rods in their hands and eating and drink- | ing. In this wise they angle for the fish called trout; but whether they ever catch him or not, not having seen it, I cannot say; for it is not pleasant to me to speak things concerning which I know not the truth. appears rather to jump with his storynamely, that the young priests have houses on the river, painted of divers colors, all of them empty. Then the priest, at my desire, brought me to one of the temples, that I might seek out all things concerning Herodotus the Halicarnassian, from one who knew. Now this temple is not the fairest in the city, but less fair and goodly than the old temples, yet goodlier and more fair than the new temples; and over the roof there is the image of an eagle made of stoneno small marvel, but a great one, how men came to fashion him; and that temple is called the House of Queens. Here they sacrifice a boar once every year; and concerning this they tell a certain sacred story which I know but will not utter. Now, after sailing and rowing against the stream for certain days, I came to the City of the Ford of the Ox. Here the river changes his name, and is called Isis, after the name of the goddess of the Egyptians. But whether the Britons brought the name from Egypt or whether the Egyptians took it from the Britons, not knowing I prefer not to say. But to me it seems that the Britons are a colony of the Egyptians, or the Egyptians a colony of the Britons. Moreover, when I was in Egypt I saw certain soldiers in white hel- Then I was brought to the priest who mets, who were certainly British. But had a name for knowing most about what they did there (as Egypt neither be- Egypt, and the Egyptians, and the Assylongs to Britain nor Britain to Egypt) Irians, and the Cappadocians, and all the know not, neither could they tell me. But one of them replied to me in that line of Homer (if the Odyssey be Homer's), "We have come to a sorry Cyprus, and a sad Egypt." Others told me that they once marched against the Ethiopians, and having defeated them several times, then came back again, leaving their property to the Ethiopians. But as to the truth of this I leave it to every man to form his own opinion. Having come into the City of the Priests, I went forth into the street, and found a priest of the baser sort, who for a piece of silver led me hither and thither among the temples, discoursing of many things. Now it seemed to me a strange thing that the city was empty, and no man dwelling therein, save a few priests only, and their wives, and their children, who are drawn to and fro in little carriages dragged by women. But the priest told me that during half the year the city was desolate, for that there came somewhat called "The Long," or "The Vac," and drave out the young priests. And he said that these did no other thing but row boats, and throw balls from one to the other, and this they were made to do, he said, that the young priests might learn to be humble, for they are the proudest of men. But whether he spoke truth or not I know not, only I set down what he told me. But to any one considering it, this kingdoms of the great King. He came out to me, being attired in a black robe, and wearing on his head a square cap. But why the priests have square caps I know, and he who has been initiated into the mysteries which they call "Matric knows, but I prefer not to tell. Concerning the square cap, then, let this be sufficient. Now, the priest received me courteously, and when I asked him, concerning Herodotus, whether he were a true man or not, he smiled, and answered "Abu Goosh," which, in the tongue of the Arabians, means "The Father of Liars. Then he went on to speak concerning Herodotus, and he said in his discourse that Herodotus not only told the thing which was not, but that he did so wilfully, as one knowing the truth but concealing it. For example, quoth he, Solon never went to see Croesus, as Herodotus avers; nor did those about Xerxes ever dream dreams; but Herodotus, out of his abundant wickedness, invented these things. 66 Now behold," he went on," how the curse of the Gods falls upon Herodotus. For he pretends that he saw Cadmeian inscriptions at Thebes. Now I do not believe there were any Cadmeian inscriptions there: therefore Herodotus is most manifestly lying. Moreover, this Herodotus never speaks of Sophocles the Athenian, and why not? Because he, being a child at school, did not learn Sophocles by heart for the tragedies of Sophocles could not have been learned at school before they were written, nor can any man quote a poet whom he never learned at school. Moreover, as all those about Herodotus knew Sophocles well, he could not appear to them to be learned by showing that he knew what they knew also." Then I thought the priest was making game and sport, saying first that Herodotus could know no poet whom he had not learned at school, and then saying that all the men of his time well knew this poet, about whom every one was talking. But the priest seemed not to know that Herodotus and Sophocles were friends, which is proved by this, that Sophocles wrote an ode in praise of Herodotus. 66 Then he went on, and though I were to write with a hundred hands (like Briareus, of whom Homer makes mention) I could not tell you all the things that the priest said against Herodotus, speaking truly, or not truly, or sometimes correctly and sometimes not, as often befalls mortal men. For Herodotus, he said, was chiefly concerned to steal the lore of those who came before him, such as Hecatæus, and then to escape notice as having stolen it. Also he said that, being himself cunning and deceitful, Herodotus was easily beguiled by the cunning of others, and believed in things manifestly false, such as the story of the Phoenix-bird. Then I spoke, and said that Herodotus himself declared that he could not believe that story; but the priest regarded me not. And he said that Herodotus had never caught a crocodile with cold pig, nor did he ever visit Assyria, nor Babylon, nor Elephantine; but, saying that he had been in these lands, said that which was not true. He also declared that Herodotus, when he travelled, knew none of the Fat Ones of the Egyptians, but only those of the baser sort. And he called Herodotus a thief and a beguiler, and "the same with intent to deceive," as one of their own poets writes. And, to be short, Herodotus, I could not tell you in one day all the charges which are now brought against you; but concerning the truth of these things, you know, not least, but most, as to yourself being guilty or innocent. Wherefore, if you have any thing to show or set forth whereby you may be relieved from the burden of these accusations, now is the time. Be no longer silent; but, whether through the Oracle of the Dead, or the Oracle of Branchidæ, or that in Delphi, or Dodona, or of Amphiaraus at Oropus, speak to your friends and lovers (whereof I am one from of old) and let men know the very truth. Now, concerning the priests in the City of the Ford of the Ox, it is to be said that of all men whom we know they receive strangers most gladly, feasting them all day. Moreover, they have many drinks, cunningly mixed, and of these the best is that they call Archdeacon, naming it from one of the priests' offices. Truly, as Homer says (if the Odyssey be Homer's), "when that draught is poured into the bowl then it is no pleasure to refrain." Drinking of this wine, or nectar, Herodotus, I pledge you, and pour forth some deal on the ground, to Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in the House of Hades. And I wish you farewell, and good be with you. Whether the priest spoke truly, or not truly, even so may such good things betide you as befall dead men. TO ALEXANDRE DUMAS. Sir, -There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, "I seem to see myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands." These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the Arabian Nights or the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of Les Trois Mousquetaires alarm himself with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas. Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a superhuman burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task too great for it. What an extraordinary vigor, what health, what an overflow of force was yours! It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas's men-so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in Vingt Ans Après, like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air. There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the "sculptor's ghost" is fabled to afford. Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and impotent as "the strengthless tribes of the dead" in Homer's Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary valor. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three friends-from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis-"he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.' No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none gave of it more freely to all who came-to the chance associate of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could not be serious;" because you created with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal. 66 66 A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia-a generation devoted to the "chiselled phrase," to accumulated documents," to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human-may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humored Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse the world-to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battle-field, and the sea-the world must always return escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the weari some De Goncourt. With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honorable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honor, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (La Reine Margot, La Dame de Montsoreau, Les Quarante-cinq), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze Les Trois Mousquetaires, Vingt Ans Après, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne); and, beside these two trilogies-a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids-Monte Cristo. In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that | great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship. You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present naturalistes. From these alcoves of Les Dames Galantes, and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You had other metal to work on you gave us that superstitious and tragical true love of La Mole's, that devotionhow tender and how pure !-of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valor of D'Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos: Honor, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of Bragelonne and to part with them forever. Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches. How we would welcome them, forgiving D'Artagnan even his hateful fourberie in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good fights of one against a multitude, in literature. These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of Bussy d'Amboise. We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley's Hereward. .. They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas "after deceiving circle;" for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought with shields and axes, not with small swords. But what matters this pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously Homeric. Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in terror from the Queen's chamber, and "find the door too narrow for their flight:" the very words were anticipated in a line of the Odyssey concerning the massacre of the Wooers. And the picture of Catherine de Médicis, prowling "like a wolf among the bodies and the blood," in a passage of the Louvre-the picture is taken unwittingly from the Iliad. There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates Monte Cristo, the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing, Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell me, was the greatest literary event of its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last degree of terror and of pity." The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame-for a moment. The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when La Curée and Pot-Bouille are more forgotten than Le Grand Cyrus, men and womenand, above all, boys-will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I remember a very idle little boy who was busy with The Three Musketeers when he should have been occupied with Wilkins' Latin Prose. Twenty Years After (alas and more) he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether Grimaud will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison. ANDREW LANG. VOL. IX. 209 THE YOUTH OF MADAME DE MAINTENON. [Arsène Houssaye, one of the most vivacious and entertaining of living French writers, was born in 1815, at Bruyères, whence he came to Paris, making his début in literature in 1836. With his friends, Jules Janin, Théophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau, he soon became a much sought-for contributor to literary and other journals. He wrote copiously on art, society, history, etc., and in 1846 published a magnificent His tory of Flemish and Dutch Painting. In 1849 he became, by the aid of the great actress, Rachel, director of the Comédie-Française, where he brought out the great works of Victor Hugo, Dumas, Musset, Mme. de Gi rardin, Sandeau, etc. The numerous works of M. Houssaye include romances, dramas, poetry, and criti cism. In 1861 he became principal conductor of the daily journal, La Presse, to which he contributed a daily feuilleton. We cite among his works: Les Trois Soeurs (1847); Les Filles d'Eve (1852); Marie (1843); Mlle. de la Vallière (1860); Mlle. Cléopâtre (1864); Blanche et Marguerite (1865); Les Grandes Dames (1868); Les Parisiennes (1869); Alice (1877); Les Trois Duchesses (1878); Philosophes et Comédiennes (1850); Les Hommes et les Femmes du 18me Siècle (1851). The last two have been translated into English.] The age of Louis XIV. is still the most brilliant page in the history of France. Voltaire, were he alive, would say so now as he did a hundred years ago; for a great age is not one made up merely of noble actions and heroic conquests, but one which gives birth simultaneously to great captains and great philosophers, to great poets and to great artists. People will always speak of the age of Pericles and the age of Augustus, of the age of Leo X. and the age of Louis XIV. They will never speak of the age of Napoleon, because under Napoleon's sway there was but one man worthy of bronze and granite in the eyes of that proud and haughty muse called history; that man was Napoleon himself. I prefer the court of Louis XIV. to the sun of Austerlitz. At the court of Louis XIV. I see a glorious Olympus in all its integrity; Turenne and Condé, Malebranche and Pascal, Corneille and Molière, Poussin and Lesueur, Mansard and Perrault. I have not named all the gods in this list; for instance, there are Puget, La Fontaine, Racine, and Sully. As for the demi-gods of this golden age of genius, they are not to be counted. Every man fond of art chooses some luminous point in the past where he may take refuge in a gallery of living faces. The dead are not those who live the least. Who can doubt the immortality of the soul, when he feels the spirit of the great men who have illustrated past ages animate himself? Who would dare to affirm that Molière is dead? Have I not met him twenty times near the Theatre Français? And Le Fontaine? Who has not seen him when the dew was on the ground, or the wild thyme perfumed the air, studying the comedy of life in the open theatre of the country, or taking the longest road to go to the Academy? There are even some faces-women's faces-which have only handed down to which will yet be adored by future ages. us the reputation of their beauty, and Who has not been in love, more or less, with the Fornarina, with Madame de la Vallière, or the Marquise de Pompadour? Does she whom you pursue at the ball, or in the public promenades, possess more life in your eyes than these all-brilliant apparitions? Madame de Maintenon does not appear to us in this guise: her boxwood rosaries have estranged from her many first-rate minds. People did not know on what terms to visit her. Is she a heroine of romance? Is she a St. Theresa? Is she a favorite of the seraglio of Versailles? Is she a Queen of France and of Navarre? Her partisans were few; her enemies were innumerable. I confess that when I look upon her portrait, engraved by Mercuri, I am one of her partisans; but this same portrait, copied from Petitot, was it really taken from life, with strict regard to nature and to truth? It is a proud, charming style of beauty, robust yet delicate. Since the period of the Psyche of Praxiteles, never was hair more becomingly dressed: St. Theresa herself did not possess so delicate a neck, or so magnificent a shoulder. But this voluptuousness is corrected by an expression of pride apparent in the features: the mind domineers over the heart. Such as she is, however, we should love her, even though we were Louis XIV. himself, the king who thought that he was more than mortal. As we pass by, let us salute the form of Agrippa d'Aubigné, the grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, and whose adventurous career would furnish matter for a curious romance. "In those days the mind was fashioned at an early age to |