by many degrees less courageous than a mastiff-bitch in the straw? It is only that they may be rogues without hearing it, and make their fortunes without rendering an account of them.

Now we chat again as we used to do. Your spirits and your enthusiasm have returned. Courage, my sweet Dashkof; do not begin to sigh again. We never can want husbands while we are young and lively. Alas! I cannot always be so. Heigho! But serfs and preferment will do; none shall refuse me at ninetyPaphos or Tobolsk.1

Have not you a song for me?

Dashkof. German or Russian?

Catharine. Neither, neither. Some frightful word might drop - might remind me no, nothing shall remind me. French, rather: French songs are the liveliest in the world. Is the rouge off my face?

Dashkof. It is rather in streaks and mottles; excepting just under the eyes, where it sits as it should do.

Catharine. I am heated and thirsty: I cannot imagine how. I think we have not yet taken our coffee - was it so strong? What am I dreaming of? I could eat only a slice of melon at breakfast; my duty urged me then; and dinner is yet to come. Remember, I am to faint at the midst of it when the intelligence comes in, or rather when, in despite of every effort to conceal it from me, the awful truth has flashed upon my mind. Remember, too, you are to catch me, and to cry for help, and to tear those fine flaxen hairs which we laid up together on the toilet; and we are both to be as inconsolable as we can be for the life of us. Not now, child, not now. Come, sing. I know not how to fill up the interval. Two long hours yet! - how stupid and tiresome! I wish all things of the sort could be done and be over in a day. They are mightily disagreeable when by nature one is not cruel. People little know my character. I have the tenderest heart upon earth: I am courageous, but I am full of weaknesses. I possess in perfection the higher part of men, and to a friend I may say it the most amiable part of women. Ho, ho! at last you smile: now your thoughts upon that.

1 They may choose the home of Venus or exile in Siberia.

Dashkof. I have heard fifty men swear it.

Catharine. They lied, the knaves! I hardly knew them by sight. We were talking of the sad necessity. — Ivan must follow next: he is heir to the throne. I have a wild, impetuous, pleasant little protégé, who shall attempt to rescue him. I will have him persuaded and incited to it, and assured of pardon on the scaffold. He can never know the trick we play him; unless his head, like a bottle of Bordeaux, ripens its contents in the sawdust. Orders are given that Ivan be despatched at the first disturbance in the precincts of the castle; in short, at the fire of the sentry. But not now, - another time: two such scenes together, and without some interlude, would perplex people.

I thought we spoke of singing: do not make me wait, my dearest creature! Now cannot you sing as usual, without smoothing your dove's-throat with your handkerchief, and taking off your necklace? Give it me, then; give it me. I will hold it for you: I must play with something. Sing, sing; I am quite impatient.

ANDREW MARVELL AND BISHOP PARKER

Parker. Most happy am I to encounter you, Mr. Marvell. It is some time, I think, since we met. May I take the liberty of inquiring what brought you into such a lonely quarter as Bunhill Fields?

Marvell. My lord, I return at this instant from visiting an old friend of ours, hard by, in Artillery Walk, who, you will be happy to hear, bears his blindness and asthma with truly Christian courage.

Parker. And pray, who may that old friend be, Mr. Marvell? Marvell. Honest John Milton.

1 The date cannot be accurately fixed, as Dr. Samuel Parker was not made Bishop until 1686, after the death of both Marvell and Milton. But about 1672, Marvell and Parker were engaged in controversy with which the name of Milton, then living in obscurity, was concerned. Parker had written a book, as Landor notes, in which occur the words: "It is better to submit to the unreasonable impositions of Nero and Caligula than to hazard the dissolution of the state." This Conversation is no doubt the finest example of Landor's moral earnestness, and one critic (the late A. G. Newcomer) questions "whether English prose of the 19th century can show anything to equal, for exalted dignity and sustained power, the utterances that Landor has put into Marvell's mouth."

Parker. The same gentleman whose ingenious poem, on our first parents, you praised in some elegant verses prefixed to it? Marvell. The same who likewise, on many occasions, merited and obtained your lordship's approbation.

Parker. I am happy to understand that no harsh measures were taken against him, on the return of our most gracious sovereign. And it occurs to me that you, Mr. Marvell, were earnest in his behalf. Indeed, I myself might have stirred upon it, had Mr. Milton solicited me in the hour of need.

Marvell. He is grateful to the friends who consulted at the same time his dignity and his safety; but gratitude can never be expected to grow on a soil hardened by solicitation. Those who are the most ambitious of power are often the least ambitious of glory. It requires but little sagacity to foresee that a name will become invested with eternal brightness by belonging to a benefactor of Milton. I might have served him! is not always the soliloquy of late compassion or of virtuous repentance: it is frequently the cry of blind and impotent and wounded pride, angry at itself for having neglected a good bargain, a rich reversion. Believe me, my lord bishop, there are few whom God has promoted to serve the truly great. They are never to be superseded, nor are their names to be obliterated in earth or heaven. Were I to trust my observation rather than my feelings, I should believe that friendship is only a state of transition to enmity. The wise, the excellent in honour and integrity, whom it was once our ambition to converse with, soon appear in our sight no higher than the ordinary class of our acquaintance; then become fit objects to set our own slender wits against, to contend with, to interrogate, to subject to the arbitration, not of their equals, but of ours; and, lastly, what indeed is less injustice and less indignity, - to neglect, abandon, and disown.

Parker. I never have doubted that Mr. Milton is a learned man - indeed, he has proven it; and there are many who, like yourself, see considerable merit in his poems. I confess that I am an indifferent judge in these matters; and I can only hope that he has now corrected what is erroneous in his doctrines. Marvell. Latterly he hath never changed a jot, in acting or thinking.

Parker. Wherein I hold him blamable, well aware as I am that never to change is thought an indication of rectitude and wisdom. But if everything in this world is progressive; if everything is defective; if our growth, if our faculties, are obvious and certain signs of it-then surely we should and must be different in different ages and conditions. Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.

Marvell. No proof of the kind is necessary to my friend; and it was not always that your lordship looked down on him so magisterially in reprehension, or delivered a sentence from so commanding an elevation. I, who indeed am but a humble man, am apt to question my judgment where it differs from his. I am appalled by any supercilious glance at him, and disgusted by any austerity ill assorted with the generosity of his mind. When I consider what pure delight we have derived from it, what treasures of wisdom it has conveyed to us, I find him supremely worthy of my gratitude, love, and veneration; and the neglect in which I now discover him leaves me only the more room for the free effusion of these sentiments. How shallow in comparison is everything else around us, trickling and dimpling in the pleasure-grounds of our literature! If we are to build our summer-houses against ruined temples, let us at least abstain from ruining them for the purpose. . . .

Parker. You will find your opinions discountenanced by both our universities.

Marvell. I'do not want anybody to corroborate my opinions. They keep themselves up by their own weight and consistency. Cambridge on one side and Oxford on the other could lend me no effectual support; and my skiff shall never be impeded by the sedges of Cam, nor grate on the gravel of Isis.1

Parker. Mr. Marvell, the path of what we fondly call patriotism is highly perilous. Courts at least are safe.

Marvell. I would rather stand on the ridge of Etna than lower my head in the Grotto del Cane.2 By the one I may

1 A stream at Oxford.

2 A cave near Naples, generating poisonous gas. The philosopher Empedocles had perished in the crater of Etna; the Grotto was especially fatal to dogs, because the gas was most abundant at a low level.

share the fate of a philosopher; by the other I must suffer the death of a cur.

Parker. We are all of us dust and ashes.

Marvell. True, my lord; but in some we recognize the dust of gold and the ashes of the phoenix; in others, the dust of the gateway and the ashes of turf and stubble. With the greatest rulers upon earth, head and crown drop together, and are over ooked. It is true, we read of them in history; but we also read in history of crocodiles and hyænas. With great writers, whether in poetry or prose, what falls away is scarcely more or other than a vesture. The features of the man are imprinted on his works; and more lamps burn over them, and more religiously, than are lighted in temples or churches. Milton, and men like him, bring their own incense, kindle it with their own fire, and leave it unconsumed and unconsumable; and their music, by day and by night, swells along a vault commensurate with the vault of heaven.

Parker. Mr. Marvell, I am admiring the extremely fine lace of your cravat.

Marvell. It cost me less than lawn would have done; and it wins me a reflection. Very few can think that man a great man whom they have been accustomed to meet dressed exactly like themselves; more especially if they happen to find him, not in park, forest, or chase, but warming his limbs by the reflected heat of the bricks in Artillery Walk. In England, a man becomes a great man by living in the middle of a great field; in Italy, by living in a walled city; in France, by living in a courtyard: no matter what lives they lead there.

Parker. I am afraid, Mr. Marvell, there is some slight bit terness in your observation.

Marvell. Bitterness, it may be, from the bruised laurel o Milton.

What falsehoods will not men put on, if they can only pad them with a little piety! And how few will expose their whole faces, from a fear of being frost-bitten by poverty! But Milton was among the few.

Parker. Already have we had our Deluge: we are now once more upon dry land again, and we behold the same creation as 1 A bishop's sleeves