ballet. Does he ever exert his thinking powers so far as to draw a mental comparison between the entertainment before him, and that of his favourite café chantant in Paris, where he used to sit and sip café or eau sucré, and listen to the lively Julie, the comely Schneider? He was in better company there, though there was no Lion Comique. Here is a pale-faced, shock-headed, spectacled German, moodily contemplating the dregs in his beer glass between vigorous puffs at a well-coloured meerschaum. The throng at the back has increased since we glanced in this direction two hours and a half ago. Rollicking jollity is the order of the night here. If there is one feature more striking than another in the general attitude of the tagrag and bobtail crowding the back of the hall, it is the total absence of ceremony. Long-legged guardsmen, cap off and stock unbuttoned, are amorously chaffing sundry highlypainted girls in sham sealskin jackets, who are a match at low repartee for the tallest guardsmen. This fellow, whose low forehead, battered face, and closelycropped hair bear ugly testimony to the truth of certain whispered rumours that the noble art of the "P. R." still lives in the byeways of the metropolis, surely we have seen him before! Was it not in the dock of Bow-street Police Court, where he stood to answer a charge of robbery with violence? What thought he of the songs about lonely meetings by moonlight? Here is another man sitting by himself, placidly tipsy. In his maudlin condition he is sentimental, and appropriates Hamlet to himself in this fashion,-"There is a tide in the affairs of man which, taken at the flood, leads on to-drunkenness!" Swells, snobs, swindlers, blacklegs, pickpockets, prize-fighters, prostitutes,

gutter snipes, flash and respectable, swell mobsmen and honest tradesmen, brandy and cigars, liqueur and cigarettes, beer and tobacco! The spectacle cannot be called a curious one, save for the stranger, for it is a scene of every night.

Let us turn for one other moment to the performance.

Curiosity once more animates all faces. We have roared at the Comique, we have winked at the ballet, now are we to be affrighted by the sensational. We have alluded to an unpleasant craving after the "equivocal" in amusement; second only to this is that love of the "sensational which has given rise in the past year to the spectacles of men walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, of young girls shot from the mouths of cannon, of men swallowing sword-blades, with much uncom fortable panting and gasping during the process. The music-hall manager, wise in his generation, has not been slow to appreciate the duties of his position as a people's caterer in relation to this appetite of the masses. Accordingly, at many halls, one of the chief features of the entertainment is a highly-spiced and dangerous performance upon the high trapeze, in which male and female acrobats apparently vie with one another in attempts to break their respective necks. Such a spectacle we are evidently about to witness. Our excitement is keenly stimulated by the very nature of the precautions taken to insure the lives of the gymnasts. Several supers and waiters are busy dragging a huge net across the length of the hall above the heads of the audience, which is made fast with much unnecessary bustling and tying of ropes. When all is ready we are bidden by the chairman to "look out for the flying comet," and sud

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denly, before, in homely parlance, we know where we are, a man comes crashing through a paper-covered hole in the ceiling, down on to the net below, bounds up again from the very shock of his descent, and catching the trapeze with one hand, swings himself on to the bar, and perched there, bows his smiling acknowledgments of the plaudits of the astonished audience. need not detail the performance, but it is one of the most remarkable of its kind ever witnessed, for trapeze successes have become more and more arduous. Two features especially one in which the chief gymnast hanging from the trapeze head downwards by a pair of hooks in the heels of his boots, catches by the hands a female who swings to meet him across the length of the hall, when the two almost dangle in mid-air; and another in which the same performer catches in like manner a youth, who leaps sheer down to him from the ceiling-are as astonishing as they are hardening to the sensibilities. There is danger in every bound, for a fall on the head from the roof of a house, into even the most yielding of nets, would be likely to entail serious consequences. Nevertheless, we can urge one plea in extenuation of this painful exhibition. It is more than unpleasant to witness; it appeals to the animal appetites of the audience; it is unhealthy and degrading; but it shows work. Every movement of the supple limbs tells of years of tedious training, the most painstaking and incessant that can be imagined; and whilst we condemn the result as we should condemn no wholesome and natural gymnastics, we can honestly admire the skill and patience of the process which produced it.

The curtain has not yet fallen; there are more attractions to come. We may still dip into the bag and

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draw thereout prizes scarcely less curious than any we have had. There is, for instance, an "eccentric comic," a "big comic," a "seriocomic," an original Lancashire Lad," a "characteristic vocalist," an acknowledged Premier Stump Orator," a man with a voice that can let you hear what he is singing about," an "infant wonder," a "perturbed flutterer," a 66 contortionist," and an "unrivalled buffo vocalist," with other and sundry such like. But possibly, unlike the majority of the audience, the reader thinks he has already had his money's worth, and is anxious to be away. We will only detain him an instant. We have spent a long evening in a queer place, and have seen and heard much which, perhaps, we knew not of before. We have followed the performance carefully, we have watched the audience closely, there remains but one feature more which should be noticed before leaving. We have seen nothing absolutely harmful in the influence exerted by the entertainment upon the spectators themselves. It seems to correspond to them only too closely. Were any philanthropist, with his best efforts to interest, to appeal to them as they are developed products of modern life-he might frighten some for a brief moment, but he could not draw or allure them; he could not afford them the congenial recreation of their own haunts. Look at that youth leaning against the pillar in front of us, who is just preparing to go. He can hardly be out of his teens-certainly he is not more than one and twenty, but so far as utter vapidity of expression is concerned his face might be that of an old man in second childhood. The features have lost every trace of intellect. The forehead is blotchy, the eyes are dull and vacant, the mouth is weak and uncertain. The youth is dressed

in faint imitation of the out-door costume of a Lion Comique-that is to say, he is vulgarly and flashily attired. He is smoking a bad cigar, and he is more than half tipsy. Now, probably there is no exaggeration in saying that this boy spends five out of every seven nights of the week at a music hall. Possibly, this is his favourite one, in which case he undoubtedly holds a season ticket of admission, and lounges in and out during the whole evening. Look at him closely-he is a confirmed habitué, and a good customer, of such establishments. We have no desire to read a homily upon the morality

or the immorality of the rising generation, but it would not be difficult to conjure up a prophetic career for such a youth. The annals of degradation are extensive, and the police reports do not give the tenth of them; the true records are graven in homes of squalor and pauperism; and upon the unwholesome bodies of weaklings yet unborn. The specimen before us is a city product; our huge cities extend themselves daily. What should we answer to the distinguished stranger were he to fall into the absurd mistake of inquiring if this be a typical EnglishTIGHE HOPKINS.

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WHAT is the difference between a gardener and a horticulturist it might be difficult scientifically to determine. But among amateurs there probably lingers about the more old-fashioned word of gardener something of rustic poetry, something of the tranquil and meditative side of life; while to the horticulturist proper there appertains rather the notion of a struggle after a new variety than of the enjoyment of a familiar beauty, and the excitement of scientific competition rather than the old contemplative ideal.

That even rare types reproduce themselves, and that there are successors to men of the honest quietude of John Evelyn, or Isaac Walton, or Adam before he left gardening for agriculture, we might be inclined to allow; but that any such should be found to spring out of journalistic circles in Paris, it is difficult to realise.

Feeling the fever of the age, M. Alphonse Karr may be pardoned for claiming for himself the proud position of being the last of the gardeners. For the times are indeed changed from the day when Evelyn, a member of Balliol and of the Middle Temple, and a master of a fine estate in Kent, wrote at the ripe age of forty years save one, to his friend Boyle, the founder of the institution that developed into the Royal Society, to propose the establishment of a college of retirement. In such a philosophical retreat studious persons were to pass their days without care or inter

ruption from the turbulence and confusion of politics, and enjoy at once their favourite pursuits and the society of their friends.

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Although we should be sorry to see the salt of the earth withdrawn from the world it seasons, and gathered into the narrow limits of a philosophic convent by way of salt-cellar, yet it would be a most delightful thing if there were college in the country where men of thought might resort for temporary quiet, and, while evolving a magnum opus, be able to sport their oak during hours of work, and refresh themselves in the society of kindred spirits in their hours of recreation.

No doubt some very thorough work would be done, and not only good work, but work impregnated with the generous spirit of affectionate tranquillity and the sweetness of nature's genial breathings.

There is something here that is lacking to most nineteenth century work, and if a man would escape from the pettiness and fret of conventional life, he can only find refuge in isolation or in that most difficult of regions to discover, whose name is variously spelled Arcadia, Bohemia, Eden, Avilion, Atlantis, Utopia.

Of the good resulting from the return of man into the garden we have evidence in the quality of work produced by the author of "Lorna Doone," who, like the author of "Autour de mon Jardin," is at once novelist and gardener. To the home of the English author one

approaches by a path through an orchard, a path thickly bordered by masses of the tiny flowers of London Pride. In entering his field of romance, which enlarges itself year by year during the time when fruits and flowers require least of the fostering hand, we are sensible of having come far away from the dusty road of the ordinary purveyor of circulating literature. His flowers and his fields are of nature's own hue, and when there comes a storm it is not of stage thunder and lightning, but serious as storms are when faced from the moor or the forest.

We cannot say so much as this for the author whose roses exhale their perfumes in the Parisian salons; he is more showy, with less of the deep instinct and appreciation of nature than the English novelist we have named.

Karr is now a septuagenarian, having been born in 1808; his baptismal names are Jean-BaptisteAlphonse, by the last of which he is generally known. His father, Henri Karr, was a German, a distinguished musician and composer, who settled in Paris in 1802. Henri Karr's father had been the chapel-master and friend of a prince, at a time when the German manners were simple and patriarchal. A pacific man by nature, he undertook diplomatic

mission for his patron, got into trouble, and died, almost of fright, a veritable fish out of water. His grandson, in whom the tranquil and patriarchal habit appears to have been resumed, was born at Munich, whither his parents had gone on a matter of business. Henri Karr, in order to support his widowed mother, had left Germany some years after his father's death in order to establish himself in Paris. He began by taking a situation in the house of Erard, the pianoforte manufacturer, where

his duty was to show off the merits of the instruments before the crowd that filled the rooms. He soon acquired a renown as a composer of morceaux for the piano; his son gives him the credit of being one of the five or six Germans who, from the spinet and the harpsichord, have made the piano. Balzac, in "Les Parents Pauvres," places him among the great German masters. For twenty years Henri Karr shared public favour with Thalberg, and his melodies had an immense circulation. There he was once engaged at some exhibition, in a contest not of music but of pianofortes, MM. Erard having responded to the challenge of all other manufacturers. Thalberg was the executant chosen by the adverse party; but Karr, by his special knowledge of the capacities of the very perfect piano which was submitted for experiment, and by a skilful adaptation to it of the most suitable theme, won the day for MM. Erard. In recognition of his abilities he was promised the cross by Marie Louise in the name of her imperial spouse, but St. Helena cut fulfilment short. In 1842 Alphonse was told that he was on the list for the ribbon of the legion of honour. "After my father, please," he said ; and his father received the red ribbon, and died the year following. Henri Karr was a true German, with blond hair, and calm and benevolent figure.

It is well to show forth Alphonse Karr's parentage, for, although born in France and of a French mother, he has proved through life how very different he is by nature from the pure French stock. It will be interesting to speculate, as we review his books and himself, how far he is German and how far French.

Karr's father taught him angling, and probably instilled the love of