selection of his political instruments, or as no free agent in their choice. And seeing, M. Gambetta, that I never doubted your political capacity, I have no hesitation in adopting the latter alternative. You were shrewd enough to see the advantage of allying yourself with the Church, but not strong enough to risk the alliance. In this as in everything else you were the helpless tool of those whom you professed to command. Throughout your whole career as leader they were pressing you steadily onwards towards the gulf of anarchy. The only difference between you and your successors is that they are a little weaker and move a little faster than yourself. I see the most certain signs of the approaching end-a Budget more inflated than that of the Empire, a desperate endeavour to amuse the country with idle foreign wars. Yes, the heirs of M. Gambetta are preparing the way for the heirs of M. Blanqui, as surely as the quickening seed contains the promise of the ear.

BLAN. You are right, M. de Morny! I know it! I feel it! It is my ever-present consolation.

DE M. Make the most of it then, my worthy friend, for the heirs of M. Blanqui will in time prepare the way for the heirs of M. de Morny as surely as the corn-blades ripen for the sickle.

GAM. Not so! Not for ever! Our country is not doomed to wear out her life in the accursed mill-round of Reaction, Revolution, and again Reaction. In the faith that it will not be so even M. Blanqui and I are, I hope,

at one.

BLAN. We are, Monsieur. No one can yearn more

passionately than I for the escape of France from what you will call an "accursed mill-round"-the stern realities of despotism varied by the miserable counterfeit of liberty. I long for the real Revolution which will sweep away both oppressors and impostors, both De Mornys and Gambettas into the common rubbish-heap of the past.

DE M. À la bonne heure! And while you two, the dreamer and the intriguer, persevere thus merrily in your work of mutual throatcutting there will always, thank God, remain a future for a man of spirit, who knows how to lay you both by the heels, and to make his own fortune out of the gratitude of the sensible fellows who want to sleep quietly in their beds. His opportunity is fast coming round to him. Would I were back again on earth to seize it!

GAM. It would not have come round in my lifetime if the Fates had granted me but a few years more. I had yet a work to do for France which would have earned for me the unchanging loyalty even of that daughter of caprice. Shall I name it?

DE M. You need not. I read la revanche in your face. You are a gambler, Monsieur, like all successful Revolutionists. But did you never weigh the stakes of that tremendous partie and count the risk of losing?

GAM. Often, and with ever-strengthening resolve to dare that risk.

DE M. And yet you have had heavy accounts to settle on a former game. There are many thousands among us here who could remind you of the bloody follies of the Loire, and of the hosts that melted away round the beleaguered capital like the snows that received their blood.

GAM. Where are they that I may greet them? You shall see what sort of welcome those gallant souls will give their chief.

DE M. No doubt you need not fear a meeting with them. As Frenchmen they were fighting for their homes, and as soldiers the poor devils were too ignorant to know how recklessly their lives were wasted. But to sacrifice, not your thousands but your hundreds of thousands, and to sacrifice them not to repel an invasion but to establish a dynasty, or what is worse, perhaps, to secure a lease of power and popularity for a single life-that is another matter. Dame! I am no milksop, and I have had many a disagreeable interview with my victims-the victims, I should say, of a mutual inisunderstanding—in the winter of '51. But I have seen that unfortunate Louis pass, with his boy beside him, through the shades of his slaughtered soldiers, the harvest of Gravelotte and Sedan, and I do not feel sure that I could preserve my composure before the silent witness of those innumerable accusing eyes.

PLATO AND LANDOR.

PLA. Say no more, my friend. I have long forgiven you the affront.

LAN. Forgiven me! . . . Zounds! I must correct him in that. I will submit to no such indignity even in the Shades You have misunderstood me, O Plato. I asked no forgiveness for anything I have written concerning you. What I have just said was meant but to assure you that, poorly as I think of your dialogues, I bear you no personal ill-will.

PLA. I never provoked the ill-will of any one; and as to my writings, I am indifferent to the opinion of a barbarian.

LAN. That was well said, and I take no offence at it. As a Greek, you would naturally despise my judgment on such a matter, and I, as an Englishman, should despise you if you pretended to defer to it. I lived my whole life among men who were barbarians to me, and I never stooped to solicit their suffrages.

PLA. Barbarians, to you a barbarian? You speak in riddles. But stay! I remember. I have heard men talk of you as a Greek.

LAN. "Born out of due time." An inapt expression, to my thinking, borrowed without much attention to propriety from St. Paul.

PLA. How is it inapt? It seems to me appropriate.

LAN. The Greek spirit is immortal, and no man's birth into its service can be an anachronism. A Greek cannot be born out of due time; but he can be born devilishly out of due place, saving your presence: and that was the case with me.

PLA. You seem then to be bringing a charge against your country rather than your times. In what respect, O exile from Hellas, were your countrymen barbarians?

LAN. Do not, I entreat you, indulge in satire. It is the one form of intellectual energy to which your genius seems to have been least adapted. Nothing, as I have already told you, can be more frigid than the raillery of your dialogues.

PLA. Let me ask you then,without satire, in what respect were your countrymen more barbarian than yourself?

LAN. In every element of distinction between barbarism and culture. One-half of them were Persians in everything but the taste for philosophy, the other half Scythians in every habit but that of nomadism. Pleasure was the sole pursuit of the one and pursuit the only pleasure of the other.

PLA. Surely, my friend, you are describing them—these last, at any rate-in the language of metaphor.

LAN. Not at all, I assure you. The English country gentleman does not dwell, indeed, in a wheeled house, or drink mare's milk; but, for the destruction of life, or the endurance of fatigue, I would match him against the toughest Scythian hunter that ever cooled his dusty feet in the Tanais.