the place takes, when you see it in the light of its old associations; in its academic tone; in its monastic quiet; and, to some degree, in making believe very much. For if you be one of those to whom the days spent in a visit to an English cathedral city are a perpetual feast; who gloat over the old houses of wood; who pervade every nook of the close; who are aware of a sanctity thrown over all the scene, from the vast house of prayer, with its gigantic towers, its solemn bells, its long aisles, its ancient oak, its windows like the Northern sunset, its white-robed train, its sublime music; to whom anything Gothic has a charm unspeakable; and if it be appointed to you to live in a country where there are no cathedrals and no ecclesiastical pomp, but where the sense of beauty is outraged by ninety-nine churches in every hundred, and where you are surrounded by good folk most of whom cannot even understand how some natures crave for the beautiful in architecture and are revolted by the hideous; then here alone in that country have you some faint echo of the thing you rejoice to see. And if you be one who delight in pacing academic courts, with their flavour of antique learning and hopeful youthfulness together; if Oxford be in your memory a glorious vision of tower, spire, quadrangle, and grove; and if even the less charming town by the Cam, with its canal-like river and its magnificent avenues behind the colleges, be cherished in remembrance; then here you have some shadow, befitting a poorer kingdom, of the like learned haunts. Here are various collegiate quadrangles, all of them Gothic, one

of them cloistered, wherein one may walk up and down and mildly rejoice; here you may pass under ancient archways, where the learned and the heroic have gone before you. Here you may look upon the graceful leaflike form of the pointed window; and come after much instruction to know by example what is meant by Byzantine architecture, what by Norman, what by Early English, what by Decorated, what by Perpendicular. Simple and humble are some instances of these; very grand some others; but if you had lived in places where for months you never saw a pointed arch, nor indeed a round one unless in a bridge, you would know how to value all these things. The love of Gothic art, starved elsewhere in this country, here finds some food: in what you may esteem a humbler Canterbury and Oxford both in one.

Such is the scene from which the writer sends forth

this volume of essays. Several others have gone before it; and this, he may say with some confidence, is the last. There is little time now, for the production of such pages: though they have found many readers and gained many friends. And the writer has insensibly drifted away from that stage in which to write these essays was natural and pleasant. Graver duties await him, fitted for grave middle-age; nor is he without the hope that, ceasing from these pages, he may, by abundant labour, be able to produce some work of such weighty thought and deep insight as no human being shall ever care to read.

CHAPTER II.

CONCERNING TEN YEARS: WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THINGS LEARNED IN THEM.

THIS

see.

HIS afternoon, I went and saw several sick persons, rich and poor, whom it was my duty to go and Some of them dwell in very handsome houses; some in very poor little cottages. It is pleasant, when one has to visit sick folk who are poor, to find that it is not necessary (as it often is in towns) to climb long and unsavoury stairs, but that the humble friends to be visited abide in real quaint country cottages, which the advancing city has yet spared. Pleasant to me is the little bit of grass in front, and the old untended hedge of thorn; pleasant the lowly dwelling of one story, with its weatherstained walls and its roof of red tiles; pleasant its homely interior, that carries one's thoughts back to a certain country parish long unseen. Capriciously, the advancing tide of building here and there spares such a place; in a little while to be engulfed by the great stone and mortar

sea.

In such a place, this afternoon, an aged grandmother told me an instance of the extraordinary precocity and

understanding of a little grandson, who stood casting bashful yet wistful looks at the visitor from beneath a great mass of uncombed hair. Each Sunday that little man attends divine service at a certain church, concerning which I desire to say, that if any intelligent reader chooses to send me ten thousand pounds, or even five thousand, to expend on the beautifying of it, the wish of that intelligent reader shall be faithfully and lovingly carried into execution. On returning from church on a forenoon on which it happened that the present writer did not preach, that fine little man with the great head of hair has been known to use such words as the following: "We hadna our ain minister the day: it was anither man that preached." I listened to the good old grandmother, relating these facts, with the reverence and interest with which, for many reasons, I always listen to anything told concerning little children by those most nearly related to them, who cannot have much of life to come. It is a contrast that never ceases to touch, and that is always most suggestive, childhood and age side by side the little feet that may have so many weary steps before them, and the aged ones whose long rest must be near. I suppose the lines you may read here are very commonplace, and I don't know who wrote them; but I read them in a newspaper ten years ago, and I cannot forget them, though I have forgot all the rest of the poem :

:

They lie upon my pathway bleak,
These flowers that once grew wild,

As on a father's careworn cheek
The ringlets of his child :
The golden mingled with the gray,

And chasing half its gloom away.

But besides the general consideration which would have made the important narrative interesting, it had chanced that on the same day an analogous history had been related to me in a very different scene. In a very handsome drawing-room, not very far away from the little redtiled cottage, a young mother had bewailed to me the increase of slang, even among the very young: adding as an instance the following information. Her son, aged five, and her daughter, aged eight, had a little quarrel. The daughter desired to make it up again: the boy was obdurate in the sense of ill-usage. On which the little girl said persuasively, holding out a friendly hand, “Come, Frank, and extend the flapper of friendship!" And the little boy was instantly melted and won by so touching an appeal to his better feelings.

If the metaphysical reader is under the impression that these incidents are related with the design of enforcing or illustrating any principle, all that need be said is that the metaphysical reader is very far mistaken. The writer is slowly but surely approaching his proper subject, by a path which, though apparently devious, is in truth straight as an arrow. These brief narratives are to be esteemed in the light of a rapid glance to right and another to left as he proceeds; but their relation to the matter to be discussed at great length in the following pages is one