little English governess, Protestant and ever doubted who was worthy to unPuritan, finds herself friendless and derstand; but you perhaps afford the alone in the church of St. Gudule. first example of the moral nature lookUtterly broken down and miserable she ing on the understanding itself as is wholly unable to resist the mighty something that is only the first of its impulse driving her, and well-nigh be- instruments. You are perhaps the first side herself, she drops on to her knees who has reached this superiority. in the first confessional she comes to, With so fine an understanding, you and there pours forth, incoherently, all have the humility to consider its disher mental distress into the ear of turbance as a blessing, so far as it imthe hidden priest behind the curtain. proves your moral system. We are all Nothing that Charlotte Brontë has accustomed to contemplate with pleaswritten comes near this finely touched ure the suspension of the ordinary episode, both for its intuitive knowl- operations of the understanding in edge of, and its fidelity to, some of the sleep, and to be even amused by its deepest springs of human nature. nightly wanderings in dreams. From the commanding eminence which you have gained you will gradually familiarize your mind to consider its other rare than

from that constant dread which so often brings on the very evil dreaded. But whoever has brought himself to consider a disease of the brain as differing only in kind from a disease of the lungs, has robbed it of that mysterious horror which forms its chief malignity. If he were to do this by undervaluing intellect, he would indeed gain only a low quiet at the expense of mental dignity. But you do it by feeling the superiority of a moral nature over intellect itself. Disappointed in the pursuit of union with real or supposed excellence of a limited sort, you sought refuge in the contemplation of the Supreme Excellence. But, by the conflict of both, your mind was torn in pieces, and even your most powerful

Other writers have, now and then, had an equal share of the like spirit of reverent understanding. In the life of Sir James Mackintosh, published in aberrations as only more 1836, occur two very remarkable let-sleep or dreams, and in process of time ters. They were written by him when they will cease to appear to you more himself getting in years, to Mr. Robert horrible. You will thus be delivered Hall, a Baptist minister at Leicester and a friend of his early life. Mr. Hall, when more than middle-aged, became subject to attacks of recurrent insanity. Youth was gone, so that any hope of perfect recovery was out of the question. It might well be thought that in such a case to offer consolation which should be free from the taint of insincerity would be well-nigh impossible. Yet Sir James Mackintosh did not so find it. After writing to his friend that his then present distressful circumstances were in great measure 66 owing to the loftiness of his ideals," She goes on to say: "The strength of your genius would in all common circumstances have made you a most desirable correspondent, and the circumstances which now limit your understanding was unable to resist the mental excursions give to your corre- force of your still more powerful moral spondence attractions of a very peculiar feelings." The letter closes with an nature. Both the subject and the tone urgent entreaty that Mr. Hall will join of our letters are probably unexampled. them forthwith at Bombay, where, Sir I have trusted enough to speak of J. Mackintosh adds, "the house is what perhaps no friend ever touched large, so that you can avoid company, before, and you justify my confidence and where you would improve us and by contemplating with calm superiority we might help cheerfulness to steal that from which the firmest men have upon you." recoiled. That the mind of a good may approach independence of external things is a truth which no one VOL. I. 39

man

LIVING AGE.

Is there any one who can read this letter unmoved and without feeling that the gift of healing may still be

And

"whom

amongst us? What, for instance, pity. The bargain is a bad one for all might not the reception of such an concerned. Pity may be akin to love utterance do for many a lost soul in (we very much doubt it), but is cerasylum to-day? Would not the tainly own cousin to contempt. possession of one such friend go far to So busy are the seientists with life in make life blessed, however evil its out- its every, its meanest form, that they ward conditions might be? But the have no time left to bestow upon difficulty is to imagine it written to-death, which, after all, is quite as uniday! Pseudo-science holds us in so versal and quite as natural a process. tight a grip, her false spirit commands "A necessity, but a vile one," as one us so entirely, that, amongst other tri- of them once described it. "Get on fles, brain disturbance and disgrace are with your dying," urged the old now almost synonymous terms. She woman, not unkindly, to her partner has told us, and we have not been slow when he appeared to be "dawdling to hearken and to adopt her creed, that about," as she expressed it, and wastlife in the plenitude of its powers is ing both his time and her own. alone worth the living. We dishonor to "get on with the dying" would our dead without protest or remark- seem to be the only word which the witness the setting up of dead bodies living at this time of day have to offer as targets in the Edinburgh mortuary to the moribund. Is the charge made the other day. The press, so ready a just one? Verily if it is, to open its columns to the vexations the gods love die young becomes of gentlemen enforcedly spending the again pregnant with new meaning. night (somewhat prematurely, perhaps) We are aware that the greatest of our in a police-cell, or to ladies aggrieved at the non-recognition of their capacity for parliamentary selection, had for this new amenity of science no single word of comment, When mental disorder comes, our modern method is to hide away those who are "stricken of the gods," as if to them, and not to our own materialistic indifference, belonged the deeper shame. Palaces abound round London and all over the provinces, filled with the living dead, of whom no acknowledging word is Regretfully we remember that it was ever spoken. It may be that for some a Frenchman, Dacier of Anquetal, who, of them the separated life offers the being informed at the age of eighty best chance of recovery. But this can- that his death might be near, wrote to not be true of all the unhappy inmates. | invite a friend in these joyous words: Only to the young, apparently, is "Venez voir un homme qui meurt granted license for full and free ex- plein de la vie." He apparently had pression of its moods. "Human docu- mastered the idea that the fine art of ments" we have had galore, all penned dying offers to the full as great oppor by experienced young persons under tunities, alike to professors and stu twenty-five years of age. To the old dents, as does the fine art of living whose need is far more urgent-for about which we are all so mightily is not the day of their long silence busy. Is it fanciful to suggest that his at hand?-no such indulgences are philosophy had even gone a step be granted. To be dumb if they cannot yond, and that, secure in his belief in smile is their hard sentence. The continued existence, he looked upon spirit of reverence for the old is, say the last twenty years of his life, not as our hostile critics, exchanged in En- a period of repose and inactivity after gland to-day for the spirit of careless labor well performed, during which his

moralists says, "Nay, retire men cannot when they would, neither will they when it were reason; but are impa tient of privateness even in age and sickness which require the shadow; like old townsmen that will be still sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer age to scorn." But, it must be remembered, Lord Bacon was an Englishman, reared under the influence of our climate, and with the shadow of Calvin about him.

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part was to sit still and be honored of | adjusted to any principles; it was for* all men, but rather as a time of begin- ever being affected by those with which ning again, of learning afresh, and from the last joined of the teachers, how best to make ready for the new worlds opening before him? If this were so, what a supple and buoyant spirit he must have carried with him to the great unknown !

B. A. CRACKANTHORPE.

From Blackwood's Magazine.
THE STORY OF MARGRÉDEL:

BEING A FIRESIDE HISTORY OF A
FIFESHIRE FAMILY.

CHAPTER X.

he came in contact. Only, he remained. neutral, as it were, like a captain who knew how his ship was apt to veer through the influence of the iron hills about him, and made allowances for the errors or inconsistency in himself. Reason fixes most of us; Frank never reasoned. He lived by intuition, as women live, they say.

Consequently, he studied every one whom he came across; and women most carefully, for they told you less than men, and required more delicate discrimination. At present Jean was under the lens. It was not love of reading character, you see. It was the

"GOOD-MORNING, Miss Oliphant," demand of his selfishness to know how said the captain, a few days later, giv-best to hold himself in the eyes of ing her his left hand, for his right was still slung. "The short shadows outside" (he inclined his eyebrows to the trees on the lawn) "tell me I am late, as usual."

"But this morning not last as usual, Captain Hill. Mother is not here yet." Jean poured out his coffee.

those with whom he would stand well. They were the whole world, if possible; not Rab only, but the cuddies also. In the main, his sensitiveness singled out the beautiful and the good. When he would he could sail past the most tempting beauty, without waxed ears. He went about tasting peaches, "Like her, I have an invalid's priv- and the over-sweet ones he could deilege. Otherwise your virtuous hours tect and throw away. Selfishness is and industry would shame me," he the Devil, and the Devil's gift is the said; and he pointed to the needle- knowledge of good and evil. It is not work which she had laid aside. strange, therefore, that the greatest devilishness carries with it a taste for the good.

Perhaps you may think that these are too out-of-the-way reflections for the breakfast-room at Eden Braes. But Frank's thought then was, How fresh everything looked there, with the clear sun shining among the cups and on this girl who sat at the other end of the table from him! And if Frank Hill was the man that I have painted him (and I would do no one a wrong deliberately, least of all a man dead and buried years ago), we who follow Jean's history should know what really these thoughts of his about her mean.

Frank Hill, I have been told, had a way of saying things that balanced themselves betwixt the serious and the flippant; and the tone of his voice in saying them hovered between the two. From words and deeds of his which have come to my knowledge (and in due time you shall hear of some of them), I judge that, could you have laid back the externals of the man as you might an eyelid, you should have exposed a hundred humors in a state of inconsistency. He could have told you all about himself, how neutral he was towards all that went on within him and around him, but he would not have told you. It was so bad in "What a simple, earnest, girlish taste to be indiscriminatingly intro- girl!" he had said to himself often spective. Indiscriminatingly, observe. during these days at Eden Braes. She The most selfish thing about this self- was a new type. Only, one had to ish man was his fine taste, his sensi- force her into womanly relations. By tiveness. His compass was never womanly relations Frank meant confi

dential relations on the assumption of in his chair, and ever and again Marthe sexes. One of the conditions in himself of which he was well aware was the heat in his blood.

into her head. She felt as if she lay in | Jean like morning sunshine on the a foreign city. river flickering at first, struggling through mists, and reflecting itself on odd, trembling little accidents of her ways, but gradually lighting her whole life, and gathering up again the heat to itself.

Of all this she said nothing to Jean. But the simple-minded Jean, fitted to be the heroine of a tragedy but not to imagine one, never forgot Margrédel's intensity in speaking the part of Ophelia. As we know, she had had Marg'et Hetherwick was a witness her own childish sorrows; they had of one meeting between Jean and touched her heart. She had wept with Frank, down by the old mill on the Ophelia as if Ophelia had been a sister. other side of the river against Eden She knew nothing of the imaginative Braes. It was through her that I came sympathy; and that it was which made to know that Frank whispered tender her story to Frank so real. She was words to a willing Jean. I am connot critical. She could not understand strained to tell you this because of Frank when he said: something which happened later. In "Ophelia or Hamlet it matters itself, too, it interests me, as illustratnot. Fate, overwhelming Circum-ing the rich increase which capital enstance, devoured both."

"Yes, I see," Jean replied slowly, as if working out the idea in her own mind. "They couldn't help it, you mean. I never thought of that. Nor could Ophelia help it."

"That's tragedy," Frank said. "But we're all in God's hands, and he can make it tragedy or-comedy." She looked a little scared at having mentioned God's name in the same breath with comedy.

"We are all in stopped.

joys. Curious ears hear the newest secrets, even as wealthy men are forever receiving legacies; and if you are conscious of virtue that does not fructify, depend upon it you have buried a napkin somewhere or other.

For her own sake and for the sake of others, perhaps Marg'et's talent would have been as well hidden. To see and hear aright what good fortune had put in her way at the mill, she mounted the rickety staircase to the second story, "then Frank and leaned far out of the window over the heads of Jean and the captain. She being a big woman and the aperture small, her elbow withdrew the support of the window-sash, which came down on her shoulders and kept her a listener willy-nilly. By and by Jean and Frank moved off. Hour after hour passed, and the moon rose upon the patient prisoner, who would not for the world have effected her escape by shouting for a stranger's help.

Did he think to himself, "Do I believe that?" and marvel at his own moral nature, which had been whittled away to a point so fine that, knowing himself, he felt no remorse? At any rate, it was a strange scruple which prevented him playing the hypocrite with God's name, and did not prevent him saying:

"It's only on the stage that women die of love. In the every-day world their hearts are harder, I think. You never heard of a girl dying of love, did you?"

"No," said Jean gravely, dropping her eyes before his look and taking up her work.

Towards midnight Rab appeared on the path searching for his wife. Marg'et knew the disadvantages of her present case; not the least of them was her inability to gesticulate. It was not often, so to speak, that she was in so tight a place.

"Takin' yer daunder, Rab?" she called to him, as unconcernedly as she could.

Before his stay at Eden Braes was over, she had come to listen to him whisper warmer things in her ears. He sounded her with his fine sensi- He stopped and looked up. By the tiveness, and watched her love mark light of the moon he read the situation, higher and higher. Love dawned on and was equal to it. Striking an atti