and so passing on to the horse of recent times. Or, to take another group, to compare that strange mermaid of the past (Halitherium) with its gigantic sister-form from Behring's Island (Rhytina borealis) which was last seen alive in 1742, and both with the Dugong and Manatee that still survive. The combinations that suggest themselves are almost endless; but perhaps the most instructive of all would be some generalized form out of which specialized animals were developed, which might be exhibited in their various stages of progressive growth from the most ancient

epochs to the present. And with regard to the recent forms selected for comparison-for, of course, in all but the largest museums there must be a very careful selection made-we would illustrate them in the most complete manner possible; stuffed skin, mounted skeleton, organs in spirit, maps to show their geographical distribution, and brief printed descriptions appended to each group. Then we should have succeeded in making the stone speak -not out of the wall, but out of the cliff, and the proverbial dry bones would be dry no longer.— Saturday Review.

It is not many weeks since one of the most fascinating of all the writers who have ever set themselves to describe the sights, sounds, and occupations, the "Works and Days" of the English country-side was removed from us by death. The remarkable merits of Mr. Richard Jefferies, both as an observer of Nature and as a literary artist, have received many tributes since his decease. He has been praised, in fact, like probitas in the well-known line of Juvenal, and unhappily it would seem with much the same result. Mr. Jefferies died, it will be remembered, in very straitened circumstances, and left a widow and family so ill provided for that his friends were obliged to make an appeal to the public on their behalf. It is melancholy to think that a laborer of such rare excellence in a field so sparsely occupied should have been thus, apparently at any rate, deemed unworthy of his hire. No doubt it would be wrong to treat this sad business as exclusively a case of public neglect. The long ill ness which preceded Mr. Jefferies's death must have progressively diminished, and toward the end, may have entirely arrested his money-earning powers; and simple as appears to have been his manner of life. it is not surprising if, at his comparatively early age, he should have been unable to lay by anything out of an income derived mainly, it is to be supposed, from his contribu

tions to the periodical press. Perhaps, too, the expression "public neglect is not applicable with justice to the lot of any writer who can find a ready and fairly remunerative market for what he writes, whatever be the particular quarter in which that market has to be sought. The world of readers may decline to buy a writer's books, or to buy them in sufficient numbers to enable him to live; but if they hear him gladly in the daily or weekly press, as they often do-and it would be a bad lookout for many authors if they did not-his friends may, perhaps, be considered ungrateful or unreasonable if they complain of his being "neglected." What right, it may be asked of them, has a man to insist on being read in that form of publication which takes its place (as a rule) on the library shelves instead of in that form which goes (as a rule) into the wastepaper basket? If there is not enough demand for his books to make his fortune, let him thank his stars that there is enough demand for his "pot-boilers" to ensure the boiling of the pot. At the worst he will be better off than those writers whose whole time is occupied on what are called "monumental works," perhaps with some allusion to the posthumnous character of the only fame that is to be expected from them-works which may possibly be read with admiration a hundred years hence, but the sale of which will not buy their authors bread

and cheese to-day. Such men are no doubt living among us at this moment, though not, I fancy, in such numbers as we have been recently asked to believe, and many, perhaps most of them, even if they could spare the time for the production of ephemeral literature, have not the self-adaptive faculty necessary to enable them to produce it of the quality which its light-minded patrons desire. Mr. Jefferies, it might be said by the kind of objector I am imagining, was unfortunate in the failure of his health, and in his early death; but he cannot be said to have been "neglected," merely because, though a wellknown, fairly-well remunerated, and, in one sense, popular writer, his books did not command a large enough sale to support him during enforced cessation of work, and to provide for his family after his death.

Looking at the matter from this hard common-sense point of view, it would no doubt be difficult to deny the justice of objections like these. At the same time it is equally difficult to restrain an emotion of that ancient and futile discontent which Coleridge rebukes in his "Complaint and Reproof." It is not so much, one cannot help feeling, that a writer like Mr. Jefferies does not "obtain that which he merits," or which we deem him to merit; but that others who seem to us to merit so much less than he did should obtain so much more. It is eminently natural, however economically unreasonable, to think that the literature which gives the most lasting pleasure to the greatest number of readers ought to bring, if not the largest, at any rate the steadiest and most lasting remuneration to its producers. If the proceeds of a single lucky hit with a shilling dreadful," which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the dustheap, may occasionally enrich its author with the capital of a modest income, is it not hard that no such reward should ever be received for those volumes which no reader who appreciates them at all would ever think of throwing away? If the thrilling story which you cannot put down till you have finished it" (but which when you have put it down you will assuredly never take up again) may prove a gold mine to its author, is it fair that the man whose

book, though you can indeed lay it down before you have finished it, can be taken up again with renewed delight a hundred and a thousand times, should almost want for bread?

These are old questions and as idle as they are old. They may be asked, of course, with as much point and as little profit in connection with plenty of other good literary work besides that of Mr. Jefferies. If in his case they appear to deserve a more sympathetic answer than they usually meet with from the "practical man, it is because his particular kind of good literary work is mocked, in this day of shams, with a semblance of popularity which it does not really profess. The English public, outside the coteries of culture, does not pretend to care for poetry except in "selections," or for philosophy or science except in primers, or for history in any larger doses than can be contained in manuals of two hundred pages foolscap octavo, or for æsthetics in any other form than that which best exhibits the eloquence of the critic under color of describing the qualities of a work of art. But hardly any one, however great or however slight his pretensions to culture, will admit indifference to Nature, and to her world of living things, if not perhaps as they present themselves to the scientific mind, at any rate as they appear to the lovingly observant eye. There are comparatively few people in these days who would plead guilty to that inveterate Cockneyism of which many a man, by no means assignable to the category of the club-fogey, would have boldly boasted a generation ago. The sweet shady side of Pall Mall has still, perhaps, its votaries, who prefer it to any other spot in the world; but unless they are very old and hardened in their defiance of modern tastes, they keep their devotion a secret. As for the others, it is "the thing" to profess enthusiasm for "the country;" and it would shock them to be out of the mode. These are they or rather these are some of them, for women here, as elsewhere, are more resolutely "in the fashion" than men-who are accustomed to fill the heated air of the drawing-room, to which nothing but their own wishes brings them in mid-July, with romantic aspirations for those woods and fields

from which nothing but their own wishes keeps them. About as genuinely rustic as china shepherdesses, they add an exasperating touch to their imposture by their selection of the confidant of their imaginary regrets, pouring out perhaps their elegant lamentations into the ear of some unfortunate man who is chained to his laboring oar in the great city, and who, if he were master of his own movements, would be far enough away from it in a few hours. It is, I say, because so many people nowadays pretend to a passionate affection for Mr. Jefferies's subject, that one was apt at first to be more than ordinarily surprised at what now appears to have been the comparatively limited circulation of Mr. Jefferies's works. It is now clear that an immense proportion of the professed admirers of "those sweet things, don't you know, The Gamekeeper at Home,' and Wild Life in a Southern County, had been content to read them as they came out" in their evening paper, along with the "This day's proceedings" of the latest sensational trial, and thereafter to hand them over to the Promethean housemaid. In most cases, indeed, it may be fairly assumed that even this transitory kind of interest in these unique productions was not due to that peculiar quality of them which so endears them to the true lover of the country. They have much to say, as their titles indicate, not only about the fields and woods, but about the creatures that people them; and there are a large number of worthy persons languidly interested in what used to be called "natural history," who imagine that to like to read about the habits of the lower animals, who have all of them their "place in the country," and nowhere else, is the same thing as being fond of the country for its own sake. I need hardly say that it is nothing of the kind, and that a man is no more entitled by this taste to boast himself a lover of the country, than he would be by a fondness for the Zoological Gardens.

Of the real meaning and the real charm of "The Gamekeeper" and "Wild Life" it appears to me that the class of readers I am speaking of have never got so much as an inkling. To make anything of these books than mere

collections of "Stories about Animals" or " Wonders of the Woods," or, at any rate, to get their full value out of them, and to recognize them as books to be kept by us, and read again and again, as we keep and read, or are supposed to keep and read, the works of our favorite poets, it is necessary that the reader should study them in that peculiar posture of the mind and will which, as I shall endeavor to show hereafter, is the sole, the indispensable, condition of finding an enduring charm in the country. And though it is, I know, the fashion to assume that the country has more charms for us of these days than it had for our fathers, I have no doubt whatever, for my own part, that, in spite of certain superficial and delusive phenomena which seem to favor this assumption, the very contrary is the truth. Indeed, I should have been prepared to say, were it not for the aforesaid phenomena, that it was the self-evident truth. Surely the contention that the love of the country is increasing at a time when the drift of migration from the rural districts to the large towns is assuming the proportions of an economical danger, must be admitted to partake of the nature of a paradox. Nor does it seem antecedently very probable that a growing desire for the repose and monotony of country life should concur with a progressive intensification of that feverish thirst for excitement and novelty which marks our age, except, indeed, in the sense in which a growing desire for cooling mineral waters is observed to coincide with an increasing addiction to intoxicating liquors. No penetrating observer, however, would adduce this last coincidence as proof of the progress of temperance; and the multiplication of "country cottages,' "bungalow" settlements, and "villas standing in their own park-like grounds," is a fact of a precisely analogous bearing on the question with which it is usual to connect it. The rush of townsmen into the country is not the sign of any genuine or settled longing for repose: rather it is a new and melancholy symptom of modern unrest. It is not quiet which is sought, but distraction; the quest is for novelty, which is itself one of the most potent sources of excitement; and the appetite, in this

instance at any rate, is very quickly satisfied. Let those who are curious on that point consult any provincial or suburban house-agent in a sufficiently large way of business, and ascertain from him what is the average rate of rapidity at which these residences change hands. The statistics which he will get can hardly fail to convince him that all over the rural environs of London, out to a radius of twenty miles or so, a perpetual process of disenchantment is going on in the minds of emigrants from the metropolis; that these districts are continually receiving the influx of a stream of restless townspeople who think they long for a life of repose and quiet, and are continually sending back again an efflux of bored suburbani, who have found that all they really wanted was a "little change.

This rapid process of satiation among the particular class to which I refer, is a phenomenon for which the wise observer would have been prepared; he would have anticipated it from the very fact that these immigrants into the country are so fastidious about the kind of neighborhood which they select for their rural retreat-so exigent in the matter of "picturesque surroundings." We shall do well, as a rule, to distrust his genuine love of the country who has much to say about "scenery;" for in all probability the root of the matter is not in him. If such an one stakes much upon his supposed predilection for this or that particular spot, disappointment is assuredly in store for him. He has yet to master the saving truth that the true pleasure of the country-the only pleasure that survives the excitement of novelty is not an affair of the æsthetic sensibilities but of the contemplative faculty. It is not the glow and radiance of an emotion-for emotions are of their very nature transitory-it is the equable atmosphere of a permanent mental state. The author of Endymion has much to answer for in having penned the most often quoted of its lines. In declaring -or declaring without the necessary qualification-that "a thing of beauty is a joy forever," he incurred a very serious responsibility. The truth which the utterance contains is not to be found in the meaning which lies upon its surface, and Keats ought to have foreseen

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that many persons, including some of the highest respectability, would put the superficial construction on it, and, upon the faith of such construction, would take villas 'standing in their own park-like grounds," on three years' agreements, perhaps even on twenty-one year leases determinable at seven or fourteen years at the option of the tenant. He should have appended a footnote to the first line of Endymion-it might have checked the not too even flow of the verse to have introduced it into the text -to the effect that though "a thing of beauty is a joy forever," it is not so to the same man at all times. Its potentiality of imparting joy to mankind at large, or even, with reservations, to the same man, is doubtless perpetual in the strictest sense; but its joy in actuality is perpetual only in the sense of being perpetually recurrent, not in that of being indefinitely continuous.* If we fancy that it is continuous it is only because we so rarely test the question by experiment. The Grecian Urn of which Keats sang, be it real or imaginary, was a thing of beauty; his own ode to it is a thing of surpassing beauty. But if he had lived in the perpetual contemplation of this urn and of nothing else, would his joy in it have been perpetual ? If the lovers of his matchless ode were to pass their lives in reading it and nothing else, would their joy in it be perpetual? I greatly fear that Satiety-that skeleton at every feast of the emotions, be the fare never so ambrosial-would at last assert its claims. A "joy forever,' is, indeed, except in the above defined sense of a "potentiality of joy," a contradiction in terms. One might as well talk of an "immovable wave. Joy is but a momentary uplifting of the waters of the soul, which flash for that moment in the sun of beauty, and then in obedience, as it were, to a mental law of gravitation, subside. Every subsidence of a pleasure is attended with a sense of

It may be complained that this elucidation of Keats's meaning-or what ought to have been his meaning -is not in the metre of Endy

mion, and that it does not readily lend itself to a poetical form of expression. With that, however, a critic has nothing to do. His duty is discharged when he says that unless Keats had some reasons for wishing to increase the incomes of house-agents and furniture removers, he ought to have explained himself more fully.

loss; and a sense of loss is pain. Emotion, therefore, of any kind, as being a defiance of an ultimately irresistible force, must necessarily either be or tend to become pain: it is only on the mirrored calm of contemplation which, never rebelling against, has never to be subdued by that force, that it acts without any disturbing effect.

But it is only rarely that a solicitor or a stockbroker, whatever his eminence in his calling, attains to much proficiency is psychological analysis; and, as a rule, therefore, he accepts Keats's poetic dictum in a sense which it will not bear. He firmly believes that the "extensive and delightful" views which so attracted him in the advertisement of his country residence, and so charmed him on his first visit, will never pall upon him, even as objects of perpetual contemplation. Great, therefore, is his disappointment when he discovers that only one-half of the advertiser's description remains permanently true, and has to confess to himself that the views, while continuing to be extensive, cease to be delightful. It is a new and unwelcome revelation to him to find that he is capable of being just as much bored with the "Hog's Back" as with Bar tholomew Lane or Bedford Row, and that the space of a year or so, or perhaps only of a few months, suffices to make him as indifferent to waving woods and embosoming hills, as he was to forests of chimney-pots and avenues of lamp-posts. Then is the time to inform him that it is not beauty of scenery which makes or mars the country for him who really loves it; that picturesqueness does not constitute nor plainness diminish its abiding charm; nay, even, paradox as it may sound, that there are certain forms of rural beauty which, as detracting from the mental effect of landscape, are apt to impair its permanent value for those true lovers of whom I speak.

The two qualities which are primarily essential to the production and maintenance of this mental effect are space and solitude. Quiet, of course, is an essential also, but that follows of necessity from solitude; and solitude and quiet, without space, will not avail-as many a stockbroker and solicitor has learnt to his cost to give him that sense of free

dom and repose which he associates, and very justly, with the rural life. An "eligible villa" at the foot of an abruptly rising hill and with, say, an impenetrable wood directly in front of it, may beget as distinct a feeling of confinement as you get in Lower Thames Street. Even the desirable residence "standing in its own park-like grounds'' will produce the same effect if this attractive description is applied, as it often is, to a house stuck down in the middle of a clump of trees, which not only intercept the view but go far toward excluding the light and air. It is an error to suppose that imprisonment within four walls of foliage is much less irksome and depressing in the long run than imprisonment within four walls of bricks and mortar. Andrew Marvell talks in "The Garden" about the mind

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade." That is all very well in the garden but not in the house-all very well for an afternoon but not for some sixteen or eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. In that case the "green thought" is only the Cockney's innocent belief that he will like it.

Space and solitude then, and not picturesqueness, are primary essentials to the production and maintenance of the true charm of the country; but it is evident that something else is required. Otherwise the appeal of the landscape and seascape would be one; for the sea is space and solitude personified, and it would affect us, in its wilder moods, say, as the mountain and the ravine affect us, and in its calmer as we are affected by the open, sunny plain. I should hope it is not necessary to point out to any true lover of the country how monstrous a heresy it would be to affirm any such proposition as this last, and how wide, how emphatically generic is the distinction which separates the “feeling" of landscape from that of the sea. Which of the two is the superior from the contemplative point of view, which of the two makes more for abiding peace, and less for transitory joy, appears to me--though I am anxious to avoid all suspicion of dogmatism-to be a question which does not admit of a moment's doubt. I have nothing, at least that I