accord with this opinion; and if Flitters was to be "quodded" for that period, it meant starvation to Tatters at least. The Counsellor might be able to make out a living for himself, but Tatters would inevitably be reduced to breaking a lamp or demanding alms of a poor-law guardian, either a preparatory step to following his friend.

The Counsellor, meantime, uttered a widemouthed howl, and flinging himself into the throng, proclaimed himself her brother, and demanded at large the history of the calamity. From twenty voices he heard twenty stories, each widely differing from the others. This much at least he knew, she was being carried to the hospital; and the two dray men who had "killed" her were in custody.

He rushed back to Tatters, whom he found now the centre of a group of sympathizing women, who were bidding him not to cry, and trying to obtain his address from him. Tatters, in all his grief, did not for an instant lose his self-possession, or forget his mendacity, and was in the middle of a pathetic family history when the Counsellor arrived.

66

Who hot her?" he sobbed.

"Twas Hugh Kelly: no, 'twas Slattery," replied another; "bud when she comes to she'll 'dentify him, if so be sh's raelly kilt. Don' ye remember when Bill Casey got six months for murderin his mother-in-law wid the poker; he an' his brother was in it, an' they were both had up to hospital for the old wan to choose which done it. She'll have to 'dentify Kelly whenever she comes to."

The Counsellor listened so far, his sharp ears selecting all the salient points out of the babel, for everybody had rushed out into the street to enjoy the excitement. Then he seized Tatters, and started with him in pursuit of the cortège.

They followed it to the hospital, and waited until nearly seven o'clock to hear the report of the doctors.

wife that the Counsellor did not guess her bootless errand.

It was a beautiful day. A hot sun beat on the roofs, the granite steps of the great portico glistened with a dazzling sheen, and the huge plate-glass windows were wide open, like so many mouths gasping for air.

Tatters and the Counsellor went down a back lane-the same where the former had changed his toilette the preceding day, and lay down to pass the anxious hours as best they could.

The Counsellor's expedition in search of evidence had been absolutely useless. No one had seen the blow. Some were positive it was Slattery; others equally positive it was Hugh Kelly's foot that had given the fatal kick. His only hope lay now in the chance of Flitters being able to identify the criminal. He lay quite still, biting his fingers, and fidgeting with impatience for the hour of admittance to chime on the steeple clock near by. Tatters was quieter; he had made up his mind for the worst, and lay still in the sun-heat, mechanically tracing figures in the soft white dust of the path, or plucking idly at the blades of grass that struggled for a dusty existence in the stone-bordering beside him.

One o'clock struck; but the Counsellor was so busy counting the chimes that preceded the hour-stroke, that he did not see a cab roll by, with a policeman seated on the box, and two more inside in company with two big roughcoated men. An outside car followed, with some men in plain clothes seated on it.

They all passed up the great, white, hot steps, and through the door into a wide long hall, so cool, so clean, and fragrant of flowers, that it felt like heaven itself after the sweltering heat and dust without. They stood still, waiting for orders. The prisoners, stunned and soddened-looking, hardly raised their eyes from the tesselated floor. At last a timid, pretty nun appeared, and, drooping her eyes, murmured something to one of the men in plain clothes, at which the whole troop set Two o'clock was the hour at which the poor themselves in motion, and followed her up a senseless body was to recover its understand-great carved oak staircase through fresh wide ing and human intelligence. Long before halls with deep windows full of cool green ferns, even mid-day Tatters and the Counsellor might into a ward where, on one white bed among have been seen skulking about the precincts many others, some tenanted, some empty, lay of the hospital. They saw a pale, sickly Flitters, her dark eyes half closed, and her woman, with a tiny infant in her arms, go up wild hair streaming back on the snowy pillow. the huge granite steps of the door, and beg in vain for admittance. After a short interview with the portress sister she crept away again, sobbing despairingly.

The sun-stained face had been sponged with vinegar and water, and looked strangely colourless and pinched. The dark violet circles round the eyes and mouth were most significant of Perhaps it was as well for Hugh Kelly's all. The reverend mother stood with a grave,

EDWARD DOWDEN.

[Edward Dowden was born in Cork, on May 3, 1843. He entered Trinity College in 1859. During his undergraduate career he chiefly devoted his attention to the study of mental science, and obtained the highest collegiate distinctions attainable in this subject. His fellow-students gave the perhaps not less valuable testimony to his mastery of this branch of study by electing him president of the University Philosophical Society twice in succession. In 1867 he became professor of English literature.

ful and pliant, spreading its first leaves to the sunshine of May, differs from the moving expanse of greenery visible a century later, which is hard to comprehend and probe with the eye in its infinite details, multitudinous and yet one, receiving through its sensitive surfaces the gifts of light and dew, of noonday and of night, grasping the earth with inextricable living knots, not unpossessed of haunts of shadow and secrecy, instinct with ample mysterious murmurs, the tree which has a history, and bears in wrinkled bark and wrenched bough memorials of time and change, of hardship, and drought, and storm. The poet Gray in a well-known passage invented a piece of beautiful mythology, according to which the infant Shakspere is represented

"Far from the sun and summer gale
In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon strayed,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless child
Stretched forth his little arms and smiled;
This pencil take, she said, whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year,

Mr. Dowden has been a frequent contributor to all the high-class magazines: the Contemporary, Fortnightly, Westminster, Fraser, and Cornhill. His first work was published in 1875-Shakspere, his Mind and Art, a Critical Study. This is a very remarkable con- as receiving gifts from the great Dispensatribution to the literature of the great Eng-tress:lish dramatist, and has already taken rank among the standard works on the subject. It is now in its fourth edition, and has been translated into German and Russian. A volume of Poems, which appeared in 1876, was received with great favour by the leading critical journals, and has passed that Rubicon of poets—a second edition. Studies in Literature (1875) contained a number of suggestive criticisms on the chief literary masters of our time-the most remarkable perhaps being that on George Eliot. Mr. Dowden has, besides, contributed a Shakspere Primer to the "Literature Primers" edited by the well-known historian Mr. J. R. Green, and he was chosen to contribute Southey to the series of "English Men of Letters," in course of publication under the guidance of Mr. John Morley.]

THE GROWTH OF SHAKSPERE'S
MIND AND ART.1

Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy,
Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears,
Or ope the sacred fount of sympathetic tears."

But the mighty mother, more studious of the welfare of her charge, in fact gave her gifts only as they could be used. Those keys she did not intrust to Shakspere until, by manifold experience, by consolidating of intellect, imagination, and passions, and by the growth of self-control, he had become fitted to confront the dreadful, actual presences of human anguish and of human joy.

Everything takes up its place more rightly in a spacious world, accurately observed, than in the narrow world of the mere idealist. In Now we proceed to observe, in some few of bare acquisition of observed fact Shakspere marvellously increased from year to year. He its stages of progress, the growth of that organism. Shakspere in 1590, Shakspere in grew in wisdom and in knowledge (such an admission does not wrong the divinity of 1600, and Shakspere in 1610, was one and the same living entity; but the adolescent Shak-genius), not less but more than other men. spere differed from the adult, and again from Quite a little library exists illustrating the Shakspere in the supremacy of his ripened branch of information, and with that: The minute acquaintance of Shakspere with this manhood, as much as the slender stem, grace-Legal Acquirements of Shakspere; Shakspere's Knowledge and Use of the Bible; Shakspere's

1 By permission of the author.

Delineations of Insanity; The Rural Life of had gained vigour to cope with fate; and

could "accept all things not understood." And during these years, while each faculty was augmenting its proper life, the vital play of one faculty into and through the other became more swift, subtle, and penetrating. In Shakspere's earlier writings we can observe him setting his wit to work, or his fancy to work; now he is clever and intellectual, and again he is tender and enthusiastic. But in his latter style imagination and thought, wisdom, and mirth, and charity, experience and surmise, play into and through one another, until frequently the significance of a passage becomes obscured by its manifold vitality. The murmur of an embryo thought or feeling already obscurely mingles with the murmurs of the parent life in which it is enveloped.

Shakspere; Shakspere's Garden; The Ornithology of Shakspere; The Insects mentioned by Shakspere; and such like. Conjectural inquiry, which attempts to determine whether Shakspere was an attorney's clerk or whether he was a soldier, whether Shakspere was ever in Italy, or whether he was in Germany, or whether he was in Scotland,-inquiry such as this may lead to no very certain result with respect to the particular matter in question. But one thing which such special critical studies as these establish is the enormous receptivity of the poet. This vast and varied mass of information he assimilated and made his own. And such store of information came to Shakspere only by the way, as an addition to the more important possession of knowledge about human character and human life which forms the proper body of fact needful for dramatic art. In proportion as an ani-imply? It implies capacity for obtaining the mal is of great size, the masses of nutriment which he procures are large. "The Arctic whale gulps in whole shoals of acephale and molluscs."

But it was not alone or chiefly through mass of acquisition that Shakspere became great. He was not merely a centre for the drifting capital of knowledge. Each faculty expanded and became more energetic, while at the same time the structural arrangement of the man's whole nature became more complex and involved. His power of thought increased steadily as years went by, both in sure grasp of the known, and in brooding intensity of gaze upon the unknown. His emotions, instead of losing their energy and subtlety as youth deepened into manhood, instead of becoming dulled and crusted over by contact with the world, became (as is the case with all the greatest men and women) by contact with the world swifter and of more ample volume. As Shakspere penetrated farther and farther into the actual facts of our life, he found in those facts more to rouse and kindle and sustain the heart; he discovered more awful and mysterious darkness, and also more intense and lovelier light. And it is clearly ascertainable from his plays and poems that Shakspere's will grew with advancing age, beyond measure, calmer and more strong. Each formidable temptation he succeeded, before he was done with it, in subduing, at least so far as to preclude a fatal result. In the end he obtained a serene and indefeasible possession of himself. He still remained, indeed, baffled before the mystery of life and death; but he

Now what does this extraordinary growth

materials of growth; in this case materials for the growth of intellect, of imagination, of the will, of the emotions.

It means, therefore, capacity of seeing many facts, of meditating, of feeling deeply, and of controlling such feeling. It implies the avoidance of injuries which interfere with growth, escape from the enemies which bring life to a sudden end, and therefore strength, and skill, and prudence in dealing with the world. It implies a power in the organism of fitting its movements to meet the numerous external co-existences and sequences. In a word, we are brought back once again to Shakspere's resolute fidelity to fact. By virtue of this his life became a success, as far as success is permitted to such a creature as man in such a world as the present.

THE SINGER.

"That was the thrush's last good-night," I
thought,

And heard the soft descent of summer rain
In the drooped garden leaves; but hush! again
Odours of violets dim in woodland ways,
The perfect iterance,-freer than unsought

Deeper than coiled waters laid a-dream

Below mossed ledges of a shadowy stream,
And faultless as blown roses in June days.
Full-throated singer! art thou thus anew
Voiceful to hear how round thyself alone
The enriched silence drops for thy delight
More soft than snow, more sweet than honey-dew?
Now cease: the last faint western streak is gone,
Stir not the blissful quiet of the night.

MARGARET STOKES.

[It is one among the many hopeful signs of | ber of small buildings, either grouped together our times that the enthusiasm for the study as at Glendalough, or thickly scattered over of Ireland's remote past, which is practically the face of the country; and at the time of a new phenomenon in Irish literature, has transition to Romanesque there was no corpassed from the ranks of men to those of responding change in the ecclesiastical system women. Equally encouraging is it to see the of the country. love of archæological study pass from one generation to another.