master instead of the slave of his fancies, his story is a simple and not uncommon one. His family are of Flemish extraction; there is a tradition that they numbered among their ancestors the painters of the grand altar-piece of St. Bavon. If it were so, they had never been specially proud of him. From being wool-staplers at Lynn they had become old Lincolnshire county gentry, had been fruitful and multiplied, formed endless high connections, and set their faces against all trades but that of arms. The younger Vanikes took to the army as naturally as young wild ducks to their Lincolnshire meres. They were a singularly good-looking race. Those who were steady went into matrimony and did well; those with whom the fatal gift of beauty turned to a curse went to the dogs. Septimus, the seventh son of the present baronet, has chosen to go to the bad in this eccentric fashion of his own. They say genius, like gout, often skips a generation; but if the blood of old Hubert and John Van Eyck really ran in Vanike veins, it was the first time for centuries their special talent had cropped out in the family. Septimus was a sufficiently lively child—generally in mischief indeed; yet his nurses used often to surprise him in contemplation of an ancient tryptich, supposed to have accompanied the original wool-stapler in his Hegira. The outlines of the aureoled saints and angels were stiffer and harder than those of the family portraits he never looked at, and yet the child saw something there invisible to duller senses. At school he was perpetually in trouble, for his books were covered as thickly with designs as a London boarding with posters. Had Dr. Swisher cared more for art and less for discipline, he would have caught the boy to his arms instead of caning him at arm's length, when he lighted on the great cartoon of the death of the Nemean lion, in turning over the fly-leaf of his Liddell and Scott. When Septimus joined the hundred and fiftieth, the duties and responsibilities of his new life naturally interfered with what had hitherto been his favorite distraction. What with gossiping, smoking, lounging in the mess anteroom, "peacocking in the high-street of the county town, -to say nothing of drill and pipe-clay at old hours, a hardworking officer has little time to spare for art. Still what is bred in the bone will come out, and in the course of his brief military career he decorated the bleak walls of many a barrack passage. There was a strange versatility in his powers, and his genius was always soaring above the suggestive surroundings that might have clogged its wings. The adjutant with his pipe, his eye-glass, his drooping eyelid and his English terrier drew levées at Aldershot new barracks, and cost the mess whole hogsheads of bitter beer and hecatombs of chops. But there was a St. Cecilia in the corridor hard by, above Lieut. Jones's bath and bullock trunks, dashed off with a charred stick on the whitewash. In her ecstatic loveliness and ineffable devotion she suggested in each rugged line the genius of a Fra Angelico. The colonel was a rigid disciplinarian. Septimus was no soldier, was baited perpetually by duns, and in the habit, as we know, of defacing her Majesty's property. The colonel never liked the lieutenant. Things came to a crisis, and Septimus sold out very soon after his commanding officer discovered that he, Col. Martinet, had posed for a venerable beggar, with snow-white beard and a stoop in the shoulders, leading Corporal Stripes's pretty little girl trotting along in his hand. As luck would have it, when it got wind that the lieutenant meant to go, Mordecai, the money-lender and picture-dealer, came down to look after some little bills of his. He smiled at the portrait of the adjutant, but stood "struck all of a heap" opposite the St. Cecilia, as he was indiscreet enough to admit in the first shock of admiration. Afterwards, when he incidentally offered to renew, on condition of Mr. Vanike painting him some little thing in the early manner of Raphael, Septimus acceded with his accustomed carelessness. Fortunately in the feverish excitement of being cast penniless and professionless on the world, he found inspiration and application. Three months later, Septimus chanced to drop into lunch with his cousin Lord Santa Croce, the great art-connoisseur. His lordship asked Septimus to give his opinion of a Raphael he had just been fortunate enough to acquire. The price had been

his

£1,600; the drawing was hard, of course- it dated from about 1507; it would want careful restoring, but lordship drew back and flourished his hand in eloquent silence. Septimus rubbed his eyes; there was no mistaking old Martinet in the St. Joseph, or Stripes's child in the little St. Catherine. He burst out laughing, offended his noble cousin beyond apology, and resolved forthwith to tread the path that led to the opening portals of El Dorado.

Had he only gone regularly into training, as his elder brother remarked, no doubt he would have landed there in a canter. But any instruction he has, has been forced upon him by benevolent seniors who are only too ready to spoil him. He may neglect advice, but he is too good-natured to be offended by it. What at once ruins and saves him is his inveterate indolence. He only works by fits and starts, but then in these fits of his it is the spirit of the sublime or beautiful that possesses him. Chiaroscuro, who labors his Campagna battle bits with perseverance so conscientious, — whose medieval condottieri change to a background of shattered columns and crumbling aqueduct arches - Chiaroscuro, whose works of great and equal merit command the highest prices of the day,-sighed with frank envy over Vanike's "Burial of Alaric in the Busentinus," the result of a dozen of broken noons and feverish nights. The faults of treatment were glaring, but then the compo sition l and how, except by revelation from the immortal dead, could Vanike have caught the iron grief of his Gothic warriors? Chiaroscuro praised it so highly that it speedily found a purchaser at a fancy price. Vanike's creditors drew back in respectful expectation, leaving the artist breathing-time, and for six mortal months thereafter he never put brush to palette.

Mortal months they were indeed, for, with money in his purse and more courted and fêted than ever, he kept his candle flaring at both the ends. He mingles in all sets, and withdraws with his remorse to the wildest of them, when more discreet dissipation has sought repose. In his way he is a local lion. In winter the connections of the Vanikes who chance to be in Rome rally to him with some orders, which perchance he may execute. He goes to the demure dinners and decent dances of English society, and charms those he meets there with the freshness of his thought and speech. He lightens and varies their respectability with long sittings at the Caffè Greco, where his voice dominates the confusion of tongues, and his face beams through the clouds of baioccho cigar-smoke; with luncheons at osterias without the gates, professedly to study the noisy life of the Roman contadino; with banquets at quaint Roman taverns by the Piazza Navona and in the Trastevere, where porcupine and hedgehog and all manner of unclean meats are washed down by the champagne he contributes. He bridges over the space between night and morn by jovial suppers at his rooms in the Ripetta, where Spillman spreads the table, and the headier grape-juice of sunny France flows round the board like beer in Valhalla. All this in a climate whose children, experience taught, live with ascetic temperance. No wonder he feels his life-thread is frayed and may snap at any moment. He knows his lamp is burned so low as to be past the trimming. He wakes day after day to throw aside the duns he dare not read, and gather cour age for forcing a staircase blockaded by clamorous creditors. No one of his intimates suspects half the horrors of the mornings of heart-worrying despair he passes tête-àtête with his blue devils. No wonder when debt-bound in Rome through the summer, he belates himself of deliberate purpose that he may ride home through the deadly night dews over the pestiferous Campagna. His life has wasted like a delicate cigar smoked in a hurricane, and when Bohemia buries him regretfully by the gray pyramid of Caius Cestius, he will leave behind him neither a name nor memory.

It will be quite otherwise with Palette, R.A. Palette will leave name, memory, and a personality sworn under something handsome, and yet he never had a spark of Vanike's genius. But he has hereditary talent of a certain sort. His grandfather was a wood-engraver, his father a meritorious painter,

who reared his son to his own calling. The Royal Academician has an accurate eye and a firm hand, and can match the shades of his color better than the most practised saleswoman in a Berlin wool-shop. He was put to an art-school young, and most carefully taught. He developed his perseverance under the eye and by the precepts of a painstaking painter. In spite of temptation and example to the contrary, he always distinguished himself by extreme propriety of dress, morals, and deportment. He was naturally shy and self-reserved, and married young, when promise was turning to profit, and found his models in the domestic circle. After he had bought experience by painting his mammoth "Marius among the ruins of Carthage," he turned to the sujets de genre that command ready sale in the salons. Varnish, the picture dealer, took him up and gave him orders. The railway mania was at its height, and the newmade millionaires were munificent patrons of modern talent. Varnish, acting middleman, always knew where to place at exorbitant profit the pictures he liberally paid for. Many of Palette's gems have changed hands since then with changing fortunes. But still Mrs. Palette and her goldenhaired high-nosed sisters are to be seen simpering on the walls of many a palace in Lancashire and the midland counties and the suburbs of the metropolis. There they are, feeding gorgeous macaws, playing, with King Charles spaniels, languishing over inlaid lutes, in jewels and diaphanous muslins, and gold-spangled brocades wofully anachronical. Once the rich stuffs were rare samples of contemporary textile fabrics, but the colors seemingly were never warranted to wear, and already they are as expressionless as the ladies' faces. Some years back Palette first condescended to portrait-painting, and the prices his portraits fetch have induced him to profess them as his spécialité. It costs his conscience nothing to flatter, for he has a fortunate faculty of missing the characteristics of his sitters, and with rare art he can gazer any originality of expression with a sparkling varnish of gentleman-like and lady-like inanity. Being very far from a fool, he meets fashion on its own terms, paints his "pot boilers" against time, blurs his draperies and blotches his hands. He has his reward as he likes it. For the sake of his bank-book now, he sacrifices any chance he might have had of a place in the art handbooks of the future; and very likely he shows true wisdom. Had Vanike taken to portrait-painting, ambition might reasonably have whispered him to look for his models in Raphael's Leo X., Titian's Charles V., and Velasquez's Philip IV. Palette, with constitutional prudence, declines to invite despair and provoke odious comparisons by seeking to soar on his feeble wings.

THE IDLE LAKE.

HE who is acquainted with the Idle Lake should be thoroughly versed in the topography of mythical localities - should be familiar with the Bower of Bliss, the House of Fame, and the Cave of Despair-with Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of the Shadow-with the Debatable Land, and the Islands of the Blest - with Armida's Garden, and that fearfully beautiful Arbor of Proserpine, where nothing but that which was noxious grew. All these legendary regions should strengthen in the beholder the love and wonderment which, as a confirmed lotus-eater, an inveterate truant, and an incorrigible sluggard, he should feel for the Idle Lake.

It is situated-anywhere; and why not in Fairyland? Why should I not chronicle its bearings, thus? Once upon a time a certain Sir Cymochles, a mailed knight certainly, who had the privilege of the entrée at Arthur's Court on levee days, whatever the privilege of the entrée may mean, but otherwise of no very bright repute, was wandering up and down" miscellaneously" (a common practice in Faery), accompanied by one Atin, a person of unquestionably bad character, and in quest of another chivalrous person, hight Sir Guyon, with the wicked intent him to kill and slay. Sir Cymochles, on this felonious errand bent, chanced to come to a river, and, moored by the bank thereof, what should

he discern but a little "gondelay," or gondola, spick and span, shining like a new pin, and so trimly bedecked with boughs and cunningly woven arbors, that the tiny cabin at the stern looked like a floating forest. In this delightful wherry there sat a lady fair to see, gayly dressed, and with a quantity of wild flowers in her hair. She was seemingly of a frivolous and irreverent temperament, and (the legends say) sat in the gondola grinning like a Cheshire cat. When she ceased to grin, she giggled, or hummed a refrain from some idle ditty. Now Sir Cymochles was desirous of passing to the other side of the river, and he asked the giggling lady if she would give him a cast across. Said the lady tittering, "As welcome, Sir Knight, as the flowers in May;" but she was not so ready to oblige Atin: stoutly, indeed, refusing him boat-room. Possibly she doubted his capacity to trim the boat properly, or haply she thought that he could not pay the ferry-fee. So Atin was, like Lord Ullin in the ballad, "left lamenting" on the shore, and Sir Cymochles, with the grinning lady, went on a rare cruise. Away slid the shallow ship, more swift than swallows skim the liquid sky;" but the behavior of the merry mariner on the voyage was, I regret to say, most improper. She possessed a whole storehouse of droll anecdotes, and while she told them she laughed till the tears rolled down her pretty, naughty face. It is certain that she "chaffed" Sir Cymochles, and I am very much afraid that she tickled him; but he was rather pleased than otherwise with "her light behavior and loose dalliance." Her name, she said, was Phædria. The inland sea, from which the river ran, and on whose bosom the gondelay was floating, was named, she remarked, the Idle Lake.

66

How the pair came at last to an island waste and void that floated in the midst of that great lake; how the laugh ing lady conducted the bemused knight to a chosen plot of fertile land," amongst wide oases set, like a little nest; " how in that painted oasis there was "no tree whose branches did not bravely spring, no branch on which a fine bird did not sit;" how she fed his eyes and senses with false delights; how she led him to a shady vale, and laid him down on a grassy plain; how he-oh! idiotic knight!

took off his helmet, and laid his disarmed head in her lap; how she, as he sank into slumber, lulled him with a wondrously beautiful love-lay, in which she sang of "the lily, lady of the flow'ring field," and of "the fleur de lys, her lovely paramour;" how, subsequently, steeping with strong narcotics the eyelids of that bamboozled knight, she left him snoring, and hied her to her gondelay again; and how eventually she, plying at the Wapping Old Stairs of Faery, like a jolly, wicked young water woman as she was, picked up Sir Guyon, and him inveigled to the Idle Island in that Idle Lake; and how there was a terrific broadsword combat of two about that "ladye debonnaire". are not all these things written in the chronicle of the land which never was- in the Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser? If you be wise, you will take the marvellous poem with you as your only travelling companion the next time you journey to the Idle Lake.

I am not habitually idle. I cannot afford it. Highly as I appreciate the delight of doing nothing, of lying in bed and being fed with a spoon, or of eating peaches from the wall with my hands in my pockets, like Thomson, I am yet constrained, as a rule, to work for a certain number of hours in the course of every day or night, in order to obtain a certain quantity of household bread. I have been wandering these many years past in a wilderness of work, not unrelieved, however, by occasional oases. I remember them all, and dwell on the remembrance of them with infinite delight; even as that stolid wretch in hodden gray, tramping the treadmill's intolerable stairs, may dwell upon that soft and happy Sybarite time he passed after he was so lucky as to find the gentleman's gold watch and chain in the gentleman's pocket, and before he was "wanted" by the myrmidons of a justice which would take no denial, and stigmatized his treasure trove as plunder, and his lucky find as an act of larceny. A jovial time he had: all tripe and dominoes, and shag tobacco and warm ale. It was an oasis in his desert life of walking about in search of something

to steal, and although there are poets and philosophers who maintain that the memory of happier days is a sorrow's crown of sorrow, I have always been of a contrary opinion; holding that, as hope springs eternal in the human breast, a man is seldom so miserable but that, if he has been already happy, he cherishes the aspiration of being happy again. He may be conjuring up visions of future tripe and warm ale, more succulent and more stimulating than ever, - that tramping man in hodden gray.

I am mindful of an oasis in Hampshire, and of one in Surrey; of a lotus-garden (where I overeat myself once) in an island in the Adriatic, and of a Valley of Poppies in North Africa. I know a bank in Andalusia on which I have reclined, pleasantly yawning, and drawing idle diagrams with my walking-stick in the sands of time at my feet. I know a cascade, far, far up in the mountains of Mexico, among the silver-mines, the silvery plashing of whose downcome rings in the ear of my soul now, drowning the actual and prosaic lapping of the water "coming in" at Number Nine, next door. I am braced up tight between the shafts, blinkers block my eyes, and a cruel bit chafes my mouth, while those tearing wheels behind me seem pressing on my heels, and ever and anon the smacking whip of the driver scathes my sides; but do you think I forget the paddock in which I kicked up my heels, or resting my nose on the top of the fence, calmly contemplated the hacks on the highway, bridled and bitted, pursued by wheels, and quivering under the whip-cord? Do you think that I forget the Idle Lake?

I had been to the wars when I came upon it. It was an ugly war in which I was concerned, a desultory, unsatisfactory, semi-guerilla warfare, in the Italian Tyrol. Our commander was a famous hero, but his troops were, to use the American expression, "a little mixed," and I am afraid that in several of the encounters in which we were engaged we ran away. We got scarcely any thing to eat, and we slept more frequently in the open air than under a roof. It was a campaign performed by snatches, and interspersed with armistices; and now and again I used to come down out of the mountains, ragged, dirty, hungry, demoralized, and “exceeding fierce," and journey to Milan for letters, money, and clean linen, to have a warm bath, and enjoy a little civilization. I am afraid that the guests at the Hotel Cavour, in the capital of Lombardy, formed any thing but a favorable opinion of my manners; still, if I did nearly swallow my spoon as well as my soup, and occasionally seize a mutton cutlet by the shank, and gnaw it wolfishly, where was the harm? It was so long since I had had a decent dinner; nor did I know, when I got back to the mountains, when I might get another.

It was on one of these expeditions to Milan that Eugenius Mildman and I struck up a friendship. He was as mild as his name; a beaming, pious, gushing, amiable creature, as innocent as a lamb, as brave as a lion, - I marked his conduct once in a battle, from which, with the prudence of a non-combatant camp-follower, I timeously retreated, and as affectionate as a young gazelle. I wish they would keep such exemplary Englishmen as Mildman's race in England; but the good fellows have a strange fancy for wasting their sweetness on the desert air of foreign countries; they do good at Florence, and blush to find it fame at Malaga; they act the part of the Man of Ross in Norway, and their right hand knoweth not what their left hand doeth at Smyrna; they enrich Thebes and beautify Tadmor in the wilderness; and, with deplorable frequency, and in the prime of life, they die of low fever at Damascus. Mildman was just the kind of charitable soul to die at Damascus, universally regretted, yet with a life wasted, somehow, in good deeds, done at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for the benefit of the wrong kind of people. He was beautifully purposeless when I met him; was undecided as to whether he should publish a series of translations from the Sarmatian anthology, in aid of the Polish emigration, or raise a loan in furtherance of public (denominational) education in the republic of Guatimozin. Meanwhile he had been fighting a little with Garibaldi. I need scarcely add that he was a spiritualist and homeopathist, and that he occasionally spoke, not in the strongest terms of censure, of the com

munity of Oneida Creek, the Agapemone, the followers of Johanna Southcote, and the Unknown Tongues. It was toss-up, I used to warn Mildman, between La Trappe d Colney Hatch for him. "Do something practical," I d to say to Mildman. "Pay a premium to a stock-broker and spend a year in his office. Article yourself to a sharp solicitor. Enlist in the Sappers and Miners. You hav plenty of money. Take chambers in St. James's, and die count bills at sixty per cent. Make a voyage to Pernary buco before the mast. Go in for the realities." But be wouldn't; and I am afraid that he will die at Damasc universally regretted, and that his courier will run away with his dressing-case and his circular notes.

er.

I shall be ever grateful to Eugenius Mildman, for he made me acquainted with the Idle Lake. It was during one of my expeditions to Milan, and broiling summer weath The Scala was closed; and at the Canobbiana (the operatic succursal to the grander theatre) the tenor had a wooden leg, the "prima donna assoluta" was fifty-three years of age, and the "prima ballerina" was slightly humped in the back, and was endowed with but a sing eye; so, as you may imagine, the Canobbiana entertain ments did not draw very crowded audiences. The garden of the usually pleasant Caffé Cova, where we dined (chie on macaroni and fried intestines), "alfresco" had become à nuisance, owing to the continual presence of noisy patriots smoking bad "Cavours," and screeching about the incapac ty of Gen. de la Marmora, and the shameful tergiversatie of the Emperor Napoleon the Third in the matter of the D minio Veneto. The caricatures in the Spirito Folletto were wofully stupid, and altogether Milan had become soc ally uninhabitable. Mildman and I determined to start on a ramble. We got to Chiavenna, and so, by Vico Soprano, to St. Moritz. Thence, hiring a little "calescino," a pis turesque kind of one-horse chaise, we made Samaden, and for three weeks or so dodged in and out of the min or Alpise passes the Bernina, the Tonale, and so forth-taking to mule-back when the roads were impracticable for the "> lescino," and coming out into the Tyrol at last somewhere near Storo, where we rejoined our famous hero and his re shirted army. After another skirmish or so - we called them battles-there was another armistice, and back! came to Milan, but this time alone. I shook hands with Mildman, and the last I saw of him was his slender fire bestriding a mule in a mountain gorge, and in the setting He was departing in quest of windmills to charge | forlorn Dulcineas to rescue; he was bound for Damascus, or the "ewigkeit." What do I know about it? Farewell es cellent Quixotic man.

sun.

But I went back to Mediolanum; and for the next eigh weeks I was continually running backwards and forwards t the Idle Lake. I had grown to love it. I loved even th quaint old Lombard town from which the lake derives, no its sobriquet, but its real name. There are two of the dir est and dearest hotels in northern Italy in that town; yet! | was fond of them both. There are as many evil smells in

the town as in Cologne; yet the imperfect drainage, and the too apparent presence of decaying animal and vegetalst matter in the market-place, did not affect me. Was I not on the shore of the great, calm, blue lake, with the blue sky above, and the blue mountains in the distance, and the whole glorious landscape shot with threads of gold by the much embroidering sun? I had made the acquaintance of a Milanese banker who had a charming villa on the opposite side of the lake, say at Silva Selvaggia. He had a pre yacht, in which many a time we made voyages on the us expanse, voyages which reminded me of the cruise of S Cymochles. My host was an enthusiastic fresh-water sail so much so that the lake boatmen used to call him, “Il Si nore della Vela." He was perpetually splicing his mar brace, and reefing his topsail. Sail! We did nothing ba sail; that is to say when we were not breakfasting, ing, or smoking, or drinking "asti spumante," or dozing, or playing with a large Erench poodle that was rated on books of the yacht, and I think did more work then an the crew (one man, very like Fra Diavolo in a check shir and without shoes and stockings, and a boy who played us

or dir

the

d

1

guitar), for he was incessantly racing from the bow to the stern, and barking at the passing boats. We spent at least eight hours out of the twenty-four on the water; and when there was a dead calm we lay to and went to sleep. At breakfast time the Perseveranza, the chief journal of Lombardy, came to hand, and our hostess would read out the telegrams for our edification. After that we bade the Perseveranza go hang, and strolled down towards the yacht. I never read any thing, I never wrote any thing, I never thought of any thing while I was floating on the Idle Lake, save of what a capital thing it would be to be idle forever.

In our boating excursions we frequently landed at different points on the lake, and called upon people. They were always glad to see us, and to entertain us with fruit, wine, cigars, sonatas on the piano-forte (if there were ladies present), and perfectly idle conversation. I never yet learned the "nice conduct of a clouded cane; but I think that I acquired, during my sojourn on the Idle Lake, the art of twirling a fan, and of cutting paper. Had I stayed long enough I might have learned to whistle; that grand accomplishment of the perfect idler. By degrees I became conscious that my visiting acquaintance was extending among a very remarkable set of people; and that nearly everybody occupying the dainty palazzi and trim little villas nestling among the vines and oranges and olives of the Idle Lake was Somebody. It will be no violation of confidence I hope, and no ungrateful requital of hospitality, to hint that at Bella Riviera to the north-east was situated the charming countryhouse of Madame La Princesse Hatzoff, the consort, indeed, of the well-known General Adjutant and Grand Chamberlain to his Imperial Majesty the Tsar of all the Russians. M. Le Prince resides on his extensive estates in the government of Tamboff. Some say that he is sojourning in a yet remoter government, that of Tobolsk in Siberia, where he is occupied in mining pursuits in the way of rolling quartz stone in the wheelbarrow to which he, as a life convict, is chained. The Princess Hatzoff passes her winters either in Paris or Florence, her springs in England, her autumns at Homburg or Baden, and her summers on the Idle Lake. She is enormously rich; although M. le Prince, during their brief wedded life, did his best to squander the splendid fortune she brought him. She is growing old now; her clustering ringlets - she was renowned for her ringlets

are silvery white; her shoulders are arched, and her hands tremble ominously as she holds her cards at piquet; but her complexion is still exquisitely clear, and she is not indebted to art for the roses on her cheeks. Her feet are deliciously small and shapely, and she is fond of exhibiting them, in their open-worked silk stockings, and their coquettish little slippers with the high heels and the pink rosettes. Forty years ago you used to see waxen models, colored to the life, of those feet (with the adjoining ankles); ay, and of those half-paralyzed hands, in the shops of the Palais Ryal and Regent Street, and the Great Moskaia at Petersburg. Forty years ago her portraits, in a half a hundred costumes and a whole hundred attitudes, were to be found in every printseller's window in Europe. Forty years ago she was not Madame La Princess Hatzoff, but Mademoiselle Marie Fragioli, the most famous opera-dancer of her age. The world has quite forgotten her, but I doubt whether she has completely forgotten the world; nay, I fancy that in her sumptuous retreat she sometimes rages, and is wretched at the thought that age, decrepitude, and her exalted rank compel her to wear long clothes, and that in the airiest of draperies she can no longer spring forward to the footlights, night after night, to be deafened by applause, and pelted with bouquets, and to find afterwards at the stage-door more bouquets, with diamond bracelets for holders, and reams of billet-doux on pink note-paper. Those triumphs, for her, are all over. They are enjoyed by sylphs as fair, as nimble, and as caressed as she has been; and when she reads of their successes in the newspapers a bitter sickness comes across ber. What artificer likes to reflect upon his loss of competency in his art?

Are retired ambassadors, are generals hopelessly.on half-pay, are superannuated statesmen, or the head masters of public schools, who have retired on handsome pensions, so very happy, think you? Not so, perchance.

Ambition survives capacity very often. The diplomatist clings to his despatch-bag, the soldier to his bâton of command, the minister to his red box, the pedant to his rod, the actor to his sock and buskin or his comic mask, long after the verdict of superfluity has been delivered; long after the dread fiat of inefficiency has gone forth the fiat proclaiming that the bellows are burned, that the lead is consumed of the fire, and that the founder worketh in vain.

All round the coasts of the Idle Lake there were retired celebrities. The district was a kind of prosperous Patmos, a St. Helena tenanted by voluntary exiles, a jovial cave of Adullam. Here vegetated an enriched director of promenade concerts; there enjoyed his sumptuous" otium " the exproprietor of dwarfs and giants, of learned pigs and industrious fleas; and in yonder Swiss chalet lived a lion-tamer, much famed on the Idle Lake for his proficiency in breeding rabbits. Millionaire patentees of cough lozenges, bronchitic wafers, anti-asthmatical cigarettes, universal pills, and Good Samaritan ointments, abounded on the Lake; together with a group of wealthy veteran tenors, baritones, and bassi, several Parisian restaurateurs and café-keepers, who had realized large fortunes; a contractor of one of the Rhine watering-place gambling tables; many affluent linendrapers and court milliners, and an English ex-butcher from Bond Street, as rich as Croesus. All who were out of debt, and had nothing to grumble at, seemed to have gathered themselves together on these shores, leading a tranquil, cozy, dawdling kind of existence, so that you might have imagined them to be partakers before their time of the delights of some Eastern Elysium, and to be absorbed in the perpetual contemplation of Buddha.

But my days of relaxation on the banks of the Idle Lake came, with that autumn, to an end; and away I went into the "ewigkeit"—always into the "ewigkeit," to be tossed about in more wars and rumors of wars, and rebellions and revolutions. For years I have not set eyes upon the Idle Lake; but I often dream of it, and puzzle myself to determine whether it is situated somewhere between the Lake of Garda and the Lake of Como. But that there is such a Lake, and that it is gloriously Idle, I am very certain.

PARIS AND THE LESSONS OF ADVERSITY.

The

THIS time last year Paris and France were passing through the furnace of affliction. The teachings of adver sity had been bitter, but at least we were assured that the lessons had not been lost. A great price had been paid for the wisdom that comes of experience, but at any rate the experience and its fruits were gained once for all. pride of the great nation had been humbled by a miraculous combination of circumstances, and it was expiating its errors by merited suffering. Clothed in sackcloth, charmed with her novel ideas, Paris pleaded extenuating circumstances for her follies. In the fatal facility of her happy nature she had yielded to the arts of the enchanter who had made life too pleasant for her. It had been the policy of the ravisher who had espoused her in Sabine nuptials, to turn her head and corrupt her heart by bedizening her person and anticipating her lightest caprices. The government had given carte blanche to the Prefect of the Seine, who acted as mayor of her household, and until very lately there had never been a difficulty about the bills.

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ers from all the continents came to ruin themselves for her, and lavished their riches in her lap. Society and the bourgeoisie grew dazzled in the blaze of the Boulevards, the ball-room, and the baccarat tables. No wonder if the Champ Elysées and the Rue Breda forgot Belleville and the Eastern Faubourgs. Of a sudden their illusions vanished in nightmares. It came out that Reds and roughs were forcing the strong hand of the autocrat; that society and its saviour had never been in more mortal peril. The corruption of the lower Empire again landed the Teuton hordes at the gates of the capital of civilization. The moral fibre had been fatally relaxed; nothing was left of the old élan that had carried the French soldier to Jena

and Austerlitz. Unnumbered woes had been brought on France, but fortunately the mischief was not irreparable. Paris, ever in extremes, as became her place, set the country an example of humility and heroism. Confessing her faults, she denounced her seducer. Borrowing a congenial precedent from the imposing Hebrew ceremonial, she charged all her sins on the dynasty of her choice, and cast it out into the wilderness. Thenceforward she had broken with her past, and made a fresh pact with the future. Like a lorette turned devotee, and alive to the excitement of contrast, she rather gloried in the mad dissipation she had repented of. There was doubtless much ephemeral sincerity in the earnestness with which she threw herself into her part. Paris is too emotional not to be genuinely impressionable, and sincerity always has its influence, even if it be born of self-delusion.

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When Paris recanted and confessed, although she vowed and promised so much, we were almost half inclined to believe her. The practical nature of the English people is so antithetical to gushing, that generosity to the fallen inclined us to an excess of charity in judging our impulsive neighbors. We were disposed to hope the best, and to believe that a regenerated France was to rise from the ashes of the Empire. Yet we might have remembered that when nations have passed their early youth they seldom profit by the schooling of adversity. A tone of thought has established itself in the ascendant, inveterate habits have become engrained; exceptional men may rouse themselves to extraordinary ef fort, but the nation gravitates back into the deep-worn grooves. We say nothing now of French Internationalists who renounce patriotism as treason to humanity, or of the Communists who denounce property as theft, and identify superstition with religion. We speak of all that is most respectable in a political point of view, whatever it may be as regards private morality; and we ask How have the respectable "Parisians performed the vows that were forced from them by the pressure of the beleaguering Germans? What have been the fruits of the panic generated of murder and fire-raising during the misrule of Communist anarchy ? As it happens, we have the means of satisfying ourselves, and Conservative Paris is put to a crucial test at the opening of the new year. It has to return a member to the Chamber, and the eyes of France and Europe are upon it. The dramatic element comes to the assistance of principle and self-interest with a people who delight in dramatic effects; for this particular election will, it is presumed, decide the question of the transfer of the Assembly from Versailles to Paris, and all Paris has set its heart on the transfer, irrespectively_of political_creed. In the opinion of many thoughtful Frenchmen, Paris is asked to decide upon its own fate, and yet conservative Paris seems to give no thought to the matter. Never had French Conservatism, taking the word in its broadest sense, its path of duty made plainer or easier. Armed order has set its heel on the revolution, and the insurrectionary partisans who would otherwise have been agitating at home are awaiting by thousands their tardy trial. It was but the other day that suspects were being arrested wholesale; so revolutionists have to do their electioneering in the shadow of the terror of the law, and in a city proclaimed in a state of siege by their enemies. Yet the timid bourgeoisie is inclined to leave the course clear to the nominee of the party who but yesterday set Paris in flames, to the poet who has prostituted his genius to apologize for the worst excesses of the Commune. While Rome burned, its Emperor fiddled. Paris has a plain duty to perform in the supreme interests of its own honor and safety, and the Parisians s'amusent. We would not be hard on a people for acting after their nature. We never believed that a grand national regeneration was to be operated by miracle. We know that with a volatile nation there must be a light-hearted reaction from the depths of depression, and that the journey back to better things must be all uphill, and very painful at the best. But, making the most generous allowances, it is impossible not to feel grievously disappointed. The Reds are raising their heads again. The Germans still occupy the provinces of France, and the German Chancellor has just stung the national pride to the

quick. The country has to brace itself to bear a burden of taxation which only industry and frugality can render tolerable, and nothing whatever is settled as to the Government of the future. Yet long before France has left the school of adversity, she has cast all its lessons behind her, and her latter state is worse than the former, by wasted opportunities and hundreds of millions of debt.

Paris is still the Paris of the Empire. Impoverished as she is, she still finds the means for dissipation and frivolity. She has discarded decency, and seems bent on proving to Europe that the refinement and good taste on which she prided herself were only tinsel on the surface. She is holding her orgies in what should be the house of mourning. She has pitched the booths of her Vanity Fair on pavements scarcely cleansed from the blood of her citizens. The stalls are set as thickly along the Boulevards as ever they were, and the trade in étrennes goes forward more briskly than before. It appears as if the chosen seat of genteel comedy had lost all sense of the ludicrous. Does Paris believe life to be a vaudeville, and crushing national calamities things to be trifled with or jested over? It is hard to see where even the most ingenious and light-hearted and vain-glorious of peoples can find matter of mutual congratulation in the events of the past year, or the prospects of the coming one. Fancy an English or German family munching bonbons and exchanging jests on the day after a funeral, and while there is an execution in the house. A moralist might find something suggestive of the hollowness of things in France in those gaudy and costly cases which contain a franc's worth of unwholesome sweets. Still we can conceive that something might be said by a Parisian for keeping up the friendly fashion of étrennes. Abused as it has been, it is the French counterpart of the German Christmas-tree, and originated, doubtless, in kindly family feeling. There might be a false air of chivalrous spirit in struggling to be cheerful in memory of past happiness, in pinching upon straitened means in order to be generous. No such defence can be set up for the public amusements of the season. The masked balls at the Opera House are in full swing. Most people know what these are, by heresay, if not by personal observation. The masked ball means the loosest of loose Paris celebrating its saturnalia, in a disguise that invites decency to join while giving indecency its wildest license; indecency of thought, speech, and all but act, we should say, for experience has taught the necessity of detailing a powerful force of police to quell any demonstrative obscenity. It means dancing beginning at midnight after long dinners; suppers in the cabinets of the Maison Dorée and the Café Anglais; women in "costume," with as little character as clothes, shading off through the neutral classes of shopgirls, actresses, danseuses, and dames de comptoir, to ladies of society ensconced snugly in their masks and dominoes. These masks and dominoes give absolute immunity from the whispers of the world, even were the world more inclined to censure than it is. The fair wearers may rub their draped shoulders with the naked ones of the most brazen-tongued of the lost sisterhood, and listen freely to shameless talk. It is easy to conceive the facility which these balls give for assignations in a city where married women are frequently as much their own mistresses as fascinating young girls in business. One might fancy that the censorship which busies itself with the politics of the drama might profitably turn its attention to the morals of these forcing-houses for female innocence. The masked ball exhibits the dignity of French men in quite as striking a light as the delicacy of French women. The grand na tion that blazoned the walls of Versailles with its victories, reared the Arch of Triumph, and cast the column of the Place Vendôme, has just been capitulating by hundreds of thousands, their arms in their hands. Here they are, fresh from the Caudine Forks, capering, shrieking, and grimacing as clowns, Pierrots, and monkeys. Not that they have forgotten the war. On the contrary, with their felicitous sense of the fitness of things, they have made the taking of each other prisoner and the spoils of the victor the standing jokes of the season. Nor are the