody has shown better than Mr. Gissing, from whom, à priori, we had expected a different kind of verdict. "This thing" (genius) "cometh not by prayer and fasting, nor by any amount of thinking about art. You have it, or you have it not," says Mr. Gissing, in words of gold. But suppose that "you have it" (which is to the last degree improbable), then by taking example from Dickens you can make more of it. His private circumstances and character hurried him into a maze of "engagements." He was caught into the wheels of the commercial machine. He had to work far too hard and far too fast, and to the injury of his art; for Dickens, as for Sir Walter, "there was no rest but in the woollen." you "have it," oh, young novelist, learn betimes not to be in a hurry. Now that Mr. Gissing has treated so excellently of Dickens, one hopes that he will go on to Thackeray. And why not to Fielding and Scott? examining them, as here, in their relations to social evolution. But it may be cruel to suggest such an invasion of a novelist's time.

Andrew Lang.

If

questions, "the greatest trouble is taken to ensure that every pupil shall be taught the very best kind of manners. Not only are lectures given daily on deportment and the art of polite conversation, but we see that the principles laid down are carried out even in play-time. In old days the conversation of boys while playing cricket or football used to be disgracefully crude and unpolished, but if you