Augustus Hare (who was a cousin of the Manqués) gave several detailed, though inconsistent, accounts of it in successive volumes of his Memoirs. But, in spite of all struggles for the light, the secret remained involved in Cimmerian darkness. Meanwhile the fortunes of the illustrious line had come to centre in the person of an only girl. The last Lord de Manque (they had been Barons since the Flood and Earls since the Conquest) was a man of desperate adventures and broke his neck in trying to ride an Irish hunter over the Great Wall of China. Thus heroically cut off in his prime, he left an infant daughter and heiress-Marguerite Manquée. She would have been a peeress in her own right but for some tiresome technicality about a weddingring. As an Earl's daughter she was styled by courtesy "Lady," although some purists might have disputed even that modest claim; and she inherited all her father's estates, equal in size to a German Principality. Her mother had died in giving birth to her, and the sole trustee and guardian appointed by her father's will, was the domestic chaplain. As Marguerite was only a year old when she succeeded, she could not, in spite of amazing precocity, be admitted to the Secret of the Luck, of which the chaplain was now the sole repository. She was brought up in her principal castle, under the careful superintendence of accomplished governesses, none of whom was below the rank of a Baronet's daughter; and she was sedulously withheld from contact with the outer world. But the development and characteristics of so great an heiress could not fail to evoke the interest of a right-minded society.

People began to ask one another if they knew anything of that Manquée child, who must really be a big girl by now; and in reply to these queries disquieting rumors began to circulate. It was stated with much show of certitude and circumstantiality, that the Heiress

of the De Manques had no hair and no teeth; while others went so far as to say that she had only one eye. "Ah, poor child!" cried sympathetic friends, "every situation has its drawbacks, and all lots their crosses. But it is really too bad to spread these stories about her, if they are not true. We shall see when she comes out."

When Marguerite Manquée was presented, social curiosity was keenly on the alert, and the verdict on her appearance was highly favorable. She was tall and nobly made; her bearing was majestic. She wore a lifelike peruke of the richest auburn. Her râtelier was the finest product of Parisian art. Her one eye flashed with all the fire of her Crusading ancestry; and the other, fashioned out of a single opal, rather added to than detracted from the impressiveness of her general ap

pearance.

But how came a pretty girl of seventeen to be so strangely defective in those appendages which nature, as a rule bestows impartially on the highborn and the lowly? Society might have asked the question in vain, only an Illustrious Personage, who had danced with Lady Marguerite at the Court Ball, insisted on knowing the truth. Then, all unexpectedly, the mystery of the Luck of the De Manques was disclosed. The talisman which from generation to generation had been so jealously guarded in the secret chamber of Castle Manque had vanished out of existence. It could never be recovered; the secret was at an end, and the story might be told.

And what a weird story it was! Lionel Manqué, tenth Baron De Manque, who flourished A.D. 1000, had conceived an unhallowed passion for his grandmother. His ill-starred love is commemorated for the warning of posterity in the Table of Kindred and Affinity. Heaven had manifested its wrath by saying (through the mouth of a Palmer), "You shall have what you

desire. You have admired the toothless and the bald. Henceforward no child born to the Manqués shall ever have a tooth in its mouth or a hair on its head."

The doom which fell upon the house in the person of the guilty Lionel was reversed by the piety of his successor, Bawdewyn. His exploits in the Crusades expiated his father's sin, and an Eremite of Ascalon, to whom he had paid a handsome tribute of Turks' heads, gave him in return a mysterious elixir, which could be warranted to stir into generative activity the barest scalp or the deadest gum. This invaluable fluid the triumphant Crusader brought home in a pocket-flask. A golden pyx of cunning workmanship was fashioned to receive it, and a secret chamber was hollowed in the thickness of the castlewall to enshrine the talisman.

For generation after generation this talisman, always safe-guarded by the Lord, the Heir and the Chaplain, went on doing its beneficent work. The Palmer's curse was frustrated, and each child born to the De Manques was in time subjected to the healing influence, and developed hair and teeth in the richest abundance. But the story closed in gloom. When the last Lord De Manque died, the Chaplain, finding himself in sole possession of the secret, suddenly yielded to a diabolical impulse. A life-long dipsomaniac (as subsequent investigation proved), the temptation to sample a new liquor was too much for him. He drank the elixir, took the next train for London, sold the gold pyx to coiners who melted it into sovereigns, and recovering from a paroxysm of inebriety, was overcome by remorse and drowned himself in the Serpentine, leaving a letter in his trousers-pocket to say what he had done. The spell was broken, and henceforward the heiress of the De Manques must dree her weird of toothlessness and alopecia.

This romantic tale, instinct with his

torical and supernatural interest, spread like wildfire. At every ball where Lady Marguerite appeared, young men of fashion were drawn to her by an irresistible attraction. They longed to toy with those exuberant tresses. They hung in rapture on every word which issued from those gleaming teeth. And a further zest was added to their passion when it became known that the loss of Marguerite's eye was due to the duenna-like zeal of her governess, who had inadvertently jobbed it out with a ruler when correcting her pupil for winking at the schoolroom footman. This last was a trait of hereditary character not to be overlooked in a story of the affections.

Among the band of ardent youths who worshipped at Lady Marguerite's shrine, the most ardent and the most irresistible was young Lancelot Smith, who inherited from his father (a friend of Charles Kingsley's) a power of passion which carried all before it. He loved with an uncalculating and selfabandoned ardor which seemed to belong to a more strenuous age and a warmer climate than our own. The crisis of his fate was reached when, one day, slipping into Lady Marguerite's boudoir in order to lay a billetdoux upon her blotting-book, he found her dozing on the sofa. It was a scorching afternoon in July, and Marguerite was fatigued by a long day's shopping. Her hair was thrown carelessly upon the piano. Her dachshund was playing with her râtelier on the velvet hearth-rug. It was too much. Lancelot saw Marguerite as she really was. The rich, concrete fact surpassed even his most ardent imaginations. His passion broke the narrow bounds of convention, as an imprisoned ocean bursts its dam. Flinging all restraint to the winds, he tickled the coral gums with a peacock's feather torn from the hand-screen, and rained kisses on the virginal, cold, white scalp.

*

Scattered up and down the pages of the Latin authors of the Roman Empire are numerous references to the public readings or recitations which were exceedingly popular in literary society at Rome. It may be of interest, therefore, to collect some of these passages, which will enable us to obtain a fair idea of what these gatherings were like which played no inconsiderable part in the social life of the upper classes. We shall see where they took place, who attended them, and the general purpose which they were intended to serve.

Literature had become fashionable in the days of Augustus. As at the present day every one seemed to be infected with the itch for writing. In his "Satires" and "Epistles" Horace is continually launching the shafts of his playful irony against "the fickle crowd which now burns with the one desire -to write." Octavius, Mæcenas and others were lavish patrons to their clientèle of poets and scribblers, and it is no wonder that during this period the practice of giving public readings was introduced into Rome by Asinius Pollio.

Pollio was a man of inordinate vanity. In the political world he held a conspicuous and important position, but his claims to distinction as a writer were held in small estimation by all but himself. Finding it difficult to obtain readers for his mediocre productions, he hit upon the happy idea of building a private theatre as an adjunct to his mansion and fitted it with orchestra and galleries complete. There were always crowds of people eager to obtain his patronage, and he had only to send out invitations to secure a good audience ready to listen to and applaud his latest effusions. It mattered not to him if they laughed at him behind his back-to obtain a hearing was his chief ambition, and doubtless those who simulated the heartiest admiration received the greatest share of his favors.

The instant popularity which attended his ingenious scheme is proof that it supplied a public want. It brought authors into direct contact with the public for whom they wrote. Books in those days were both common and cheap if we compare the supply with that which prevailed in mediæval times before the introduction of printing, though rare and dear if compared with the enormous output of the present day. There was a wide reading public for authors of repute and distinction, but it is obvious that the number of publishers was very limited, and the rising author found it difficult to secure a market. Hence the utility of these public readings. The author had only to secure a suitable building and announce his intention of reading his work, and he was enabled to judge by the reception accorded to it whether he was likely to recoup himself for the expense of having it published. Halls, therefore, built specially for this purpose, sprang up in Rome; rich men lent their large banqueting chambers, and poor authors, who could not afford the hire of a hall and had no influential

friends and patrons, recited in the open air, at the baths, in the porticoes round the Forum, and at the public lounges, where they could reckon with certainty upon attracting the attention of a ring of loafers idling away their time. In fact, just as in London there is a wellorganized concert season, so in Rome there seem to have been certain months of the year when there was a constant round of recitations.

Thus Pliny in one of his letters, congratulates his friend, Senecio, on the fine crop of poets who had made their début that year, and says that right through April hardly a day had passed without some one giving a recitation. Juvenal, whose satires open with a savage attack on the raucous poets of his time, speaks of these starveling creatures reciting even in the month of August, by which time the heat had driven all the well-to-do people to take refuge in their country houses. In another letter Pliny speaks of his having fixed a day in July for giving a recital, because during that month he was less likely to be busy in the Law Courts, but it seems clear that April and the spring months were the favorite season in which authors exhibited their wares either to a select audience or to an indiscriminate assembly.

As might be supposed, numbers of people only attended these readings because it was fashionable and "the thing" to do so, and because their friends the authors would be offended if they failed to put in an appearance. There is a very amusing letter of Pliny's, in which he complains bitterly of the difficulty that authors sometimes find in securing an audience. People will promise readily enough, he says, but they are slow to enter the hall. They gossip and waste time outside. Instead of going in and waiting for the lecturer to begin, they arrange for some one to come and tell them when he has got through his introduction, or whether he is nearly at the end of his