She prays to the Lord Christ in her agony, and when her maid summons her-" By the tomb he waiteth for you, lady"-she goes to meet him, white but resolute. The interview that follows is intensely pathetic. She has vowed to Christ that

this unrighteous love shall be put away:

"I am very sorry for my sin;

Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell;

I am most fain to love you, and to win
A place in heaven some time."

So she rakes up the old passion relentlessly, though it tears her heart. Fearlessly she speaks bitter words to the man whom even yet she cannot help loving. She stabs him with a white face, and a quivering hand. She has resolved to be strong and harsh and repellant, and even his piteous reproaches do not move her :

"Lo you her thin hand,

That on the carven stone cannot keep still,
Because she loves me against God's command,

Has often been quite wet with tear on tear,

Tears Launcelot keeps somewhere, surely not
In his own heart, perhaps in Heaven, where
He will not be these ages."

But his tender humility and unresisting hopelessness all but vanquish her at last.

"They bite me-bite me, Lord God !--I shall go mad,

Or else die kissing him; he is so pale

He thinks me mad already, O bad! bad!
Let me lie down a little while and wail."

"No longer so; rise up, I pray you, love,

And slay me really, then we shall be healed
Perchance, in the after time by God above."

Then, as if stung by an adder, she starts up to her

feet, and in a passion of terror at the weakness which is assailing her, stabs him yet more cruelly. By the banner of Arthur

Banner of Arthur, with black-bended shield,

Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground

she will tell him how he has broken his knightly vows, how disloyal he has been to his lord :

"Banner, and sword, and shield, you dare not pray to die,
Lest you meet Arthur in the other world,

And, knowing who you are, he pass you by,
Taking short turns that he may watch you curl'd,

Body and face and limbs in agony,

Lest he weep presently and go away,

Saying, "I loved him once," with a sad sigh.

Now I have slain him, Lord, let me go too, I pray.

Alas! alas! I know not what to do;

[LAUNCELOT falls.

If I run fast it is perchance that I
May fall and stun myself, much better so.
Never, never again! not even when I die."

LAUNCELOT, on awaking.

"I stretched my hands towards her and fell down,
How long I lay in swoon I cannot tell;
My head and hands were bleeding from the stone,
When I rose up, also I heard a bell."

There are some wonderful lines in this passage -scarcely excelled by anything in The Idylls, a strange subtle sweetness and infectious gracelike Guenevere's own.

But after all," quoth Reginald, as he wound up the argument, "intensely human as all this is, we yet walk blindly and in the dark. The most searching, and penetrating, and brilliant faculty

can but faintly reproduce these passionate forms, or restore that faded life. Arthur, and Guenevere, and Lancelot, are dead, and the best we can do will not bring them alive again. Let us be warned in time. Carpe diem. Let us make the most of the sunlight while we may; for they are fools who confide their fame to history, and seek atonement in the grave."

It may be that he is right in the main. A prudent scepticism, not rash, but critical, is perhaps the safest frame of mind. We see through a glass darkly. The past is an enigma. The voices of the dead are faint and distant. History will not become a branch of positive science till the secrets of all hearts are loosed, till at eventime it is light.

So there sits the Sphinx; silent, unmoved, inscrutable, confessing neither to bliss nor woe, awaiting the judgment of God.

THIS

Alas! alas!

Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy! How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

HIS season of the year, when, through habitual communion with the moor-fowl and the heather, we are enabled to contemplate, in a calm. and emancipated spirit, the conventional respectabilities, which become so overpowering, and personally momentous on our return to town-this season we devote to the literature which is not

respectable." We wander through the birken glens with half-a-dozen literary vagabonds at our heels; we drink our smuggled whisky and water beside the camp-fires of questionable gipsy settlements; and we even profanely enjoy at times the

guerilla warfare which the light-headed gentry carry on against the True, and the Good, and the Beautiful of modern civilized life. Evil communi

cations corrupt good manners. At such seasons we dare to question the honesty of our statesmen, and the piety of our divines.

The Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli is a godsend to the Bohème de lettres. He is the first of the race who has been trusted with the exchequer. The god of red tape in religion and politics hates this Free Lance with its whole heart. He has defied the respectabilities, fought them on their own ground, and routed them ignominiously. He can afford to scoff with impunity at the leader of the Puritans, in the face of Puritan England. Noble lords await his pleasure, and wealthy commoners-according to Eastern metaphor-tie his shoe-strings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a grave and solemn personage; very magnificent in the dignified deference he pays to the assembly which he rules, and to the beef-eaters of old England who sit behind his back. Is the whole affair, indeed, a farce at bottom? How can the politics of our puny societies affect the chief who has stepped out of the desert? Talk of consistency or of inconsistency to the Bedouin sheik whom you have caught, and tried to tame! "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" Tory, Whig, Radical are only names; but the conduct of war, of Government, of men, are realities. that may satisfy the ambition even of a Hebrew King.

No man has been more abused than the