bower-maidens, "of the wells, and of the connected with the ancient classical myths woods, and of the holy rivers, which fleet of Hades. They have a kingdom underforward into the salt sea." We shall re-ground, like Hades; they are ruled by a turn to the topic of our English fairy-lore, queen, like the subjects of the dread lady and try to show what a quaint compound Persephone. The Middle Ages half conit is of divers mythologies. In Scott's sciously recognized this; thus Chaucer excellent essay on the subject, prefixed speaks of "Pluto that is king of fayrie,” to the ballad of " Tamlane" in the "Bor- and of "Proserpine and all her faery." der Minstrelsy," he begins by examining In the old romance of Orfeo (Orpheus) the fable of the northern dwarfs who dwell the classical hero seeks his lost Eurydice, in the hollows of the hills, and are greatly not in Hades, but in fairyland. Fairies skilled in metallurgy. The dwarfs forged and beings of the fairy order are essenthe famous sword Tyrfing, which was tially a popular superstition. Nothing never drawn without slaying a man, and prevents us from supposing that before which dealt the three dolorous strokes. there was a Greek literature, the Greek Scott thinks the dwarf smiths may have peasants had their stories of the underbeen a distorted memory of the Finns, a world of faery, which stories poets later race well skilled in mining and in the combined with other materials into the working of minerals. But we imagine full-grown myths of Hades. However that the Finns, like the Lapps, have them- this may be, the Scotch Kirk, when Jane selves the tradition of a happy, blameless, Weir was tried for witchcraft, recognized and skilful subterranean people. Whether that "the fairy queen was but another these were Euskarians or not, it is cer- name for the lord of the under-world, the tainly bold to connect a Neolithic people Devil. The result of this hasty inquiry with a fabled race whose specialty is skill is to prove, we think, or at least to sug in forging weapons of bronze or steel. gest, that fairy mythology is a tissue of The Fata, or Moipal, had one attribute in many threads of fancy. Fragments of common with our fairies. They came to history, half forgotten, may be woven into the birth of children, and gave them the tales of skilled dwarfs, dwellers in mystegifts of destiny; they span, too, like the rious mines. A superstition less readily fairies in nursery tales. They span the web accounted for supplies imagination with of good and evil fortune. The Moipai have nymphs and nereids, fatuæ and fées, lovthese duties in Homer; but long ere Ho-ers of mortal men as were Mélusine, mer's time the same functions were performed by the Hathors of Egyptian folklore. The French fées, like a section of the Scotch fairies, are beautiful women of the woods and waters, fair, and with yellow locks, like the New Zealand sea fairies, or with green tresses, like the Russian Rusalkas; beautiful always, like the Servian Vila. "The hill was her mother, the dew her mother's milk, the wild wind rocked her cradle." The love of these fays is sometimes baneful to men, as in the Breton legend of the Sieur Nan. The New Caledonians have the same fairy-lore. A credible witness assured us that a Kaneka prophesied that his own death would follow, as it did, a few days after he had been the lover of one of the fairy women of the island. It does not need much fairy-lore to see how commonly the fays are women, in all respects unlike the short, dark women of a hostile race.

Calypso, and the Queen of Faery who led the Rhymer into her own country, riding through rivers of slain men's blood. Yet another, but kindred, superstition supplies the Fata and Moipal, the fairy godmothers, with the mystic birthday gifts, and the woven web of fortune. Once more we have the most graceful creations of man's fancy, the soulless ladies of the sea and river, the mountains and the wells. Over the whole mass of tangled imaginations, the genius of Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Herrick, of Homer, and Virgil has brooded, and produced Titania and Oberon, the Pixies, Calypso, and all the choir of Thetis and Cymodoce. Apart, again, from these are the wilder shapes of the woodland, lamia who steal children, and the dreadful women of the night who wash the bodies of the dead by the moonlit shores of the rivers of France. These beings start from imaginative beginnings Our fairies answer to the as rude and remote as the ancestral Zulu nereids of modern Greek superstition spirits which people African thickets, and airy shapes that dance on the hills, and are at last formed by popular and poetic allure young maidens to join their com- fancy into the characters of the "Mid. pany. Again, our fairies are curiouslysummer Night's Dream."

IX. BAD HANDWRITING AND STUPID READERS, Spectator,

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Under the mist that veiled thy path from sight;

I knew not then that joy would come un-Together the plough-horses. bidden,

To make thy closing hours divinely bright.

I only saw the dreary clouds unbroken,
I only heard the plash of icy rain,
And in that winter gloom I found no token,
To tell me that the sun would shine again.

Oh, dear old year, I wronged a Father's kind-
ness,

I would not trust him with my load of care;
I stumbled on in weariness and blindness,
And lo, he bless'd me with an answered

prayer!

Snow, snow, snow,

On moor and wold, on woodland and in glade,
On city roof, on country cottage thatch,
Winter's "regalia," crisp, bright, sparkling
A. H. B.

snow! Chambers' Journal.

"THIS MORTAL."

ARE then the fleshly bonds so strong and stern?
Must all this waiting, watching, longing,
This passionate praying of the loved to learn,
weeping,
That fevers all my waking, haunts my sleep-
Pass, powerless as a child's light-lived desire,
ing,
To sink no deeper, and to rise no higher ?

My darling, oh, my darling, whose brown eyes,
Looked back such full communion into mine,
At whose dear name such happy memories
rise,

Round whose dear image such sweet fancies
twine;

Friend, guide, companion, comforter, and brother,

Strong staff to me, to me, who have no other !

From The Fortnightly Review.
A PAGE OF DIPLOMATIC HISTORY.

M. TAINE, in the second volume of his
brilliant work, "Les Origines de la France
Contemporaine," points to the testimony
of those who wrote down what took place
day by day, without regard to the subse
quent publication of their notes, as to that
which proved most useful to him in his
endeavor to reconstruct the history of the
Revolution. This statement has called
forth publications of every kind - biog-
raphies, correspondences, diaries-from
private and public archives. The Swed-
ish collections have proved particularly
valuable. Baron Klinkowström published
the important correspondence of Count
Axel Fersen with Gustavus III. and his
councillors, and the year 1881 brought a
contribution for which we are indebted to
the royal archives of Stockholm. This
is the diplomatic correspondence of Baron
Staël-Holstein, from 1783 to 1799, edited
by L. Léouzon Le Duc, who is already
known in literature as the author of a life
of Gustavus III.

Few names of the last century are
more familiar than that of Staël, but hith-
erto it has recalled the memory of Neck-
er's daughter, who adopted it by her
marriage with the Swedish ambassador to
the court of Versailles. Baron Staël
himself, who enjoyed the doubtful privi-
lege of being the husband of a celebrated
woman, has hardly attracted attention, and
the little known of him was not flattering.
J. E. Bollmann, for example, the amiable
and intelligent German doctor, who came
to Paris in 1792, and saved the life of
Count Narbonne after the 10th of August
by guiding a daring flight to London, has
nothing better to say of Baron Staël than
that his wife was not married, but tied to
a man who could not have invented a new
dish of potatoes, much less gunpowder.†

Correspondance diplomatique du Baron de Staël-
Holstein, Ambassadeur de Suède en France, et de
son successeur comme Chargé d'Affaires, le Baron
Brinkmann. Documents inédits sur la Révolution

(1783-1799), recueillis aux archives royales de Suède et
publiés avec une introduction par L. Léouzon Le Duc.
Paris, Hachette et Cie. 1881. Vol. i.

† Varnhagen v. Ense. Denkwürdigkeiten u. ver-
mischte Schriften, 1837-1840. Vol. i., p. 161. Justus
Erich Bollmann.

It must, of course, be borne in mind that Bollmann, who proved his chivalrous devotion to Madame de Staël by saving, at the risk of his own, the life of a person in whom she was so much interested, cannot be implicitly trusted when speaking of her husband. But another contemporary, and quite a first-rate observer, Morris, the American statesman, speaks of the Swedish ambassador as of a man unfit to be intrusted with a serious negotiation.* The correspondence published by Léouzon Le Duc, which affords for the first time an opportunity of testing these judg ments, by no means confirms their severity. Staël does not belong to that class of great, high-minded statesmen, who in the midst of fermenting ideas and stormy times shape their own course and keep their end steadily in view. His mistake, like that of so many others, was to believe in the realization of dreams and hopes, which, happily for mankind, did not all prove idle. When we reflect how extremely limited in number those were who did not succumb to the influences of that

time, it is hardly fair to reproach Staël with not having been one of the excep tions. On the other hand, he possessed keen powers of observation and an exceedingly accurate knowledge of the position of affairs. He understood how to make the most of his sources of information, and carried independence of thought to the length of resistance, and even of rebellion, against his own government. If he shared the opinions of Necker's circle, it was by no means because he submitted to its intellectual ascendancy, but because his political convictions moved on the same lines, at least as long as Necker remained in power. As late as the autumn of 1789 the political party which he considered most honest and trustworthy was the constitutional group led by Mounier, of whom he says that, although it was he who had inaugurated the movement in Dauphiné, he had already become one of the most moderate. But while thus admiring him, Staël failed to perceive the principle of his

* Jared Sparks's Life of Governor Morris, with selections from his correspondence. Vol. ii., p. 247.

tion on the necessity of reverence for the sovereign, respect for acquired rights, and prudence, not only in the choice of the end to be aimed at, but also in the selec

However, in the case of Staël, the error of the statesman enhances the value of the witness. If his despatches had been written by a defender of the old system, a champion of the reigning classes, or an upholder of the theory of the division of powers under a strong monarchy, they

whole political system. "Mounier," he | too often repeated that the Revolution is wrote, “is as adverse to aristocracy as the directed against the nobility, and not most resolute democrat; but, convinced against the throne. The king has been as he is of the necessity of a monarchy, insulted as the protector of the nobility, and of a strong executive for the mainte- rather than as head of the executive.. nance of order in France, he is a passion- If he consents to separate his cause from ate admirer of the English Constitution, that of the aristocracy, he is sure of the two chambers, the absolute veto, and, in support of the whole country." The ima word, of quite a different order of things mediate future contradicted this asserfrom what is desired here. However tion. After all the foundations of society sound the arguments in support of these had been destroyed to gratify mere theviews may be, Mounier ought to give them ory, and all barriers between the throne up because they are impracticable. The and the people removed, the king fell. It hatred of aristocracy is so strong that a was not Baron Staël but Morris the resecond chamber would always be consid-publican who proved right in insisting ered its refuge." These concluding from the very beginning of the Revolu words serve to show that the views of Staël did not rest on the basis of a sound political doctrine, and how it came to pass that, after fully sympathizing with the moderate party in 1780, he was drivention of the means by which it was to be into the ranks of their antagonists, when attained. the tide turned against them. Like so many others, from his friend Lafayette down to the lowest orator of the Palais Royal, he failed to discriminate between the deservedly despised nobles, who hung about the court at Versailles, and the true aristocratic elements in the country. Those elements, which comprised the would have been received with great regreat landowners, the magistracy, the serve. As the testimony of a man who clergy, the haute finance, could have twice sacrificed his brilliant position to brought to the public service high charac- his predilection for democratic instituter, political experience, and intellectual tions, they are above suspicion when they training, which no government can dis- confirm on nearly every page the letters pense with. So little were they opposed of Jefferson and Morris, the foresight of to reform that they actually inaugurated Pitt and Washington, the prophetic warnthe movement. Staël acknowledges this ings of Burke, or the conclusions of well-known fact when he says that "the Tocqueville, Lavergne, and Taine. The French Revolution was begun by the re- agreement is so striking that sometimes sistance of the nobility, the clergy, and the mind seems to be laboring under a the Parliaments." He also reminds his delusion, and to be dealing with a literary sovereign that "monarchy is impossible work of yesterday instead of with a narwithout the rights of nobility and a polit-rative written eighty years ago. Taine ical hierarchy." But when it comes to a says in a well-known passage on the situpractical test, and he has to advise on the ation after the 14th of July, "It was not situation, he loses sight of these truths the destruction of one government to and contradicts himself. The original make room for another, but a government mistake of confounding those who en- which fell, to be replaced by the despotjoyed the worn-out privileges of the anism of the mob." Staël, speaking of the cien régime with the necessary supports of constitutional monarchy recurs over and over again. In September, 1791, he writes to Gustavus III., "It cannot be

same events, writes to Gustavus III.: "Since the executive has been entirely taken out of the king's hands by the refusal of the troops to act against their