on his breast. Amyas stood spell-bound. The effect of the narcotic was all but miraculous in his eyes. The sustained eloquence, the novel richness of diction in one seemingly drowned in sensual sloth, were in his eyes the possession of some evil spirit. And yet he could not answer the Evil One. His English heart, full of the divine instinct of duty and public spirit, told him that it must be a lie: but how to prove it a lie? And he stood for full ten minutes searching for an answer, which seemed to fly farther and farther off the more he sought for it. . .

A rustle a roar ! a shriek! and Amyas lifted his eyes in time to see a huge dark bar shoot from the crag above the dreamer's head, among the group of girls. A dull crash, as the group flew asunder; and in the midst, upon the ground, the tawny limbs of one were writhing beneath the fangs of a black jaguar, the rarest and most terrible of the forest kings. Of one? But of which? Was it Ayacanora? And sword in hand, Amyas rushed madly forward before he reached the spot those tortured limbs were still.

It was not Ayacanora; for, with a shriek which rang through the woods, the wretched dreamer, wakened thus at last, sprang up and felt for his sword. Fool! he had left it in his hammock! Screaming the name of his dead bride, he rushed on the jaguar as it crouched above its prey, and seizing its head with teeth and nails, worried it, in the ferocity of his madness, like a mastiff dog.

The brute wrenched its head from his grasp, and raised its dreadful paw. Another moment, and the husband's corpse would have lain by the wife's. But high in air gleamed Amyas's blade; down, with all the weight of his huge body and strong arm, fell that most trusty steel; the head of the jaguar dropped grinning on its victim's corpse:

'And all stood still who saw him fall,

While men might count a score.'

'O Lord Jesus,' said Amyas to himself, 'thou hast answered the devil for me! And this is the selfish rest for which I would have bartered the rest which comes by working where thou hast put me!'

They bore away the lithe corpse into the forest, and buried it under soft moss and virgin mould; and so the fair clay was transfigured into fairer flowers, and the poor gentle untaught spirit returned to God who gave it. And then Amyas went sadly and silently back again, and Parracombe walked after him, like one who walks in sleep. Ebsworthy, sobered by the shock, entreated to come too; but Amyas forbade him gently. 'No, lad; you are forgiven. God forbid that I should judge you or any man. Sir John shall come up and marry you; and then, if it still be your will to stay, the Lord forgive you, if you be wrong; in the meanwhile, we will leave with you all that we can spare. Stay here, and pray to God to make you, and me too, wiser men.'

And so Amyas departed. He had come out stern and proud, but he came back again like a little child.

(From Westward Ho!)

The Last Buccanier.

Oh England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,

But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I ;
And such a port for mariners I ne'er shall see again
As the pleasant Isle of Avès, beside the Spanish Main.

There were forty craft in Avès that were both swift and stout,

All furnished well with small arms and cannons round about;

And a thousand men in Avès made laws so fair and free To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.

Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,

Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folk of old;

Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as

stone,

Who flog men and keel-haul them, and starve them to the bone.

Oh the palms grew high in Avès, and fruits that shone like gold,

And the colibris and parrots they were gorgeous to behold;

And the negro maids to Avès from bondage fast did flee,
To welcome gallant sailors, a-sweeping in from sea.

Oh sweet it was in Avès to hear the landward breeze
A-swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the

roar

Of the breakers on the reef outside, that never touched the shore.

But Scripture saith, an ending to all fine things must be; So the King's ships sailed on Avès, and quite put down

were we.

All day we fought like bulldogs, but they burst the booms at night;

And I fled in a piragua, sore wounded, from the fight.

Nine days I floated starving, and a negro lass beside, Till for all I tried to cheer her, the poor young thing she died;

But as I lay a gasping, a Bristol sail came by, And brought me home to England here, to beg until I die.

And now I'm old and going-I'm sure I can't tell where ;

One comfort is, this world 's so hard, I can't be worse off there :

If I might but be a sea-dove, I'd fly across the main, To the pleasant Isle of Avès, to look at it once again.

Ode to the North-East Wind.
Welcome, wild North-easter!
Shame it is to see
Odes to every zephyr ;

Ne'er a verse to thee.
Welcome, black North-easter!
O'er the German foam;
O'er the Danish moorlands,
From thy frozen home.
Tired we are of summer,
Tired of gaudy glare,
Showers soft and steaming,
Hot and breathless air.
Tired of listless dreaming,
Through the lazy day :
Jovial wind of winter
Turn us out to play!

Sweep the golden reed-beds;

Crisp the lazy dyke; Hunger into madness Every plunging pike. Fill the lake with wild-fowl; Fill the marsh with snipe; While on dreary moorlands Lonely curlew pipe. Through the black fir-forest Thunder harsh and dry, Shattering down the snow flakes Off the curdled sky. Hark! The brave North-easter! Breast-high lies the scent, On by holt and headland, Over heath and bent. Chime, ye dappled darlings,

Through the sleet and snow.
Who can override you?

Let the horses go!
Chime, ye dappled darlings,
Down the roaring blast;
You shall see a fox die

Ere an hour be past.
Go! and rest to-morrow,

Hunting in your dreams, While our skates are ringing O'er the frozen streams. Let the luscious South-wind Breathe in lovers' sighs, While the lazy gallants

Bask in ladies' eyes.
What does he but soften

Heart alike and pen?
'Tis the hard grey weather
Breeds hard English men.
What's the soft South-wester?
'Tis the ladies' breeze,
Bringing home their true-loves
Out of all the seas:
But the black North-easter,

Through the snow-storm hurled, Drives our English hearts of oak

Seaward round the world. Come, as came our fathers,

Heralded by thee, Conquering from the eastward,

Lords by land and sea. Come; and strong within us Stir the Vikings' blood; Bracing brain and sinew;

Blow, thou wind of God!

Young and Old.

When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen ;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,

And all the trees are brown;

And all the sport is stale, lad,

And all the wheels run down;

Creep home, and take your place there,

The spent and maimed among ; God grant you find one face there You loved when all was young.

(From The Water Babies.)

His widow published his Life and Letters in 1876 (2 vols.); and there is a monograph on Kingsley as a Christian Socialist' and reformer by Kaufmann (1892). A collected edition of his works appeared in twenty-eight volumes in 1879-81; an édition de luxe of the Life and Works was issued in 1901-3 in nineteen volumes, of which the sixteenth was occupied by the poems. Mrs Harrison, distinguished as a novelist under the pen-name of Lucas Malet,' is his youngest daughter.

George Henry Kingsley (1827-92), the second brother in a gifted family, was born at Islington, was educated at King's College School, and graduated in medicine at Edinburgh and at Paris. His devotion to professional duty in a time of cholera was commemorated by his brother in Two Years Ago. In attendance on patients he travelled much; and he wrote, besides Notes on Sport and Travel, one famous book, South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor- his compagnon de voyage on this occasion being the Earl of Pembroke.-His daughter, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, was educated mainly at home on account of her weak health, and early became a voracious but desultory reader of books of all kinds. And after the death of both father and mother she resolved to travel and study the manners and customs of uncivilised peoples. She made two journeys in the Congo country, in the Cameroons, and on the Ogowé; her Travels in West Africa (1897), besides being 'rich in incident and bubbling over with racy humour,' showed a marvellous instinct for looking at savage rites, religions, and usages from the native point of view; and her original and unconventional views on some missionary methods, and on the services of the traders to Europe and civilisation, provoked criticism, but proved the writer's absolute good faith and unscrupulous desire to do justice to all aspects of truth. She had planned another voyage to study fishes and fetishes,' but at Cape Town volunteered to nurse sick Boer prisoners, and fell a victim to enteric fever in the Simon's Town hospital.

Henry Kingsley (1830-76), the younger brother of Charles, was born at Barnack rectory, near Stamford, and was brought up at Clovelly and Chelsea. From King's College, London, he passed in 1850 to Worcester College, Oxford, but went down in 1853 without a degree, and started for the Australian gold-diggings. He never talked of his colonial experiences, but is known to have been for a time in the mounted police. He turned up again at Chelsea in 1858, and next year wrote at Eversley The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, which, like The Hillyars and the Burtons (1865), is full of the strong, vivid life of the antipodes. Still, Ravenshoe (1861) is his masterpiece. Austin Elliot (1863), Mademoiselle Mathilde (1868), and Stretton (1869) deserve men

tion; but his later works are of much less value, save perhaps his children's story, The Boy in Grey (1871). He married in 1864, and settled at Wargrave near Henley, then migrated in 1869 to Edinburgh to become the editor of the Liberal Daily Review. It was not a success, and he was glad next year to turn war correspondent. His best novels are manly, pathetic, strong; yet even the best are full of most obvious faults-elementary solecisms, bad Irish and worse Scottish dialect, frequent improbabilities, and occasional impossibilities. Besides, as the critics have told us, they all lack distinction of style.' Yet how noble (he loved that epithet) they often are! That a story should move one to tears or laughter, better still to both, is a true test of excellence; Henry Kingsley's stories are hard to read aloud, for wanting to laugh, or else wanting not to cry. There is an edition of them, with a Memoir (1894) by Mr Clement Shorter.

A Bushranger.

It was one wild dreary day in the spring; a day of furious wind and cutting rain; a day when few passengers were abroad, and when the boatmen were gathered in knots among the sheltered spots upon the quays, waiting to hear of disasters at sea; when the ships creaked and groaned at the wharfs, and the harbour was a sheet of wind-driven foam, and the domain was strewed with broken boughs. On such a day as this, Major Buckley and myself, after a sharp walk, found ourselves in front of the principal gaol in Sydney.

We were admitted, for we had orders; and a small, wiry, clever-looking man, about fifty, bowed to us as we entered the whitewashed corridor, which led from the entrance-hall. We had a few words with him, and then followed him.

To the darkest passage in the darkest end of that dreary place; to the condemned cells. And my heart sank as the heavy bolt shot back, and we went into the first one on the right.

Before us was a kind of bed-place. And on that bed-place lay the figure of a man. Though it is twenty years ago since I saw it, I can remember that scene as though it were yesterday.

He lay upon a heap of tumbled blankets, with his face buried in a pillow. One leg touched the ground, and round it was a ring, connecting the limb to a long iron bar, which ran along beneath the bed. One arm also hung listlessly on the cold stone floor, and the other was thrown around his head-a head covered with short black curls, worthy of an Antinous, above a bare muscular neck, worthy of a Farnese Hercules. I advanced towards him.

I

The governor held me back. 'My God, sir,' he said, 'take care. Don't, as you value your life, go within length of his chain.' But at that moment the handsome head was raised from the pillow, and my eyes met George Hawker's. Oh Lord! such a piteous, wild look. could not see the fierce, desperate villain who had kept our country-side in terror so long. No, thank God, I could only see the handsome curly-headed boy who used to play with James Stockbridge and myself among the gravestones in Drumston churchyard. I saw again

the merry lad who used to bathe with us in Hatherleigh water, and whom, with all his faults, I had once loved well. And seeing him, and him only, before me, in spite of a terrified gesture from the governor, I walked up to the bed, and, sitting down beside him, put my arm round his neck.

'George! George! Dear old friend!' I said. 'Oh George, my boy, has it come to this?'

I don't want to be instructed in my duty. I know what my duty was on that occasion as well as any man. My duty as a citizen and a magistrate was to stand at the farther end of the cell, and give this hardened criminal a moral lecture, showing how honesty and virtue, as in my case, had led to wealth and honour, and how yielding to one's passions had led to disgrace and infamy, as in his. That was my duty, I allow. But then, you see, I didn't do my duty. I had a certain tender feeling about my stomach which prevented me from doing it. So I only hung there, with my arm round his neck, and said, from time to time, 'Oh George, George!' like a fool.

He put his two hands upon my shoulders, so that his fetters hung across my breast, and he looked me in the face. Then he said, after a time, What! Hamlyn? Old Jeff Hamlyn! The only man I ever knew that I didn't quarrel with. Come to see me now, eh? Jeff,

old boy, I'm to be hung to-morrow.'

I know it,' I said. And I came to ask you if I could do anything for you. For the sake of dear old Devon, George.'

'Anything you like, old Jeff,' he said, with a laugh, 'so long as you don't get me reprieved. If I get loose again, lad, I'll do worse than I ever did yet, believe me. I've piled up a tolerable heap of wickedness as it is, though. I've murdered my own son, Jeff. Do you know that?'

I answered, 'Yes; I know that, George; but that was an accident. You did not know who he was.'

'He came at me to take my life,' said Hawker. 'And I tell you, as a man who goes out to be hung to-morrow, that, if I had guessed who he was, I'd have blown my own brains out to save him from the crime of killing me. Who is that man?'

'Don't you remember him?' I said. 'Major Buckley.' The Major came forward, and held out his hand to George Hawker. You are now,' he said, 'like a dead man to me. You die to-morrow; and you know it, and face it like a man. I come to ask you to forgive me anything you may have to forgive. I have been your enemy since I first saw you: but I have been an honest and open enemy; and now I am your enemy no longer. I ask you to shake hands with me. I have been warned not to come within arm's-length of you, chained as you But I am not afraid of you.'

are.

The Major came and sat on the bed-place beside him. 'As for that little animal,' said George Hawker, pointing to the governor, as he stood at the farther end of the cell, if he comes within reach of me, I'll beat his useless little brains out against the wall, and he knows it. He was right to caution you not to come too near me. 1 nearly killed a man yesterday; and to-morrow, when they come to lead me out- But with regard to you, Major Buckley, the case is different. Do you know I should be rather sorry to tackle you; I'm afraid you would be too heavy for me. As to my having anything to forgive, Major, I don't know that there is anything.

If there is, let me tell you that I feel more kind and hearty toward you and Hamlyn for coming to me like this to-day than I've felt toward any man this twenty year. By-the-bye, let no man go to the gallows without clearing himself as far as he may. Do you know that I set on that red-haired villain, Moody, to throttle Bill Lee, because I hadn't pluck to do it myself?'

'Poor Lee!' said the Major.

'Poor devil!' said Hawker. Why, that man had gone through every sort of villainy, from' (so and so up to so and so, he said; I shall not particularise) before my beard was grown. Why, that man laid such plots and snares for me when I was a lad, that a bishop could not have escaped. He egged me on to forge my own father's name. He drove me on to ruin. And now,

because it suited his purpose to turn honest, and act as faithful domestic to my wife for twenty years, he is mourned for as an exemplary character, and I go to the gallows. He was a meaner villain than ever I was.'

'George,' I asked, 'have you any message for your wife?'

'Only this,' he said; 'tell her I always liked her pretty face, and I'm sorry I brought disgrace upon her. Through all my rascalities, old Jeff, I swear to you that I respected and liked her to the last. I tried to see her last year, only to tell her that she needn't be afraid of me, and should treat me as a dead man; but she and her blessed pig-headed lover, Tom Troubridge, made such knife and pistol work of it that I never got the chance of saying the word I wanted. She'd have saved herself much trouble if she hadn't acted so much like a frightened fool. I never meant her any harm. You may tell her all this if you judge right, but I leave it to you. Time's up, I see. I ain't so much of a coward, am I, Jeff? Good-bye, old lad, good-bye.'

That was the last we saw of him; the next morning he was executed with four of his comrades.

(From Geoffry Hamlyn.)

F. HINDES GROOME.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), born in London, was the only child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In her seventeenth year she eloped to the Continent with Shelley, and after living with him for two years, she was married to him when his first wife, Harriet, had committed suicide. In the summer of 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary were living on the banks of the Lake of Geneva; and the Shelleys often passed their evenings with Byron at his house at Diodati. Having during a week of rain amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed to write something in imitation of them. Thus began Byron's tale of the Vampire, which Polidori, his physician, completed and published as his patron's. But the most memorable result of the story-telling compact was Mrs Shelley's romance of Frankenstein, recognised on its publication in 1817 as worthy of Godwin's daughter and Shelley's wife. It is on the model of St Leon. A native of Geneva, Frankenstein is sent to the University of Ingolstadt, where, having already dabbled in magic and mystery, he pores over books on physiology, makes chemical experiments, visits

sepulchres and dissecting-rooms, and after days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue succeeds in discovering the secret of life. Full of his discovery, he proceeds to create a man, and after revolting experiments constructs a gigantic figure eight feet high, and, a veritable modern Demiurgus, breathes into its nostrils the breath of life. The Monster ultimately becomes a terror to his creator, haunts him like a spell, murders his friend, and strangles his bride. Frankenstein pursues him to the Arctic regions, and then perishes of cold and anguish; while the Monster disappears from the scene, resolved to put a period to his unhallowed existence.

After the death of her husband, Mrs Shelleywho was left with an only surviving son to inherit the baronetcy-returned to London, and devoted herself to literary pursuits, producing Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck, Lodore (1835; largely autobiographical), and other works of fiction, none of which merited the success of Frankenstein, though several of them contain admirable passages. Her father-in-law, when making her an allowance, insisted on the suppression of the volume of Shelley's Posthumous Poems which she had issued in 1824. She wrote industriously and gracefully for the annuals, contributed biographies of foreign artists and men of letters to the Cabinet Cyclopædia, edited and wrote prefaces to Shelley's Poetical Works (1839), and also edited Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840). Her last book

was a record of her travels with her son in Italy and Germany. She was buried at Bournemouth. There are Lives by Mrs Julian Marshall (1889) and Mrs W. M. Rossetti (in the Eminent Women Series,' 1890).

Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury (1812-80) was born at Measham, Derbyshire, and from 1854 lived at Chelsea, to be near her intimate friends, the Carlyles. The Half-Sisters and The Sorrow's of Gentility were by far the best known of the series of novels which included also Zoe, Marian Withers, Constance Herbert, and Right or Wrong— not to speak of stories for children and short tales of various kinds. Delicate health alone prevented her from becoming a regular writer for the Times; she was for many years a constant contributor to the Athenæum and a member of its staff; her theological views were 'advanced;' and her brilliant and humorous conversational gifts 'made her a social force in literary and artistic circles.' Her indiscreet gossip unduly affected Froude's view of the relations between Mr and Mrs Carlyle. See her Letters to Mrs Carlyle, edited by Mrs Ireland (1892). Her sister, Maria Jane (1800-33), wrote poetry; articles in the annuals and in the Athenæum; Phantasmagoria, or Sketches of Life and Character (1825); Letters to the Young (1828); and The Three Histories (of an enthusiast, a nonchalant, and a realist; 1830). Wordsworth addressed his poem of Liberty to her. She married in 1832 an Indian chaplain, the Rev. W. K. Fletcher, and died of cholera at Poonah.

Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812-85), a daughter of the first Earl Granville, was born at Tixall Hall in Staffordshire, and in 1833 married Alexander George Fullerton, an officer in the Guards. Her father was ambassador in Paris, and the young couple were for the first eight years of their married life in Lord Granville's household. The husband became a Catholic in 1843; and Lady Georgiana, two years after publishing her first story, Ellen Middleton (1844), also became a convert to Catholicism. The rest of her life was mainly devoted to charitable and religious works and the writing of tales of religious subject or tendency-amongst them Grantley Manor (1847), Too Strange not to be True (1864), Constance Sherwood (1864), A Stormy Life (1864), Mrs Gerald's Niece (1871), and A Will and a Way (1881). Two were written and first published in French-La Comtesse de Bonneval (1857) and Rose Leblanc (1861). She published two volumes of verse, and wrote or translated the story of several saintly lives. After her son's death she became one of the Tertiaries of the order of St Francis; she helped in establishing the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul in England, and was herself one of the founders of a minor order of women. Dying at Bournemouth, she was buried in the cemetery of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton. Several of her novels are still read and reprinted; the most popular, Too Strange not to be True,

being the history of a pious but much-afflicted French emigrant to Canada. See her Life by Father Coleridge, from the French of Mrs Craven (1888); and Miss Yonge in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897).

Mrs Henry Wood (1814-87), novelist, whose maiden name was Ellen Price, was born at Worcester, married early Mr Henry Wood, a ship-agent living in France, and after his death settled in London, and commenced writing for the New Monthly Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany. Her temperance story, Danesbury House (1860), was followed by East Lynne (1861), which had an almost unexampled success. Having found her public, Mrs Wood poured forth upwards of thirty more novels, perhaps the best The Channings (1862), The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863), Oswald Cray (1864), A Life's Secret (1867), Dene Hollow (1871), Within the Maze (1872), and Pomeroy Abbey (1878). Her work rarely rises above the commonplace, though she revealed some power in the analysis of character in her anonymous Johnny Ludlow stories (1874-80). In 1867 she acquired the monthly Argosy, and her novels went on appearing in it long after her death. No novelist of her day was more popular with girls of the middle class. Her son published Memorials of her in 1895.

Charlotte Brontë, third child of the Rev. Patrick Brontë and Mary Branwell, his wife, was born at Thornton, Bradford, 21st April 1816. Her father was an Irishman of County Down, a man of strong character and some literary talent. His wife, who was a native of Penzance, died of cancer on 15th September 1821, leaving behind her six children. By this time Patrick Brontë had removed to Haworth, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where he remained to his death. It was a large village of nearly five thousand inhabitants, most of the people being engaged in the woollen manufacture.

The motherless children were cared for by their aunt, Miss Branwell, and they displayed an extraordinary precocity of talent. Their father treated them as his intellectual equals, and discussed with them the public affairs of the day. They had very little intercourse with their neighbours; their refuge was in the unenclosed, untilled, heathery moors, with their becks and hollows. The two eldest daughters were sent, in July 1824, to a school for clergymen's daughters at Cowan Bridge near Kirby-Lonsdale, and Charlotte and Emily followed in September. A low fever broke out in the school, and Maria and Elizabeth became seriously ill, and were taken home only to die. Though Charlotte was but eight years old, the habit of observation had set in, and she attributed the death of her sisters to their cruel treatment in the school, an injury avenged in the opening scenes of Jane Eyre. At Haworth, where the diminished family now gathered, Miss Branwell gave the girls