was, as she said, "like a near relation," that "Lizzie is so like what I used to be at her age, Bernard I think I see myself again in her-only for the dress. We wore more stuff in our skirts in those days, and I think it looked better-not but what she's very good taste."

Mrs. Vane might have furnished a warning to Bernard in more ways than one. She was the widow of a man who had held a somewhat higher position than Aglionby's, in a business of the same kind-such a position as Bernard himself looked forward to attaining before he could make Lizzie His higher position had afforded him the means of marrying, and had enabled him to save sufficient money to leave a tiny income to his widow and his one child, which income they eked out by taking two lodgers, Bernard Aglionby and another young man, who did not trouble them much, and who always went home to the country at the end of the week, and stayed there till Monday.

66

Lizzie had been at a cheap school, where she had acquired some flimsy accomplishments, and a little superficial information-generally incorrect -upon such matters as geography, history, and common subjects." The large and first-rate High School for Girls had been disdained as not being select enough, since tradesmen's daughters went to it. The other large school in the vicinity, at which a really first-rate education was to be obtained, was a ladies' college, avowedly intended for rich and exclusive pupils, and of which the terms were prohibitory to persons of Mrs. Vane's annual income; therefore Lizzie had gone to the cheap day-school already mentioned, and had flirted at a very early age with the students of the college hard by, with the big boys on their way to the grammar-school, and with the clerks going down to business, specimens of each of which class she was in the habit of meeting on her way to and from her seminary. She had been the belle of that truly select establishment for a long time before she had left it. Languishing youths had written her notes, and sent her valentines and gloves and goodies in abundance; in fact, Miss Vane was a reigning beauty-in her set. If she had been in another set, the "society" papers would have chronicled her doings, and told of her costumes, would have disputed about the color of her eyes, and fought fiercely over her reputation, or want of it.

Just a year ago Bernard Aglionby had come to lodge with them, replacing another young man who had recommended the place to him. Naturally, they had frequently met. Lucy Golding and she had talked him over. Lucy said Percy knew him well, but that he never came to their house; that he was well known to be impervious to all feminine charms and womanly wiles. This, and other communications of a like nature, had somewhat piqued Miss Vane, and had inspired her with a deep interest in Aglionby. Soon existence ceased to be worth having until at any rate a smile and a compliment had been wrung from. Bernard-some token to show that he was not proof against her, however case-hardened. It had been some little time before the experiment had succeeded-before Aglionby had even thoroughly roused to the consciousness that there was a pretty girl in the house who smiled kindly upon him. Then, whatever he might have felt, he had for some time concealed his sentiments behind a mask of impassive calm, until one day he broke forth, and made love in a fashion so imperious, and sa vehement, as, metaphorically speaking, to carry Miss Vane off her feet. She could not withstand the torrent of his fiery nature. His piercing eyes seemed to burn through her. His voice and his glance and his ardor had for the moment thrilled and subdued her, and it was such a triumph over Lucy and Percy, and all the rest of them,-over Bernard's friends too,-those odd "Agnostics". who never went to church, and who talked about republicanism as if they would not be sorry to see it established, and who all-there was the point— seemed to think that Aglionby was quite above woman's influence-these incentives, put together, formed a stronger influence than she could resist: Aglionby became her accepted lover, and, looking at it all from her point of view, she presently began to find that a great conquest brings its cares and pains as well as its pleasures. Still, it was a con quest, and her power had made itself felt now and then. More than once she had cajoled Bernard into giving up some political meeting, or some evening of debate; or she had withdrawn him from his brother Agnostics in order to take her to the theatre, or go out with her to some suburban tea-party. Suburban tea-parties and theatre-going were things which she liked, and which Bernard, as she very well knew, disliked, so that every time he accompanied her to either one or the other

entertainments, was a new and tangible proof of her ascendency over him.

This afternoon she had what she considered a very convincing proof of this ascendency. Bernard meekly followed her to Mrs. Golding's, and there there were, as he had prophesied, rivers of tea, many muffins and teacakes, a number of young people, and a little music by way of diversion. Bernard sat in silent anguish during this last form assumed by the entertainment. He had some scientific knowledge of music; his mother while she lived had taken care of that; and he had a fine natural taste and discrimination in the matter, thrilling in answer to all that was grand or elevated in the art. His one solitary personal extravagance was to attend the series of fine concerts which were given every autumn and winter season at Irkford. The performances this afternoon caused him pain and dejection. He experienced a sense of something akin to shame; to him it all appeared a sort of exposé. Lizzie, in the sublime blissfulness of ignorance, boldly sat down and sang in a small voice, nasal, flat, and affected:

"We sat by the river, you and I,

In the sweet summer-time long ago."

It was terrible. He was thankful when at last Lizzie arose and said it was time to be going to church. That was her moment of triumph, or rather, it ought to have been-when Miss Golding, it may be innocently, or it may be of malice aforethought, but certainly with every appearance of ingenuous surprise, exclaimed:

"To church! I thought you never went to church, Mr. Aglionby."

"I go with Lizzie whenever she likes," he said carelessly and haughtily. "It pleases her, and does me no harm."

"Oh-h, Bernard!" cried his betrothed, her cup of pleasure dashed from her lips; while a young lady who was almost a stranger, and who appeared struck with this remark of Bernard's, said severely that she could not understand how going to church could harm any one. To which he, inwardly annoyed by the silly stupidity of the whole affair, replied nonchalantly that it was nevertheless very bad for some constitutions, his among them, and amid the consternation produced by this statement, he and Lizzie departed.

Really, Bernard, you do upset me when you come out with those awful remarks of yours. Poor Miss Smith couldn't make you out at all."

"I daresay not. I am sure it is a matter of complete indifference to me whether she made me out or not.'

"Yes, you will set public opinion at defiance, and it will do you no good, say what you like."

"My child," said he, drawing her hand through his arm, and laying his own upon it, "I think you can hardly be called a judge as to what is public opinion. If you mean that Miss Smith represents it, I don't care to please it. And if I go to church with you at your wish, what do fifty Miss Smiths and their silly ideas matter ?''

"Ah! but I don't know whether it is not very wicked in you to come to church, when you don't believe in a word of what is going on. I am not sure that I do right to bring you, only I keep hoping that it will have some good effect upon you."

"Well, it has," he said tenderly. "It has the effect of making me love you and prize you ten times more for your goodness and your faith."

They were reconciled, as they entered the gates of the churchyard, and joined the throng going in, while the loud, clanging bells overhead sounded almost deafening, and the steeple rocked to their clamorous summons.

Bernard liked sitting there through the evening service, with Lizzie by his side; and he liked the walk home through the fields, under the clear, starlit sky, and then through the streets, between the line of lamps. When she hung on his arm, and they talked nothings together, then he felt at home with her, he forgot her bad singing, and her conventional little thoughts and stereotyped ideas. In the province of talking nothings Lizzie was at home, was natural, unaffected, even spirited. So soon as she left them she became insipid and artificial, and this was what Aglionby had dimly felt for some time, though he had not given a definite name to the sensation. They talked nothings to-night, and he parted from her in the warm. conviction that she was a dear, lovely little creature, that she was the woman who loved him, and whom he loved, and to whom he was going to be loyal and true, to his life's end. (To be continued.)

Of lullaby, to bring her babe asleep."

Of all new-born creatures, the baby is the least happy. For some reason or reasons, it is exceedingly disposed to vex its heart and needs much soothing. In civilized countries mothers resort too often to the druggist for means to quiet their children. In less advanced states of society another expedient has been resorted to from time immemorial to wit, the cradle-song.

Babies show an early appreciation of rhythm. They rejoice in measured noise, whether it takes the form of words, music, or the jingle of a bunch of keys. In the way of poetry we are afraid they must be admitted to have a perverse preference for what goes by the name of sing-song. It will be a long time before the infantine public are brought round to Walt Whitman's views on versification. For the rest, they are not very severe critics. The small ancient Roman asked for nothing better than the song of his nurse: Lalla, lalla, lalla,

Aut dormi, aut lacta.

This two-line lullaby constitutes one of the few but sufficing proofs which have come down to us of the existence among the people of old Rome of a sort of folk verse not by any means resembling the Latin classics, but bearing a considerable like ness to the canti popolari of the modern Italian peasant.

There exists another Latin cradle-song, not indeed dating from classical times, but which, like the laconic effusion of the Roman nurse, forms a sort of landmark in the history of poetry. It is composed in the person of the Virgin Mary, and was in bygone days believed to have been actually sung by her. Good authorities pronounce it to be one of the earliest poems extant of the Chris

tian era:

Dormi fili, dormi! mater Cantat unigenito: Dormi, puer, dormi! pater

Nato clamat parvulo:

Millies tibi laudes canimus

Mille, mille, millies.

Dormi, cor, et meus thronus; Dormi matris jubilum; Aurium cælestis sonus,

Et suave sibilam! Millies tibi, etc., etc.

Ne quid desit, sternam rosis, Sternam fænum violis, Pavimentum hyacinthis

Et præsepe liliis, Millies tibi, etc., etc.

Si vis musicam, pastores, Convocabo protinus; Illis nulli sunt priores; Nemo canit castius. Millies tibi, etc., etc.

Everybody who is in Rome at Christmas-tide makes a point of visiting Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, the church which stands to the right of the Capitol, where once the temple of Jupiter Feretrius is supposed to have stood. What is at that season to be seen in the Ara Cœli is well enough known to one side a presepio, or manger, with the ass, the ox, St. Joseph, the Virgin, and the child on her knee; to the other side a throng of little Roman children rehearsing in their infantine voices the story that is pictured opposite. The scene may be taken as typical of the cult of the infant Saviour, which, under one form or another, has existed distinct and separable from the main stem of Christian worship ever since a voice in Judæa bade man seek after the divine in the stable of Bethlehem. It is almost a commonplace to say that Christianity brought fresh and peculiar glory alike to infancy and to motherhood. A new sense came into the words of the oracle:

Thee in all children, the eternal Child. And the mother, sublimely though she appears against the horizon of antiquity, yet rose to a higher rank-because the highest-at the founding of the new faith. Especially in art she left the second place that she might take the first. The sentiment of maternal love, as illustrated, as transfigured, in the love of the Virgin for her divine child, furnished the great Italian painters

with their master motif, while in his humble fashion the obscure folk-poet exemplifies the self-sanie thought. We are not sure that the rude rhymes of which the following is a rendering do not convey, as well as can be conveyed in articulate speech, the glory and the grief of the Dresden Madonna:

Sleep, oh sleep, dear Baby mine,

King Divine;

Sleep, my Child, in sleep recline; Lullaby, mine Infant fair,

Heaven's King all glittering, Full of grace as lilies rare.

Why dost weep, my Babe? Alas!
Cold winds that pass

Vex, or is't the little ass?
Lullaby, O Paradise;

Of my heart thou Saviour art. On Thy face I press a kiss.

Wouldst Thou learn so speedily

Pain to try, to heave a sigh? Sleep, for Thou shalt see the day

Of dire scath, of dreadful death,

To bitter scorn a shame, a prey.

Beauty mine, sleep peacefully;

Heaven's Monarch see! With my veil I cover Thee. Lullaby, my Spouse, my Lord,

Fairest Child, pure, undefiled.

Thou by all my soul adored.

Lo! the shepherd band draws nigh;

Horns they ply, Thee their King to glorify.

Lullaby, my soul's Delight;

For Israel, faithless and fell,

Thee with cruel death would smite.

Sleep, sleep, Thou who dost heaven impart;

My Lord Thou art:

Sleep as I press thee to my heart.

Poor the place where Thou dost lie,

Earth's loveliest! Yet take Thy rest;

Sleep, my Child, and lullaby.

It would be interesting to know if Mrs. Browning ever heard any one of the many variants of this lullaby before writing her poem, "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus." The version given above was communicated to us by a resident at Vallauria, in the heart of the Ligurian Alps. In that district it is sung in the churches on Christmas Eve, when out abroad the mountains sleep soundly in their snows and a stray wolf is not an impossible apparition, nothing reminding you that you are within a day's journey of the citron

groves of Mentone. An old English carol, current in the time of Henry IV., has much affinity with the Italian sacred cradle-songs:

Lullay! Jullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere fode;
How xalt thou sufferin be naylid on the rode.

In Sicily there are a great number of pious lullabies of a lighter and less serious sort. The Sicilian poet relates how once, when the Madunazza was mending St. Joseph's clothes, the Bambineddu cried in his cradle because no one was attending to him; so the Archangel Raphael came down and rocked him, and said three sweet little words to him, "Lullaby, Jesus, Son of Mary!" Another time, when the child was older and the mother was going to visit St. Anne, he wept because he wished to go too. The mother let him accompany her on condition that he would not break St. Anne's bobbins. Yet another time the Virgin went to the fair to buy flax, and the child said that he, too, would like to have a fairing. The Virgin buys him a tambourine, and angels descend to listen to his playing. Such stories are endless; some, no doubt, are invented on the spur of the moment, but the larger portion are scraps of old legendary lore. Not a few of the popular beliefs relating to the infant Jesus may be traced to the apocryphal gospels, which were extensively circulated during the earlier Christian centuries.

Professor Angelo de Gubernatis, in his "Usi Natalisj," quotes a charming Spanish lullaby addressed to any ordinary child, but having reference to the Holy Babe:

The Baby Child of Mary,
Now cradle IIe has none;

His father is a carpenter,

And he shall make Him one.

The lady good St. Anna,
The lord St. Joachim,

They rock the Baby's cradle,

That sleep may come to Him,

Then sleep thou, too, my baby,

My little heart so dear; The Virgin is beside thee,

The Son of God is near.

When they are old enough to understand the meaning of words, children are sure to be interested up to a certain point by these saintly fables; but, taken as a whole, the songs of the South give us the impression that the coming of Christmas kindles the imagination of the southern

mother rather than that of the southern child. On the north side of the Alps it is otherwise; there is scarcely need to say that in the Vaterland Christmas is before all the children's feast. We, who have borrowed many of the German Yuletide customs, have left out the Christkind; and it is well that we have done so. Transplanted to foreign soil, that poetic piece of extra-belief would have become a mockery. As soon try to naturalize Kolyada, the Sclavonic white-robed New-year girl. The Christkind in his mythical attributes is nearer to Kolyada than to the Italian Bambinello. He belongs to the people, not to the Church. He is not swathed in jeweled swaddling clothes; his limbs are free, and he has wings that carry him wheresoever good children abide. There is about him all the dreamy charm of lands where twilight is long and shade and shine intermingle softly, and where the earth's wintry winding-sheet is more beautiful than her April bride-gown. The most popular of German lullabies is a truly Teutonic mixture of piety, wonder-lore, and homeliness. Wagner has introduced the music to which it is sung into his "Siegfried-Idyl." We have to thank a Heidelberg friend for the text.

Sleep, baby, sleep:

Your father tends the sheep;

Your mother shakes the branches small,
Whence happy dreams in showers fall:

Sleep, baby, sleep.

Sleep, baby, sleep:

The sky is full of sheep;

The stars the lambs of heaven are,

For whom the shepherd moon doth care : Sleep, baby, sleep.

Sleep, baby, sleep:

The Christ Child owns a sheep;

He is himself the Lamb of God;
The world to save, to death He trod :
Sleep, baby, sleep.

In Denmark children are sung to sleep with a cradle-hymn which is believed (so we are informed by a youthful correspondent) to be "very old." It has seven stanzas, of which the first runs: "Sleep sweetly, little child; lie quiet and still; as sweetly sleep as the bird in the wood, as the flowers in the meadow. God the Father has said, 'Angels stand on watch where mine, the little ones, are in bed.'" A correspondent at Warsaw (still more youthful) sends us the even-song of Polish children.

The stars shine forth from the blue sky; How great and wondrous is God's might! Shine, stars, through all eternity,

His witness in the night.

O Lord, Thy tired children keep;

Keep us who know and feel thy might;
Turn thine eye on us as we sleep,

And give us all good-night.

Shine, stars, God's sentinels on high,
Proclaimers of his power and might;
May all things evil from us fly;

O stars, good-night, good-night!

Is this "Dobra Noc" of strictly popular origin? From internal evidence we should say that it is not. It seems, however, to be extremely popular in the ordinary sense of the word. Before us lie two or three settings of it by Polish musicians.

The Italians call lullabies ninne-nanne, a term used by Dante when he makes Forese predict the ills which are to overtake the dames of Florence.

The ninne-nanne of the various Italian provinces are to be found scattered here and there through volumes of folk poesy, and no attempt has yet been made to collate and compare them. Signor Dal Medico did indeed publish, some ten years ago, a separate collection of Venetian nursery rhymes, but his initiative has not been followed up. The following is one of Signor Dal Medico's lullabies:

Hush! lulla, lullaby! So mother sings;

For hearken, 'tis the midnight bell that rings.
But, darling, not thy mother's bell is this:
St. Lucy's priests it calls to prayer, I wis.
St Lucy gave thee eyes—a matchless pair—
And gave the Magadalen her golden hair;
Thy cheeks their hue from heaven's angels have;
Her little loving mouth St. Martha gave.
Love's mouth, sweet mouth, that Florence hath for home,
Now tell me where love springs, and how doth come?...
With music and with song doth love arise,
And then its end it hath in tears and sighs.

The question and answer as to the beginning and end of love run through all the songs of Italy, and in nearly every case the reply proceeds from Florence. The personality of the answerer changes; sometimes it is a little wild-bird; on one occasion it is a preacher. And the idea has been suggested that the last is the original form, and that the preacher of Florence who preaches against love is none other than Jeronimo Savonarola.