Merlin and Vivien, it is necessary in order to portray the progress of evil in the court. It had demolished the citadel of knowledge in Merlin; old age with its wisdom had fallen; but the picture must be completed by the wreck of a young, pure life in Pelleas. He deserved a better fate, and Mr. Hutton thinks he ought to have had it; but that could only be at the cost of the finished portrait of the tragedy of evil, which is no respecter of persons.

In Pelleas the victory falls back to Sense, and delineates the young, pure life rudely awakened to the falsities concealed within the sensuous. Pelleas stands for the ingenuous soul allured by the senses, not seeing how sensuous beauty may conceal moral ugliness, or a worm be curled within a rose, or evil pass as an angel of light.

The danger is lest the shock of the discovery may cause such revulsion of feeling that faith in humanity shall be lost and the young life fling itself into the night of infidelity.

There is, further, the danger of confusing the sensuous with the spiritual. Pelleas confounds physical beauty with beauty of soul, and when he finds that he has been allured and deceived by the physical, he loses faith in the spiritual. He does not see that the face of gentle culture may hide the meanest of souls. The pure soul gives a subtle beauty of its own to Sense, but Sense may have beauty without Soul, which may allure to death.

The bloom of many a life has been blighted by the loveliness of Sense. The soul is only beautiful when goodness dwells within. It can make lovely the loveless face with its own spiritual glory. Beware of physical beauty without moral goodness, is the lesson of "Pelleas and Ettarre."

The Last Tournament.

THE war of Sense with Soul is shaping to its tragic end. The evil, wrought by the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere and by the scattering of the Knights through following "wandering fires" of superstition, now rushes on to its final conflict in "The Last Tournament."

In Arthur

The characters are powerfully drawn. and Dagonet the victory is on the side of Soul, but in Tristram and Isolt it falls to Sense.

Let us watch the unfolding of the spiritual and the sensuous, and note the glory that circles the one and the shame that darkens the other. We have seen how Arthur, the King, stands for the spiritual principle, authoritative and supreme within its own realm, striving to bring all its conflicting forces into obedience.

For a time the spiritual was regnant, but we noted the gathering shadows and dying light within the court. We saw the deepening of the moral gloom as that spell of superstition, working secretly among the Knights, drew them into the wastes. Now the night grows darker, and we begin to hear

the muttering of the storm that wrecks the goodly realm of the King.

We hear its echoes in the insolent message of the Red Knight brought by the maimed churl who escapes to Arthur's Hall,

""Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I
Have founded my Round Table in the North,

and say his hour is come,

The heathen are upon him, his long lance
Broken, and his Excalibur a straw."'"

The King is not only well informed of the rebel forces without who band themselves to violate the order of his realm, but he is also conscious of a lower tone within his Knights.

"Or have I dream'd the bearing of our knights
Tells of a manhood ever less and lower?'"

He had laboured to construct a kingdom of spiritual men, but the carnal forces had not been slain, only maimed, and the recreant rebels lift their heads again. Sense would wrestle with Soul for supremacy.

"The Last Tournament" is the symbol of the battle growing ever fiercer between the higher and lower nature.

The old question asked in "The Coming of Arthur" we hear once again :

"Asking whence

Had Arthur right to bind them to himself?

Dropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep?

They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood
Of our old kings; whence then? A doubtful lord
To bind them by inviolable laws."

It is Sense at war with Soul, questioning its origin and right to reign. It is the gross materialism that would choke the soul out of the universe. Because it cannot trace its genesis through flesh and blood it will deny its supremacy. It will spurn the categorical imperative

"Thou shalt and shalt obey and do my bidding
And fight my wars."

It would pull down the higher nature. The philosophy that would resolve all of man into matter chokes the soul. So Arthur prepares to wage war : with the fleshly forces.

The description of the fierce onslaught images the fervour and force with which spiritual battles ought to be waged.

"Swording right and left
Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd
The tables over and the wines, and slew
Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,
And all the pavement stream'd with massacre.

So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord."

Arthur

Once again Soul is regnant over Sense. is still King, and the spiritual is supreme; conscience is alive and Sense has been defeated. But

why pain?

Because it is the law of life that we pass from the lower to the higher through struggle. Life only comes to its crowning through Gethsemane. It must wrestle with Sense in the red rain of its agony if the angel is to be seen. Arthur had not yet won the final victory, and so "pain was lord."

We do not vault into thrones, we wade to them through blood.

Sir Tristram had won the jewels in the joust and proclaimed, without the name, Isolt as Queen of Beauty. What more of evidence is needed that the glory of the Round Table had departed! What

an elevation and a crowning of the sin of Guinevere and Lancelot, when, by implication, an adulteress is proclaimed, by the co-respondent, Queen of Beauty in the Tournament of Arthur! No wonder that Guinevere sits and sighs in her high tower as Arthur passes. No wonder the great Sir Lancelot

languidly watches the jousts,

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,

When all the goodlier guests are past away."

Was there not a root of the ruin in his own heart?

The Tournament is over, and Tristram whiles away the time with Dagonet.

Dagonet is court-jester, and little of stature, but great of soul. No Knight of Arthur was ever more chivalrous. His quick penetration into the causes