that comes from them is simple, well-bred, unimaginative, destitute of ideas and emotions. And yet I know that these same men are capable of the most tenacious passions, the suddenest self-abandonment to overmastering impulse. It seems though their concentrated life in village homes had made them all of one piece, which, when it breaks or yields, splits irretrievably to fragments.

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I will tell some stories which prove that the Swiss peasants, though they look so stolid, have in them the stuff of tragedy. There was a lad in a valley called Schaufigg, not long ago, who loved and was betrothed to a girl in the Hinter Rheinthal below Splügen. She jilted him, having transferred her affections to another; and he went to take a formal farewell of his sweetheart in her home. Everything passed decorously so much so the girl's brother put his horse into the cart and drove the rejected lover with his own sister down to Thusis. The three had reached that pas. sage of the Via Mala where the Phine loses itself in a very deep, narrow gorge. It is called the "Verlosene Loch," and is spanned by a slender bridge thrown at right angles over the river. Here, as they were spinning merrily down-hill, the lad stood up in the cart, sprang to the parapet of the bridge, and dashed himself at one bound into the grim death of jagged rocks and churning waves below them. It was a stroke of imaginative fancy to commit suicide for love just at this spot. And now a second tale of desperate passion. A rich man in the Prättigau had two children, a daughter and a son. The daughter wheedled him into allowing her to marry some peasant, who was poor and an unequal match in social station. Then his son set his affections upon a girl equally ineligible. The father stormed; but the youth was true to his plighted troth. During a temporary absence of the son, his father contrived to send the girl off to America with a round sum of money. his return, after hearing what had happened, the lad said nothing, but went down to the Landquart water in the evening and drowned himself there.

On

And now a third tale. Last spring, in a village not three hours distant from Davos, lived a young man who was an orphan. He had inherited a considerable estate, and expected more from two uncles. Life, could he have managed it prudently, would prob

ably have made him the wealthiest farmer in the neighborhood; and he was, to boot, a stalwart fellow on whom nature had lavished all her gifts of health and comeliness. Unluckily, he loved a girl of whom his uncles disapproved as a match for such a youth of consequence. One Saturday evening, as the custom is here, he went to pay his addresses by stealth to this maiden of his choice, and returning early next morning, he was upbraided by his interfering uncles. I do not know what he replied; but certainly he made no scene to speak of. When the uncles left him, he unhooked his gun from the wooden panelling of the house-room, went out alone into the copse hard by, and put a bullet through his brain.

That is the sort of things of which these youngsters, with their heavy gait and scorn ful carriage, are capable of doing. The masks they wear for their faces are no index to the life that throbs within.

Well, I am digressing from Ilanz and the Ligia Grischia. After the concert there came the banquet, and after the banquet came the ball. About three in the morning, having smoked many pipes with friends in homespun, I retired to my wellearned rest and slept soundly, although the whole inn was resonant with fifes and violins, and stamping, shouting burschen. You should have seen the last dregs of the orgy, the petits crevés of Ilanz, when I came down to breakfast at eight. Some of them were still dancing.

Next day we took a sleigh and drove up the valley of Lungnez. Such a silent snow scene under the steady flooding sunshine! The track between wood and precipice was just broad enough for our runners till we came close to Villa. There the valley expands, yielding a vast prospect over the mountains-passes which lead to Splügen and to Olivone-a wilderness of craggy peaks and billowy snow-fields, all smoothed and softened with clear sunshine and blue shadows. No one can paint, no words can describe, that landscape. must be seen and then it will never be forgotten. A baronial family, De Mont, were lords of Villa in old days, and now they keep an inn there in one of their ancestral houses. Portraits of generals and ladies look down upon the casual guest, among emblazoned scutcheons with famous quarterings Scharenstein, Castelberg, Toggenburg — discernible by specialists

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who (like myself) love to trace a nation's history in its heraldries. Photographs of more recent De Monts, abroad in the world, have a modest place beneath these canvases upon the planks of Cembra-pine which form the panelling. It is by no means uncommon in this country to find the homes of people whose ancestors were counts or barons of the Empire, nobles of Spain and France, and whose descendants could bear such titles if they chose, turned into hos telries. I sometimes wonder what they think of American and English tourists. When I make inquiries about their former state, and show some knowledge of their family, it is always appreciated in the grave, dignified way these people of Graubünden have with them.

The chief attraction of Villa-letting alone the annals of Lungnez, of which I have not here the time to speak-is an old church, at Pleif, built on a buttress of the hills far up above the torrent. It occupies a station which would be singular in any land; and it commands a view of peaks, passes, glaciers, and precipices which even in Switzerland is rare. Once it was the only church in the vast upland region it surveys. The tolling of its bell brought stalwart Catholics from far and near, trooping under arms to join their forces with the men of Ilanz, Trons, and Dissentis, and then to march with flying flags on Chur. That was in the times when Graubünden struggled in religious strife between Catholics and Protestants, partisans of the French and Spanish sides. The building is large and of venerable antiquity. On its walls hangs a huge oil-paintingsurprising to find in such a place a picture, clearly by some Venetian artist, of the battle at Lepanto, just such a canvas as one sees in the Ducal Palace on the Lagoons. The history of this picture, and why it came to Pleif, seems to be forgotten; but we know that the Grisons in the sixteenth century were stout allies and servants of St. Mark's.

It was not the inside of the church at Pleif which attracted my notice, but the graveyard round it, irregularly shaped to suit the rocky station, girt with fernplumed walls, within which were planted ancient ash-trees. A circuit of gnarled, bent, twisted, broken ash-trees. In Westmoreland or Yorkshire they would not have had the same significance; but here, where all deciduous trees are scarce, where the

very pine-woods have been swept away by avalanches and the violence of armies, each massive bole told a peculiar story. I thought of the young men, whose athletic forms and faces like masks impressed my fancy, and something breathing from the leafless ashes spoke to me about them. Here was the source of their life's poetry; a poetry collected from deep daily communings with Nature in her shyest, most impressive moods; a poetry infused into their sense unconsciously; brought to a point and gathered into some supreme emotion by meetings with a girl in such a place as this-the hours of summer twilight, when the ash-trees are laden with leaves, and the mountains shrink away before the rising moon, and the torrent clamors in the gorge below, and the vast divine world expresses its meaning in one simple ineffaceable word of love. I seemed, as I sat upon the wall there in the snowy, sunny silence, to understand a little more about the force of passion and the external impassiveness of this folk, whom I dearly love. I felt why those three lads of whom I spoke had thrown their lives away for an emotion, breaking to pieces because the mainspring of their life was broken-that which moved them, for which they had grown up to manhood, through which the dominant influences of nature on their sensitive humanity had become manifest in an outburst of irreversible passion. Then I remembered how a friend of mine from Trius talked to me once about the first thoughts of love evoked in him, just in a place like this. It was on the top of a hill called Canaschàl, where there is a ruined castle and a prospect over both the valleys of the Rhine, and the blending of that mighty river's fountains as it flows toward Chur. was a boy of fifteen, my friend, when he saw the simple thing of which he told me at the age of twenty-three. A pair of lovers were seated on the cliffs of Canaschal-the lad and the girl both known to him-and he was lying in the bushes. It was the sight of their kisses which informed him what love was; and the way in which my carpenter-friend spoke of the experience seven years afterward made me conceive how the sublime scenery and solitudes of these mountains may enter into the soul of lads who have nothing to show the world but masks for faces.

He

I give this here for what it is worth.

We have heard much of the Swiss in foreign service dying of home-sickness at the sound of the "Ranz des Vaches." We have also learned the proverb, "Pas d'argent, pas de Suisse." I think that the education of young men in these Siren mountains-far more Siren than the mermaids of Sorrento or Baiae, to any one who once has felt the spirit of the Alpscombined with their poverty, their need of making money to set up house with, accounts for the peculiar impression which they make on town-bred foreigners, and for their otherwise inexplicable habit of wedding the uncomely daughters of the land.

I will not linger over our drive back from Ilanz. One sleigh-journey is like another, except for the places one stops at, the postilions one talks to, the old wooden rooms one drinks in, the friends one visits on the way, and the varieties of the grand scenery one sweeps through.

It has been my constant habit for many years to do a considerable amount of hard study while travelling. It would be difficult to say how many heavy German and Italian books on history, biography, and criticism, how many volumes of Greek poets, and what a library of French and English authors, have been slowly perused by me in railway stations, trains, steamers, wayside inns, and Alpine châlets. I enjoy nothing more than to sit in a bar-room among peasants, carters, and postilions, smoking, with a glass of wine beside me, and a stiff work on one of the subjects I am bound to get up. The contrast between the surroundings and the study adds zest to the latter, and when I am tired of reading I can lay my book down and chat with folk whom I have been half-consciously observing.

On this short trip I had taken a remarkable essay, entitled La Critique scientifique, by a young and promising French author -now, alas! no more-M. Emile Hennequin. The writer tries to establish a new method of criticism upon a scientific basis, distingished from the aesthetical and literary methods. He does not aim at appreciating the merit of works of art, or of the means employed in their production, or of the work itself in its essence, but always in its relations. He regards art as the index to the psychological characteristics of those who produce it, and of those whom it interests and attracts. His method of

criticism may be defined as the science of the work of art regarded as a sign. The development of these ideas in a lengthy and patient analytical investigation taxes the reader's attention pretty severely, for some of Hennequin's views are decidedly audacious, and require to be examined with caution. Well, I had reached Chur on my homeward route, and was spending the evening in the little hotel I frequent there. It has a long, low, narrow room with five latticed windows, and an old stove of green tiles, for its stube, or place of public resort. Here I went to smoke and read M. Hennequin's book on criticism. Three diligence conductors and a postilion, excellent people and my very good friends, were in a corner by the stove, playing a game of yass; and after exchanging the usual questions with these acquaintances, I took my seat near them and began to study. About ten o'clock they left, and I was alone. I had reached the point in Hennequin's exposition of what he somewhat awkwardly termed esthopsychologie, which is concerned with the theory of national literature taken as a sign of national character. This absorbed my attention, and nearly an hour must have passed when I was suddenly disturbed by the noisy entrance of seven hulking fellows in heavy great-coats, with, strange to say, eight bright green crowns upon their heads instead of hats. I write eight advisedly, for one of them wore two wreaths, of oak and bay respectively.

In a moment I perceived that a gymnastic performance, or Turnfest, must have taken place; for I recognized two of the men whom I knew to be famous athletes. They came up, shook hands, introduced to me their comrades, and invited me to drink a double-litre of Valtelline wine. I accepted with alacrity, shut up my treatise upon criticism, and sat down to the long central table. Meanwhile, the gymnasts had thrown off their great-coats, and stood displayed in a costume not very far removed from nudity. They had gained their crowns, they told me, that evening at an extraordinary meeting of the associated Turnvereins, or gymnastic clubs of the canton. It was the oddest thing in the world to sit smoking in a dimly-lighted, panelled tap-room with seven such companions. They were all of them strapping bachelors between twenty and twenty five years of age; colossally broad in the chest

and shoulders, tight in the reins, set massily upon huge thighs and swelling calves; wrestlers, boxers, stone-lifters and quoitthrowers. Their short, bull-throats supported small heads, closely clipped, with bruised ears and great big-featured faces, over which the wreaths of bright, green, artificial foliage bristled. I have said that the most striking thing, to my mind, about the majority of young faces in Graubünden is that they resemble masks, upon which character and experience have delved no lines, and which stare out in stolid inscrutability. These men illustrated the observation. Two of them had masks of wax, smooth, freshly-colored, joining on to dark, cropped hair. The masks of three seemed to be moulded out of gray putty, which had hardened without cracking. The sixth mask was of sculptured sandstone, and the seventh of exquisitely chiselled alabaster. I seemed to be sitting in a dream among vitalized statues of the later emperors, executed in the decadence of art, with no grasp on individual character, but with a certain reminiscence of the grand style of portraiture. Commodus, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, the three Gordians, and Pertinax might have been drinking there beside me in the pothouse. The attitudes assumed by these

big fellows, stripped to their sleeveless jerseys and tight-fitting flannel breeches, strengthened the illusion. I felt as though we were waiting there for slaves, who should anoint their hair with unguents, gild their wreaths, enwrap them in the paludament, and attend them to receive the shouts of "Ave Imperator' from a band of gladiators or the legionaries of the Gallic army. When they rose to seek another tavern, I turned, half-asleep, into my bed. There the anarchy of dreams continued that impression of resuscitated statues-vivified effigies of emperors, who long ago perished by the dagger or in battle, and whose lineaments the craft of a declining civilization has preserved for us in forms which caricature the grace and strength of classic sculpture.

Next day I found myself at Davos Platz, beginning my work again upon accumulated proofs of Gozzi and the impossible problem of style.

This is literally a page of my life, a page extracted and expanded from my desk-diary. I have done what I promised the Editor of the Fortnightly Review. In conclusion, however, I must remark that I do not altogether like this novel idea of making a man interview himself.-Fortnightly Review.

THE secret of Mr. Tupper's success in selling his only very successful work was, we believe, only this,-that the less educated middle class is far less thoughtful than it appears to be. A contributor, whom we know to have an unusually extensive and practical experience of the subject, recently explained in our columns one of the literary needs of shop-girls, factorygirls, and other young women in their mental condition. A book to attract them must be what critics would call a poor book, that is, a book full of well-worn thoughts, strung together in the most ordinary manner, with commonplace incidents, and reflections of the regular copybook kind. Anything which is not simple puzzles and slightly worries them; anything allusive is unintelligible to them; while anything original creates in them the faint irritation with which a certain class of mind receives a joke, and especially a

joke implying something of a jeer. They resent surprise as we should resent a new taste in the loaf. Fifty years ago, minds in the condition of these shop-girls were in the majority among the middle class, and even now they are more numerous than is suspected, no modern art having been so successfully and generally acquired as that of concealing your mental backwardness; and it was their possessors who bought, and who, when they happen not to be aware that their betters ridicule the book, still buy "Proverbial Philosophy. Scores of thousands, for example, of Amorican farmers' wives bought it, and so did the uncultivated but fairly prosperous wives of the well-to-do tradesmen in English country towns, people with many duties, usually strictly performed, much observation of a kind upon the facts of life, but no power of independent thinking or desire for it. One of the most suc

cessful business men men we have known kept the book in his desk, and whenever work was slack read it, as he said, to recover his mind. Such people genuinely admire the book, and until the storm of contempt nous criticism grew as unbearable as the ridicule of the clergy man is to superstitious country-folk, they expressed their admiration aloud. There is a theory now prevalent that this admiration was never genuine, that the book was, by pure accident, accepted as a proper and harmless book, and that it was only purchased to be given away to growing girls; but we cannot accept that theory. The present writer saw it forty years ago on too many tables, and heard too many angry declarations that it was an admirable book, to believe that explanation, even if it were not contradicted by two admitted facts. The American farmers, who give nothing away, were its largest purchasers, and its reception modified, though perhaps only in the sense of exaggeration, the whole character of its author. He was probably by nature a vain man, or rather, one full of the simple confidence in himself which the book itself reveals; but from the date of its success, he became immovably convinced that he was a great author. He was by no means a fool, and he did not deduce this judg ment from its sale merely-as a still more illustrious and successful author is said to do-but from the reams of letters, all lau

datory and some worshipping, which reached him from all parts of the Englishspeaking world, and from men as well as women. His correspondents were neither joking nor seeking to curry favor; they genuinely and heartily enjoyed his work, and it is not difficult to perceive why they did so. The book is, if viewed through a proper medium, a great deal better than critics who hunt in books for force or originality, or instruction of some sort, can bring themselves to allow. There is no poetry in it, or depth, or height, or strength of any kind. But then, there are plenty of ordinary thoughts, usually true thoughts, platitudes in fact, expressed in the most intelligible English, with words so arranged that if you adopt the sing-song in which the half-educated usually read aloud, the sentences acquire a certain slow and monotonous cadence, which must be pleasant to many ears, or all parish clerks of the elder kind-passed now, Heaven be thanked into the Ewigkeit-and many NEW SERIES.-VOL. LI., No. 1.

country clergymen would not have read the Psalms as they used to do. We take this half-page, for example, absolutely at random, as the one at which a new copy opened :

"For all things leave their track in the mind; and the glass of the mind is faithful. Seest thou much mirth upon the cheek? there is then little exercise of virtue: For he that looketh on the world, cannot be glad and good :

Seest thou much gravity in the eye? be not assured of finding wisdom;

For she hath too great praise, not to get many mimics.

There is a grave-faced folly; and verily, a laughter-loving wisdom;

And what, if surface judges account it vain frivolity?

There is indeed an evil in excess, and a field may lie fallow too long;

Yet merriment is often as a froth, that mantleth on the strong mind:

And note thou this for a verity,-the subtlest thinker when alone,

From ease of thoughts unbent, will laugh the loudest with his fellows :

And well is the loveliness of wisdom mirrored in a cheerful countenance, Justly the deepest pools are proved by dim

pling eddies;

For that, a true philosophy commandeth an innocent life,

And the unguilty spirit is lighter than a linnet's heart :

Yea, there is no cosmetic like a holy con. science;

The eye is bright with trust, the cheek bloomed over with affection,

The brow unwrinkled by a care, and the lip triumphant in its gladness.'

That will seem to the educated almost childish, but it is quite intelligible-with a reserve about the false use of the word "cosmetic"--it is perfectly true, and the idea it conveys is one greatly to be commended. These were the very qualities the buyers of "Proverbial Philosophy" wished for, it may be from ignorance and vacancy of mind, as our contributor believes of the shop-girls; or it may be, as we should be inclined to think, from these and from a certain lazy-mindedness such as tempts the educated on a holiday to read over again stories and books of reflection which they know already by heart. The buyers wished for commonplaceness, if only to see that an author, a man who could get his words into print, thought just the same thoughts as they did, and expressed them in just the same didactic, not to say pompous, way. They were quite proud to understand him so well

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