the sea the course of the river flowing by his feet, and see, wherever it goes-whether past Tours and Blois, Amboise and Orleans, or by Saumur and Nantes to lose itself in the ocean at Saint-Nazaire-a country peaceable, enlightened, contented, free. The very monks whom Rabelais denounces as vermin are commencing to disappear, and the educational millennium he anticipated, and the intellectual modes of life he mapped out, seem no longer beyond reach. So quietly and with so little preliminary announcement was the statue inaugurated, that I did not hear of the ceremony in time to be present. Last year, however, I stood upon the spot on which the statue now stands. Meantime, as nothing will wholly extinguish the rancour of British prudery and the ignorance of British Philistinism, there is little cause for surprise at finding in the pages of a London periodical a letter from a correspondent in which Rabelais is once more described as an "C obscene buffoon."

THE

HE publication of a complete edition of the works of Bret Harte proves that the most genial, original, and national of American humourists is far more prolific than has ordinarily been supposed. His poems and dramas alone occupy a handsome volume of four hundred and fifty pages. I should not draw attention to works which need no advertisement, were it not for the fact that the present edition contains a short personal and quasi-biographical preface of the author. In this Bret Harte disabuses the public of the idea that the invention of his poems and stories was attributable to the accidental success of a satirical poem entitled the "Heathen Chinee." A statement to this effect has been read by him during the present year, in a literary review of no mean importance. He takes, accordingly, the opportunity "to establish the chronology of the sketches, and incidentally to show that what are considered the 'happy accidents' of literature are very apt to be the results of quite logical and often prosaic processes." The most interesting portion of the preface is that, however, in which Bret Harte describes the reception afforded his immortal "Luck of Roaring Camp," when he sent it in to the Overland Monthly, a magazine of which he was at that time editor. "He had not yet received the proof-sheets, when he was suddenly summoned to the office of the publisher, whom he found standing, the picture of dismay and anxiety, with the proof before him. The indignation and stupefaction of the author can be well understood, when he was told that

The Complete Works of Bret Harte, arranged and revised by the author. Vols. I, and II. (Chatto & Windus).

the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper, that the proof-reader-a young lady had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless evidence of the manner in which the editor was imperilling the future of that enterprise." Further I dare not quote. Very strange, however, is it to hear that the story was at last published under a kind of protest, inasmuch as the author declared that he should take its non-insertion in the magazine as a proof of his unfitness for an editorial position which he would at once lay down. Nor until the warm recognition of the Eastern States of America, backed up by that of Europe, reached the West, was the story finally acquitted of the charges brought against it. In this instance the difficulty was attributable to Pharisaism and Pietism. It is strange, however, to learn that scarcely one of Bret Harte's stories of Western life found acceptance among those of whom and for whom it was written, until it came forward with the imprimatur of Eastern civilisation.

AM

MONG cosas de España are many things which I trust will, until their ultimate extinction, be confined to that melancholy peninsula, in which alone in Europe cruelty has been elevated into a religion. How deeply ingrained is that love of contemplating suffering which distinguishes the Spaniard, finds constant illustration. I thus hear of Spaniards having celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Inquisition, the existence of which most infamous of all human institutions may be said, in a fashion, to date from the 1st of June, 1480. On that day the Cortes then assembled at Toledo, on the suggestion of Cardinal Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza-backed up, it may be supposed, by Cardinal Ximenes, acting for Ferdinand and Isabella-decreed the formation of a Tribunal of Faith, for the purpose of punishing heretics. Here is indeed an event worthy of commemoration!. How completely saturated with blood-lust was the Spanish nation may be inferred when it is told that Lope de Vega, the most illustrious of Spanish dramatists, presided over an auto-da-fé in which a Jew was burned, and wrote his "La Fianza Satisfecha" for the express purpose of stimulating the public hostility to the Jews and so bringing about further persecution. In this atrocious play he represents the Jews as stealing a Christian child, and repeating upon it all the processes of the "Passion," from the scourging by thorns to the crucifixion, and even to the ultimate apotheosis.

SYLVANUS URBAN.

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER 1880.

QUEEN COPHETUA.

BY R. E. FRANCILLON.

CHAPTER XXVI,

Three Flavours of Folly: A Sour Thought, a Bitter Heart, and a Sweet Desire.

Three Songs of Sorrow: Will without Might, Love without Right, Day without Night.

Three Sayers of Sooth: A Dull Ear, a Sharp Eye, and a Rough Tongue.

WALTER

ALTER GRAY-as he called himself-had grasped at the opportunity which chance had given him of making Alan Reid his friend. Alan would never recognise, under the disguise of a false name, a man whom he had never seen, and who would be, as a matter of course, the very opposite of what he would imagine him to be. It would never come into his head that a greedy adventurer, fresh in the possession of a great estate, would be amusing himself, as an amateur, with the discomforts of war. Victor Waldron-to call him once more by his true name-had felt few emotions stronger than that wherewith, among the Bats, he had for the first time grasped in comradeship the hand of the man who would have refused the grasp had he known his comrade's name. He was claiming friendship and brotherhood on false pretences; but better on these than on none at all. It was intolerably infamous that Alan should go through life believing the man to be his unscrupulous enemy who would have given a hundred Coplestons to be openly his friend. After all, it was the false name that would represent the inward truth of the matter, since the true name belonged to a lie. Under a false name, and in a false guise, Alan would surely come to VOL, CCXLVII, NO. 1798.

CC

know him, and to see that he was incapable of the meanness and treachery with which he had been charged; for he believed in himself as thoroughly as a man can, and could not conceive that anybody who really knew him could fail to believe in him too. He was conscious, too, that the personal liking he had taken to Alan at first sight was quite sufficiently returned to make a good beginning. One can tell so much by the feel of a man's hand; one can even measure the degree, so long as one can keep the folly of reason from intruding. Victor felt that he and his cousin were made to be friends ; and, if only for his own sake, friends they must become. When that came to pass, he could say some day, "I am Victor Waldron, who robbed you of Copleston-what do you think of me now? and will you be so contemptibly and abjectly proud as to refuse to take an unbearable burden from the back of a Friend?"

The friendship had grown: the time was very near when Victor might think of claiming his reward. And then-but why tell the story of Alan's end over again? Helen herself could not feel Alan's death more bitterly than he. He began to feel as if there were a curse upon him, as if he were doomed to be the instrument of death as well as of ruin to all who bore the name of Reid. It is true that he once coveted his neighbour's land; but surely the punishment should have fallen upon the covetous man himself, and not upon his neighbour. Hatred is too weak a word for his feelings towards Copleston. To have seen a friend and comrade whom he had grown to love struck down by his side would have been shock enough at any time, without having to feel that it was his own hand which, by no means indirectly, had dealt the blow. Had he never come with Gideon Skull to Copleston in the hope of recalling to life a longburied claim, Alan Reid, instead of dying in Paris, would even now be living at Copleston, rich and happy. "Why are men always thinking of their rights instead of their duties?" thought he. "One's own rights always seem to mean somebody else's wrongs."

So he had not returned when the war was over, but had gone on travelling about, something in the spirit of a wandering Jew. He knew that he might as hopefully and as wisely contrive plans for flying from place to place as for helping Alan's mother and sister in despite of their pride. And even if he could, what fresh evil might he not bring down upon them-he, who had already robbed them of land, life, home, hope, brother, and son? Hatred would be their least return for all he could try to do. He could never have imagined a network of circumstances under which a man could be so utterly helpless to do right and justice as he was with regard to the

Reids. If they had been only commonplace people, with commonplace views about the inherent rightness of their own rights, nothing would have been more easy than to know what to do. They would have taken all Copleston because they wanted it, and there would have been an end. But these uncomfortable people would refuse the offer of a grain of its dust as an insult, if it came from him.

But now it seemed as if there were a destiny deeper than destiny, since almost the first day of his return to England had brought him into the presence of his friend's sister. He could not help being glad that caprice, or habit, or the general use of it among new friends, had let him retain his new name. Could it mean that friendship, above and outside circumstances, was possible between her also and Walter Gray, while Victor Waldron must still remain an enemy? It was not strange that she had not recognised him, though she had the advantage over her brother in having seen him twice, while Alan had never seen him at all. For when she had seen him, he had been on the first occasion frankly light-hearted, almost her play-fellow, in the church tower; on the second, they had been engaged in a duel, wherein she was not careful to study his face, but trying to crush his spirit, if he had one. There was no reason why she should look for an enemy and a coward in her brother's friend-for Victor Waldron least of all: and, as all the world knows, no eye sees what it does not look for. On both occasions, too, there had been the absence of beard and sunburn, which were the best reasons of all for failure to recognise him; while there is little distinctive individuality in foreign voices to English ears. He was not likely to repeat a single phrase to her now that he had ever said to her before. Nothere was no reason why Walter Gray should not become the friend of Helen Reid.

Yes, but there was, though! There was Gideon Skull.

How had that come to pass-that Helen Reid, in any shuffling of the cards of life, should be the wife of Gideon? It seemed the very wildest of mysteries: it felt to Victor like some horrible sort of profanation, though he could not, for the life of him, have told himself why. Alan, he knew, would have revolted at the idea of such a marriage. "Well-there is no accounting for what women do," he said to himself, with that every-day philosophy which so admirably accounts for everything by accounting for nothing. After all, there have been many much stranger matches in the world, so far as she was concerned. But that Gideon should have married for love alone that was the arch-mystery of the whole world.

Nothing was more natural than that he should drop in, during