When she became too ill to leave her house, her bedroom was partitioned to make a little chapel, where one of the clergy from the Theological College could come to celebrate the Eucharist for her. She loved animals, and in the eight years that failing health made her a prisoner in the house, she gathered round her many pets. The piety of her life led to no unnatural austerity, although there came a time in her life when delight in the discovery of more and more points of union for divergent branches of the Catholic Church, rather inclined her to overlook the faults of Romanism and to ignore the fact that the "full Catholic teaching" she was so rejoiced had come to be imparted by the English Church, does not include all the practices and ideas of medieval asceticism. She was often pressed to take up the government of a community, to become the mother-superior of a sisterhood, but she was firm in the assertion that she had not the vocation. And indeed it was true that her mind was not definitely closed against convictions arising from experience. Still, with her love of reading, she retained the power to modify opinions by what she read.

She was already "laid aside" and waiting for the call to "go up higher " when she wrote in her diary some beautiful and informing words which reveal the humanity and the saintliness that made her more than notable as a Churchwoman.

"Looking back upon my past life I see it to be a very wondrous piece of God-leading through, and in spite of difficulties, to His own Church; and yet now, at the age of sixty-five, I feel that I am more tolerant of others, more ready to put out a loving hand of fellowship to all Christians than ever before, more strong in belief of all sacramental dogma, but more loving to those who know it not, and yet love our one Master. I think under God's blessing it was my love of reading which guided me, and that love has gone on strengthening, and is the solace of my failing life

now."

Another from whom we have reminder of the potency that is in us the potency of high, bright thoughts, of

religious attainment and of intellectual industry-is Miss Charlotte Yonge. The daughter of a house where Church interests and observances of the orthodox pattern formed a regular part of daily life, Charlotte Yonge was educated on the Edgeworth system " modified by religion and good sense." She was not spoilt. She was a high-spirited, excitable, rather noisy child, vigorous though awkward in play. The particular quality of her literary inventiveness was early expressed by her taking her sixteen dolls for her children and sisters, and by her living day by day as she has herself related that she did-with an imaginary family of ten boys and eleven girls domiciled, by her fancy, in an arbour in the garden of her parents' house at Otterbourne. The playmates thus prolifically devised in childhood lived with her all her life long. They became the Mohuns, Mays, Merrifields and Underwoods. It was this power in Charlotte Yonge for making history, whether by representing actual events, movements and life-stories to be extracted from a nation's chronicles, or by detailing the ideal thoughts, actions and conversations of personalities born of her imagination, that constituted her genius→ for a genius Charlotte Yonge undoubtedly was, although not rightly a literary genius. No books can exercise such a spell over the thoughts and aims of the young, the intelligent and the ardent as The Heir of Redcliffe, Pillars of the House, The Daisy Chain, The Dove in the Eagle's Nest, and Miss Yonge's many other novels exercised in their time, unless they be the product of a talent and an individuality to which, combined, only the term of genius can be given. And the fact that Charlotte Yonge lived with and in her characters, that they were as near, as dear and as real to her as were her many friends and relations, is further proof that in their creator was the spontaneity of a true genius.

But possession of instinctive faculty does not always imply right use of it, and we may ask how did Charlotte Yonge employ her genius? The answer is unequivocalas a Churchwoman. Much of her literary execution was faulty. Although history, biography, criticism, jour

nalism, educational and religious text-books, essays and translations flowed as freely from her pen as did the novels which gave her the greater fame, the scope of her vision was limited. She saw life through books, in refined homecircles, in a small village community and in her own ideals and aspirations. But where she saw it, she saw it clearly. Yet clearer, more definite, more commanding than any vision of humanity—even of a re-created humanity—that was hers, was her view of the Sacraments and of the ordinances of her Church. She was in the world, not of it. Her life was hidden in the mysteries of the sanctuary. At an early age-even in the time that preceded her confirmation-she came to know, as a neighbourly friend and a spiritual director, the Rev. John Keble, author of The Christian Year. He was the Vicar of Hursley and of Otterbourne; the Yonge family being residents at Otterbourne, where the father of Charlotte had been instrumental in building a new church.

The work effected by Keble in his country parishes as in the Church at large was a noble and a needed work. It was a work that derived its special impulse from the Oxford Movement. Yet its ultimate aims received wise check from the good sense and the good feeling that were innate both in Keble and in Mrs. Keble. "My master he was in every way, and there was no one like Mrs. Keble for bright, tender kindness. In her transparency of complexion and clear, dark, hazel eyes she was like a delicate flower." These are words of Miss Yonge. Concerning the teaching of the master by whom she was prepared for confirmation, Charlotte Yonge has left us the testimony that when he had worked with her "through the Catechism and the Communion service, with the last comparing old liturgies and going into the meaning," her mind was opened to Church doctrine. But then came from Keble warnings against “taking these things up in a merely poetical tone for their beauty," and against "too much talk and discussion of Church matters, especially doctrines." As wise as his teachings, were the things he left untaught. "Mr. Keble never taught me at my confirmation anything about fast