life as well as in art, early arrived at that stage; indeed, he never seems to have had a youth free from sophistication. Women especially he has studied as a connoisseur; he has subjected his specimens of the sex to the sort of tests Dr. Bode applied to the Flora bustand perhaps with as little real success as Dr. Bode on that famous occasion. Mr. Moore's earlier novels are almost like chemical treatises in this regard; he treats his Evelyn Innes to a strong solution of bad-baronetical culture, and she gives off the yellow fumes of rather commonplace naughtiness; then he tries an infusion of youthful Celticism, with rather confused results; then for a change he bleaches with Catholic chlorine; and SO forth. Every detail of each experiment is jotted down with the aloof curiosity of the vivisectionist, and reproduced with a curious mixture of expert outspokenness and amateur zest. It is as if the methods of the scientist were at the disposal of an inquisitive schoolboy, or as if Peeping Tom were at work on a damaged Godiva with a whole optical battery.

Mr. Mantalini boasted of his conquest of two countesses and a dowager, adding that 'the two countesses had no outlines at all, and the dowager's was a dem'd outline.' Mr. Moore's heart, in all that concerns the sex, is equally disengaged, and his vision equally without illusion. His women, spiritually considered, have either no outline at all, or 'dem'd outlines.' And, judging from his exceedingly frank autobiography, he is not more impressed by the male of his species, and least of all by the Irish male. He makes fun of Mr. Yeats; he even laughs at Sir Horace Plunkett; he expresses a whole-hearted contempt for the whole race of Irish idealists and politicians; 'there is no political capacity outside Ulster,' he said not long

ago. This special disdain of things Irish may perhaps be connected with the failure of an attempt to take the lead in the Irish literary movement. Dublin did not respond, partly, perhaps, because Mr. Moore had discovered an enthusiasm for what he called 'Protestantism'-in his case surely a very formless thing-and declared that 'Catholicism had produced no great literature.'

Whatever the reason, Mr. Moore's Irish enthusiasm was short-lived, and he has long been at home only in London. Here, in a certain circle, he is an oracle, and in a much larger circle a character. In the latter capacity he is the more piquant because his heterodoxy goes with an exterior of tame and almost dejected submission to the commonplace. I once saw a fur in Oxford Street labeled "Tiger-rabbit,' and there is in Mr. Moore's duality something almost as incongruous. To some a new book by him is an event, and occasionally, as in the case of The Brook Kerith, a ripple of interest reaches the larger world. Mr. Moore, having written a story which upset every orthodox view of the Founder of the Christian faith, was rather unphilosophically irritated by the resentment it occasioned in some quarters, and four years have not apparently soothed his ruffled feelings. He gave some little time ago his reasons for no longer offering his work to the general public. He is tired, it seems, of persecution. The persecutions began with his first book, Flowers of Passion — a title rather suggestive of the rawboned poetess in Pendennis - nearly forty years ago; and they have never ceased. 'Even the publication of Esther Waters did not bring them to a close,' says Mr. Moore, 'a book which is now looked upon as a beautiful development of the beatitudes.' Mr. Moore, in short, wishes to write a 'per

onal literature,' and 'in the present emocratic circumstances a personal terature is not possible in prose narative.' Therefore, Mr. Moore is to be Dought only by a thousand people who Lsk for him in prescribed fashion and gree to pay two guineas for a volume n all the pomp of splendid type and and-made rag paper; while the forunate author enjoys 'a freedom un<nown since Elizabethan times.'

All of which argues pluck and peraps some business acumen also. But, while an author is right to take himself seriously, it is possible that Mr. Moore would be none the worse for some practical sense of humor. For, though he is an admirable craftsman, his weaknesses are precisely those which most flourish in the freedom which he claims, and which (thanks to monetary independence) he has, in fact, always

enjoyed. He would have written none the worse, and might have delivered a more important message, had he been forced into a football match of life, instead of being always a Sadducean spectator on the verge of things. The 'democracy' he contemns is, no doubt, a very 'rough, ill-favored thing,' like Master Slender's bears, but those who shrink from its coarse judgments will always be wise to ask themselves very seriously whether they or the common people are more likely to be right on the large questions. On the small things the common man is, of course, almost certain to make himself ridiculous occasionally. But if he does not always know the difference between nudity and indecency in a stone Venus, he can be trusted to tell when a living woman is a hussy, or a living man a fribble.

THEY begin on the north side of the city, at Poverty Corner. They begin imperceptibly, and very likely are no more than what a native knows is there. They do not look like wharves. They look like another of the byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish them from the rest of Fenchurch Street. You will not find them in the directory, for their name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If a wayfarer came upon thern from the west, he might stop to light a pipe (as well there as anywhere and pass on, guessing noth

ing of what they are and of their memories. And why should he? London is built of such old shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time to turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonable doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened. In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships that have gone, and of the men

who knew them, and traditions of a service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on to-day's high water.

In a frame outside one of the shops hangs a photograph of a sailing ship. The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject so evident that it might have been the cause of the stranger stopping there to fill his pipe. Yet how could he know that to those groups of men loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or Rio, even though they have never seen her? They know her as well as they know their business. They know her house flag it is indistinguishable in the picture and her master, and it is possible the oldest of them remembers the Clippers of that fleet of which she alone now carries the emblem; for this is not only another year, but another era. But they do not look at her trait. They spit into the road, or stare across it, and rarely move from where they stand, except to pace up and down as though keeping a watch.

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At one time, perhaps thirty years ago, it was usual to see gold rings in their ears. It is said that if you wanted a bunch of men to run a little river steamer, with a freeboard of six inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you could engage them all at this corner, or at the taverns just up the turning. The suggestion of such a voyage, in such a ship, would turn us to look on these men in wonder, for it is the way of all but the wise to expect appearance to betray admirable qualities. These fellows, though, are not significant, except that you might think of some of them that their ease and indifference were assumed, and that, when trying not to look so, they were very conscious of the haste and importance of this great city into which that corner jutted far enough for them.

landed or they are about to sail again, and they might be standing on the shore eyeing the town beyond, in which the fate of ships is known by those they never see, but who are inimical to them, and whose ways are inscrutable.

If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place where that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them. That comes from no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression. That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which we try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape. It may be said that I looked into this window while still soft. The consequence, everybody soft. knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding machines, signaling gear, and the other secrets of navigators. Not only those things, either. There was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on Stowage, and Norie's Navigation, volumes never seen west of Gracechurch Street. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted by chance. Knots and Splices, Typee, Know Your Own Ship, the South Pacific Directory, and Castaway on the Auckland Islands. There were many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and attractive order. The back of every volume had to be read, though the light was bad.

On one wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed. Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering! About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank, being beyond soundings. At the Capes are red dots, with arcs on

ne seaward side to show at what disbance mariners pick up the real lights t night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates' receipts 1 their pockets, being on errands to nip owners, look outward, and only eem to look inward. Where are the onfines of London?

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, r there used to be, an archway into a ourtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models of ailing ships, I remember the name of ne, the Winifred. Deed boxes stood n shelves, with the name of a ship on ach. There was a mahogany counter, n encrusted pewter inkstand, desks nade secret with high screens, and a ilence that might have been the reroof to intruders of a repute remempered in silence and dignity behind the creens by those who kept waiting so inimportant a visitor as a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events n London river, the fine ship Blackadder for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane.' And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East India Company's warehouses still remained, a sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth century and forgotten. I never saw anybody go into it, or come out. How could they? It was of another time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly as well, the Cathedral which certainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and the Abbey that was little more than something we had heard named, they were but the scenery close to the buses.

Yet London was more wonderful than anything they could make it

VOL. 18-NO. 912

appear. About Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street wagons could be seen going east, bearing bales and cases, and the packages were portmarked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos — names like those. They had to be seen to be believed. One could stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more than make the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and that the evening light was full of glittering motes and smelled of dust, and that life worked itself out with ink in cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco was more than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his eyes so casual an acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of a fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to our capital, though you may learn how Cornhill got its name.

For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much right to the place as the Aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by London Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their city ends on the east side. Their river descends from Oxford in more than one sense, and ceases to lose their respect in the neighborhood of Westminster. It has little history worth mentioning below that. The Thames goes down then to a wide gray vacuity, a featureless monotony where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes out through fogs to nowhere in particular.

But there is a hilltop at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our river, the burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York

and Sydney, can be seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the ships upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of the city. And surely some surmise of what our river is comes to a few of that multitude which crosses London Bridge every day? They favor the east side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause to stare overside to the pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up which their cargo is hauled piecemeal to vanish instantly into mid-air caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless, The walls enclosing the pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost_forgotton memory of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods, they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship below are real.

Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow and that all you people there are being drawn down resistlessly into that lower world of shades. You release yourself from this spell with an effort and look at the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their thoughts? Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memo

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ries, and tales that were told? They T move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is going. We I watch the eastern mists which take her from us. For we never are so passive i and well disciplined to the routine of the things which compel us, but rebellion comes at times-misgiving that there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent. The bascules descend again.

There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is our oldest road, and now has many by paths. Near Poverty Corner is a building which recently was dismissed with a brief humorous reference in a new guide to our citya cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a brickfront topped by a clock face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would guess to be at

the end of it.

The train runs over a wilderness of tiles, a gray plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and scored as though by a withering heat. Noth ing grows there; nothing could live there. Smoke still pours from it, from numberless vents, as though it were volcanic. The region is without sap. Above its plains project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapors solving great areas. When the train descends slightly, then holes appear that cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actually burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Something does live there.

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