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and I know that love unrequited, or withdrawn if half given, makes a woman spiteful and embittered. All the milk and honey of her nature turn to gall; and, besides hating the man she ought to love, she ends by despising herself, whom she ought to reverence. But you,' she said, something of the old bitterness for a moment coming back to her, 'you will make no sacrifice for another. Your love is given utterly to this idle aimless life-this life, not of love, but of love-making, not even of pleasure, but of pleasure-seeking. Seethere is the boat coming for you. You must go now. Go-go. The night is getting chilly. You cannot stay longer, and I am too tired to again face the party. Alas, my friend! I can wish you nothing worse than that you may continue a life like this. But go. I shall see you soon again-shall I [not? And think over meanwhile what I have said to you.'

'I fear you will not see me again for some time,' he said. 'You say I give up nothing I delight in. I do delight, I confess it, in this idle life here; and yet to-morrow I am going to give this life up. My place is already taken by the mid-day train to-morrow, and the morning after I shall be in the fogs and frosts of England. Business, and business not of my own, but of others-of others whom I still try to help, but for whom I feel no affection—calls me away; and I choose to obey the call. Do not fear for my sake. I am not unhappy, though I am not happy, and I try to do my duties, though I make no solemn face whilst I am doing them. In England, in June, perhaps we may meet again; and if meanwhile happiness should come to me in the form of love, it will be so much the better for me, for we all welcome happiness; and I will ask you to congratulate me on the unhoped-for treasure. But if it does not, I shall remember with gratitude your interest in me all the same; and will only ask you not to waste your compassion on one who knows how to give a frolic welcome both to thunder and to sunshine, and whose worst crime it is, that he cools, with light amusements, brows that might otherwise be often aching.'

He said good-bye to her, but she hardly answered him. In another instant he was gone, and the voices of his friends soon mounted up to her as he was entering the boat. Lady Di remained motionless as a statue, leaning on the balustrade. 'Going!' she moaned to herself. Far off-gone-to-morrow!'

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She was remaining lost in thought, when she was startled by a few chords struck suddenly on a guitar, the sound of which floated up to her, clear from the surface of the water. There was some woman,' she exclaimed-'I remember they said so now-that was going to sing one of his songs as they rowed home! and has he the heart to ask it of her? Can he see nothing? Can he understand nothing?'

She did not move. She stood there as if petrified, with her. lips half parted.

Saxea ut effigies bacchantis constitit Evoe.

She was fearful and yet expectant of the woman's voice-the voice of the Countess Marie-of which she had often heard, but with which she had never dreamed of having such associations. Soon it came; and there came mixed with it a splash of oars, and a tinkling of the faint guitar-strings. The voice seemed to rise from the bosom of the moonlight, and so light and liquid, so aërial and so plaintive, were the sound and melody, that they might have come from some soulless mermaid or Siren; and seemed expressive half of exultant buoyancy, half of extreme sadness.

'Hollow and vast starred skies are o'er us,
Bare to their blue profoundest height.
Waves and moonlight melt before us,
Into the heart of the lonely night.

'Row, young oarsman, row, young oarsman;
See how the diamonds drip from the oar!
What of the shore and friends? Young oarsman,
Never row us again to shore.

See how shadow and silver mingle

Here on the wonderful wide bare sea;
And shall we sigh for the blinking ingle—
Sigh for the old known chamber-we?

'Are we fain of the old smiles tender?

The happy passion, the pure repose?
True, we sigh; but would we surrender
Sighs like ours for smiles like those?

'Row, young oarsman, far out yonder,
Into the crypt by the night we float;
Fair faint moon-flames wash and wander,
Wash and wander, about our boat!

'Not a fetter is here to bind us,

Love and memory loose their spell;
Friends of the home we have left behind us,
Prisoners of content, farewell!

'Row, young oarsman, far out yonder,

Over the moonlight's breathing breast;
Rest not. Give us no pause to ponder :
All things we can endure, but rest!

'Row, young oarsman, row, young oarsman!
See how the diamonds drip from the oar;
What of the shore and friends? Young oarsman,
Never row us again to shore!'

Lady Diotima could not distinguish the words; but she stood listening for the last faint sounds till long after they had become inaudible. Then she turned and walked slowly back towards the villa. Tears fell slowly from her eyes. She started to find herself shaken with a convulsive sob. 'Life indeed,' she cried bitterly, 'has a perfect happiness for all of us, if we only long for it, no matter whether or no we win it!' Then once more she turned towards the sea, and to the silver track on which she knew the boat was floating, and exclaimed, half aloud, in the still flower-scented night air, as she looked :

'And so, without more circumstance at all,

I hold it fit that we shake hands and part:

You, as your business and desire shall prompt you—

For every man hath business and desire,

Such as it is-and, for my own poor part,

Look you, I will go pray.'

W. H. MALLOCK.

CLERICAL EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

I.

TIME was when the victims of contemporaneous iniquity knew of no other resource but an appeal to the judgment of posterity. In our days, thanks to progress, those who have to complain of their fellowcountrymen can lodge an appeal immediately after, or sometimes even before, the sentence which condemns them. Nothing is easier: all that is required is to cross the frontier and to throw one's self, whether wounded or not, into the arms of the foreigner. The foreigner, that postérité vivante, is generally disposed to annul the decrees of his neighbour. He will do so all the more readily that he is better managed and his national pride more skilfully flattered. Tell him that he is free and you are enslaved, that his laws are perfect and your own hateful, that Lord Beaconsfield is a god and M. Jules Ferry a demon, and you will at once get a hearing and your cause will be already half won. Although this process savours somewhat of Platonic emigration, I do not undertake to blame it altogether. It would certainly be more patriotic to laver notre linge sale en famille, but these international complaints and pacific appeals to foreign judgment possess at any rate the merit of affirming two great points: the unity of right and the solidarity of nations. It has pleased the French Clericals to summon M. Jules Ferry before the tribunal of English opinion: be it so. They have put forward, and in the very pages of the Nineteenth Century, a clever, eloquent, and ardent advocate: it was their right. But it is mere justice that a friend of the assailed Minister, and a firm partisan of his Bill, should be allowed to speak in his turn. I am a free-trader, and in the exportation of our arguments, whether good or bad, I demand that both sides be admitted free, on a footing of perfect equality.

Permit me, first of all, to point out that the Ferry Bill is no longer the property of M. Jules Ferry, neither of that 'reactionary Government' which M. l'Abbé Martin holds up to the hatred and contempt of all English Liberals. The Chamber of Deputies, in its sitting of the 9th of July last, took possession of the measure in voting it by 362 against 159-that is to say by an enormous majority. Now, the Chamber, which is neither young nor old, but precisely in the prime of

life, most undoubtedly represents the country which elected it. It is well known that the election of the 14th of October, 1877, opened under the auspices of Marshal de MacMahon and the pressure of an unscrupulous Ministry. The Duc de Broglie, M. de Fourtou, their colleagues, their prefects, their agents, and their paid publicists had left no stone unturned, during five months, to deceive, intimidate, and frighten universal suffrage. They had taken a base advantage of force and even of justice, sometimes distorting the law, sometimes trampling it under their feet, and had strained all the powers of government to prevent the re-election of the 363. The clergy, secular or regular, of all ranks, threw themselves headlong into the electoral struggle. It was they, the clergy, who had provoked, counselled, and directed the foolish adventure of the 16th of May; in fact, this was so well known that, when speaking of the poor old Marshal and his Ministers, the peasants the most remote from Paris used to say: 'It's the government of the priests' (C'est le gouvernement des curés). The electors, therefore, went to the poll with a full knowledge of the situation; they knew what they were doing; the millions of men who elected, in spite of M. de MacMahon and his advisers, the present majority of the French parliament did not only record their vote for the Republic against the Empire or the Monarchy, but also for the Liberal element against the Clerical one.

The deputies who emerged from that hard and perilous struggle know that their mandate expires in two years; they diligently watch their electors; they render them accounts, ask their advice, and keep up daily communications with them. Rest assured that it was not to please a Minister or a Government that they voted the Ferry Bill. They voted it under the direct inspiration of their constituents; and to vote it they were 362. Remark the figures, and acknowledge with me that there exists in this country a fixed, solid, and almost immutable majority against Clericalism and the Monarchy.

If M. Jules Ferry be a despot, as you have been told, then he is so in company with all his colleagues of the Cabinet, with two-thirds of the Chamber, and with two-thirds of the country. It is not, therefore, the Minister of Public Instruction, but France, that must be denounced by Liberal Europe.

But-pardon the question-do you happen to know thoroughly this vexatious and tyrannical law which is held up to your contempt, without one article, one paragraph, one word being quoted from it? When you saw M. l'Abbé Martin, pleading against M. Jules Ferry in an article of twenty-two pages, devote eighteen of them to the question of primary schools, you must have naturally thought that the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine and the modest Sisters of the village schools were to be the first victims of this new Diocletian. Be not uneasy, generous souls! the Ferry Bill. . . . But perhaps you had better read it for yourselves. With the exception of one

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