speed; and when we got well up into the road which goes by the side of the Rothay up into the region of the hills, we found that we had left Tita and her company far behind. Then he began to walk the cob.

"Look here!" he said, quite fiercely; "is Bell going to marry that German fellow ?"

"How do I know?" I answer astonished by the young man's impudence.

"You ought to know. You are her guardian. You are responsible

her"

"To you ?"

for

"No, not to me; but to your own conscience; and I think the way in which you have entrapped her into making the acquaintance of this man, of whom she knows nothing, doesn't look very well. I may as well say it when I think it. You ought to have known that a girl at her age is ready to be pleased with any novelty; and to draw her away from her old friends-I suppose you can explain it all to your own satisfaction-but I confess that to me

I let the young man rave. He went on in this fashion for some little time, getting momentarily more reckless and vehement and absurd in his statements. If Tita had only known what she had escaped.

"But after all," I say to him, when the waters of this deluge of rhetoric had abated, "what does it matter to you? We have allowed Bell to do just as she pleased; and perhaps, for all we know, she may regard Count von Rosen with favor, although she has never intimated such a thing. But what does it matter to you? You say you are going to get married."

"So I shall !" he said, with an unnecessary amount of emphasis.

"Katty Tatham is a very nice girl."

"I should think so! There's no coquetry about her, or that sort of vanity that is anxious to receive flattery from every sort of stranger that is seen in the street"

"You don't mean to say that that is the impression you have formed of Bell ?"

And here all his violence and determination broke down. In a tone of absolute despair he confessed that he was beside himself, and did not know what to do. What should he do? Ought he to implore Bell to promise to marry him? Or should

and

he leave her to her own ways, and go seek a solution of his difficulties in marrying this pretty little girl down in Sussex, who would make him a good wife and teach him to forget all the sufferings he had gone through? The wretched young fellow was really in a bad way; and there were actually tears in his eyes when he Isaid that several times of late he had wished he had the courage to drown himself.

To tell a young man in this state that there is no woman in the world worth making such a fuss about, is useless. He rejects with scorn the cruel counsels offered by middle age; and sees in them only taunts and insults. Moreover, he accuses middle age of not believing in its own maxims of worldly prudence; and sometimes that is the case.

"At all events," I say to him, "you are unjust to Bell in going on in this wild way. She is not a coquette, nor vain, nor heartless; and if you have anything to complain of, or anything to ask from her, why not go direct to herself, instead of indulging in frantic suspicions and accusations ?"

"But-but I cannot," he said. It drives me mad to see her talking to that man. If I were to begin to speak to her of all this, I am afraid matters would be made worse."

the other side of the great valley, the masses of the Wythburn and Borrodaile Fells showed their various hues and tints so that you could almost have fancied them transparent clouds. Then the road descended, and we got down to the solitary shores of Thirlmere, the most Scotch-looking, perhaps, of the English lakes. Here the slopes of the hills are more abrupt, houses are few and far between, there is an aspect of remoteness and a perfect silence reigning over the still water, and the peaks of mountains that you see beyond are more jagged and blue than the rounded hills about Windermere. From the shores of Thirlmere the road again rises, until, when you come to the crest of the height, you find the leaden-colored lake lying sheer below you, and only a little stone wall guarding the edge of the precipitous slope. We rested the horses here. Bell began to pull them handfuls of Dutch clover and grass. The Lieutenant talked to my Lady about the wonders of mountainous countries as they appeared to people who had been bred in the plains. Arthur looked over the stone wall down into the great valley; and was he thinking, I wonder, whether the safest refuge from all his troubles might not be that low-lying and silent gulf of water that seemed to be miles beneath him?

When we were about to start again, the Lieutenant says to Arthur

"If you are tired of driving the dogcart, you might come into the phaeton, and I will drive your horse on to Keswick." Who prompted him to make such an offer? Not himself, surely. I had form ed a tolerable opinion of his good-nature; but the impatient and fretful manner in which he had of late been talking about Arthur rendered it highly probable that this suggestion was his own. What did Bell's downcast look mean?

"Thank you, I prefer the dogcart," says Arthur, coldly.

"Oh, Arthur," says Bell, "you've no idea how steep the hill is, going down to Keswick, and in a dogcart too

66

"I suppose," says the young man, "that I can drive a dogcart down a hill as well as anybody else."

"At all events," says the Lieutenant, with something of a frown, "you need not address Mademoiselle as if that she did you harm in trying to prevent your breaking your neck."

This was getting serious; so that there was nothing for it but to bundle the boy into his dogcart and order the Lieutenant to change places with my lady. As for the writer of these pages-the emotions he experienced while a mad young fellow was driving him in a light and high dogcart down the unconscionable hill that lies above Keswick, he will not attempt to describe. There are occurrences in life which it is better to forget; but if ever he was tempted to evoke maledictions on the hotheadedness, and bad temper, and general insanity of boys in love-Enough! We got down to Keswick in safety.

Now we had got among the tourists, and no mistake. The hotel was all alive with elderly ladies, who betrayed an astonishing acquaintance with the names of the mountains, and apportioned them off for successive days as if they were dishes for luncheon and dinner. The landlord undertook to get us beds somewhere, if only we would come into his coffee-room, which was also a drawing-room, and had a piano in it. He was a portly and communicative person, with a certain magnificence of manner which was impressive. He betrayed quite a paternal interest in Tita, and calmly and loftily soothed her anxious fears. Indeed, his assurances pleased us much, and we began rather to like him; although the Lieutenant privately remarked that Clicquot is a French word, and ought not, under any circumstances whatever, to be pronounced "Clickot."

Then we went down to Derwentwater. It was a warm and clear twilight. Between the dark green lines of the hedges we met maidens in white with scarlet opera-cloaks coming home through the narrow lane. Then we got into the open, and found the shores of the silver lake, and got into a boat and sailed out upon the still waters, so that we could face the wonders of a brilliant sunset.

But all that glow of red and yellow in the north-west was as nothing to the strange gradations of color that appeared along the splendid range of mountain-peaks beyond the lake. From the remote north round to the south-east they stretched like a mighty wall; and whereas near the gold and crimson of the sunset they were of a warm, roseate, and half-transparent purple, as they came along into the darker regions of the twilight they grew more and more cold in hue and harsh in outline. Up

thetic philosopher or philosophic historian. A sketch of the past history of poetry, in England alone, would be sufficiently startling; and surely a most tremendous indictment might be drawn thence against Rhyme. Glance back over the works of British bards, from Chaucer downwards; study the delitia Poetarum Anglicorum. What delightful scraps of melody! what glorious bursts of song! Here is Chaucer, wearing indeed with perfect grace his metrical dress; for it sits well upon him, and becomes his hoar antiquity, and we would not for the world see him clad in the freedom of prose. Here is Spenser; and Verse becomes him well, fitly modulating the faëry tale he has to tell. Here are Gower, Lydgate, Dunbar, Surrey, Gascoigne, Daniel, Drayton, and many others: each full of dainty devices; none is strong enough to stand without a rhyme-prop on each side of him. Of all sorts of poetry, except the very best, these gentlemen give us samples; and their works are delightful reading. As mere metrists, cunning masters of the trick of verse, Gascoigne and Dunbar are acknowledged masters. Take the following verses from the "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins":

"Then Ire came in with sturt and strife, His hand was aye upon his knife,

He brandeist like a beir;

Boasters, braggarts, and bargainers,
After him passit in pairs,

All boden in feir of weir
Next in the dance followed Envy,
Fill'd full of feid and felony,

Hid malice and despite.

For privy hatred that traitor trembled,
Him follow'd many freik dissembled,
With fenyit wordis white;
And flatterers unto men's faces,
And back-biters in secret places,
To lie that had delight,
With rowmaris of false leasings;
Alas that courts of noble kings

Of them can ne'er be quite!" This, allowing for the lapse of years, still reads like "Peter Piper" at his best; easy, alliterative, pleasant, if neither deep nor cunning. For this sort of thing, and for many higher sorts of things, Rhyme was admirably adapted, and is still admirably adapted. When, however, a larger music and a more loosened speech was wanted, Rhyme went overboard directly.

Ón the stage even, Rhyme did very well, as long as the matter was in the Ralph Royster Doyster vein; but a larger soul begot a larger form, and the blank verse of Gorboduc was an experiment in

the direction of loosened speech. How free this speech became, how by turns loose and noble, how subtle and flexible it grew, in the hands of Shakspeare and the Elizabethans, all men know; and rare must have been the delight of listeners whose ears had been satiated so long with mere alliteration and jingle. The language of Shakspeare, indeed, must be accepted as the nearest existing approach to the highest and freest poetical language. Here and there a rhymed dialogue was used, when the theme was rhythmic and not too profound; as in the pretty love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the bantering, punning chat of Love's Labor's Lost. Lost. True song sparkled up in its place like a fountain. But the level dialogue for the most part was loosened speech. Observe the following speech of Prospero, usually printed in lines, each beginning with a capital :

"This King of Naples, being an enemy to me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit; which was, that he, in lieu of the premises, of homage and I know not how much tribute, should presently extirpate me and mine out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan, with all the honors, on my brother. Whereon, a treacherous army levied, one midnight fated to the purpose did Antonio open the gates of Milan; and, in the dead of darkness, the ministers for the purpose hurried thence me and thy crying self!"

Tempest, Act I., Scene 2.

Any poet since Shakspeare would doubtless have modulated this speech more exquisitely, laying special stress on the five accented syllables of each line. Shakspeare, however, was too true a musician. He knew when to use careless dialogue like the above, and when to break in with subtle modulation; and he knew, moreover, how the loose prose of the one threw out the music of the other. He knew well how to inflate his lines with the measured oratory of an offended king:

"The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruin'd; and the soul of every man
Prophetically doth forethink thy fall.
Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company;
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession;
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir,
That men would tell their children, This is he!
But, like a comet, I was wonder'd at ;
Others would say, Where? which is Bolingbroke?"
Henry IV., Act III. Scene 2.

&c.

In the hands of our great Master, indeed, blank verse becomes almost exhaustless in

its powers of expression; but nevertheless, prose is held in reserve, not merely as the fitting colloquial form of the "humorous" scenes, but as the appropriate loosened utterance of strong emotion. The very highest matter of all, indeed, is sometimes delivered in prose, as its appropriate medium. Take the wonderful set of prose dialogues in the second act of "Hamlet," and notably that exquisitely musical speech of the Prince, beginning, "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth." Turn, also, to Act V. of the same play, where the "mad matter" between Hamlet and the Gravediggers, so full of solemn significance and sound, is prose once more. The noble tragedy of " Lear," again, owes much of its weird power to the frequent use of broken speech. And is the following any the less powerful or passionate because it goes to its own music, instead of following any prescribed form ?

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"-Merchant of Venice, act 3, sc. I. It would be tedious to prolong illustrations from an author with whom everybody is supposed to be familiar. Enough to say that the careful student of Shakspeare will find his most common magic to lie in the frequent use, secret or open, of the oratio soluta. And what holds of him, holds in more or less measure of his contemporaries of Jonson, Marston, Webster, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Peele, and the rest; just as it holds of the immediate predecessor of Shakspeare, whose "mighty line" led the way for the full Elizabethan choir of voices. Then, as now, society had been surfeited with tedious jingle; and only waited for genius to set it free. It is difficult to say in what respect the following scene differs from first-class prose; although we have occasionally an orthodox blank verse line, the bulk of the passage is free and unencumbered; yet its weird imaginative melody could scarcely be surpassed.

Duch. Is he mad, too?

Servant. Pray question him; I'll leave you.

Duch. And thou hast come to make my tomb? Bos. Yes!

Duch. Let me be a little merry: Of what stuff wilt thou make it?

Bos. Nay, resolve me first: of what fashion? Duch. Why do we grow phantastical on our death-bed?

Do we affect fashion in the grave?

Bos. Most ambitiously. Princes' images on the tombs

Do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray Up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks,

carved

As if they died of the toothache! They are not
With their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as
Their minds were wholly bent on the world,
The self-same way they seem to turn their faces.
Duch. Let me know fully, therefore, the effect
Of this thy dismal preparation!-
This talk fit for a charnel.

Bos. Now I shall (a coffin, cords, and a bell).
Here is a present from your princely brothers;
And may it arrive welcome, for it brings
Last benefit, last sorrow.*

He who will carefully examine the works. of our great dramatists, will find everywhere an equal freedom; rhythm depending on the emotion of the situation, and the quality of the speakers, rather than on any fixed laws of verse.

If we turn, on the other hand, to dramatists and poets of less genius, if we open the works of Waller, Cowley, Marvell, Dryden, and even of Milton, we shall find much exquisite music, but little perhaps of that wondrous cunning familiar to us in Shakspeare and the greatest of his contemporaries. Shallow matter, as in Waller; ingenious learned matter, as in Cowley; dainty matter, as in Andrew Marvell; artificial matter, as in Dryden; and puritan matter, as in Milton, were all admirably fitted for rhymed or some other formal sort of Verse. Rhyme, indeed, may be said, while hampering the strong, to strengthen

The Duchess of Malfy, Act IV. Scene 2. The above extract is much condensed. The reader who would fully feel the force of our allusion, cannot do better than study Webster's great tragedy as a whole. It utterly discards all metrical rules, and abounds in wonderful music.