appeared so delightful. With fondness they lingered as if they could have gazed for ever, the scene was so serene, the sorrow so overpowering. At last they gained an eminence two leagues distant from the city. The sun lighted up the summits of the minarets; the silver Xenil winded gracefully beneath; their cherished Alhambra stood erect in stately grandeur; and a sudden descent or divergence of the road shut out all from their eyes for ever. The scene was too impressive for mortal silence, the loss too great for human endurance; and when a gun booming forth announced that the Spanish had taken possession of the longheld domains of himself and his ancestors, all the hitherto suppressed grief of Boabdil burst out. His conscience now smote him that he had been the dupe of the Spanish monarch, or that he had not resisted as he ought, and Allah achbar, Great is God,' was feebly ejaculated by him amid a torrent of emotion. His heroic mother was moulded in sterner form: "You do well," she fiercely exclaimed, "to weep like a woman for what you have failed to defend as a man." Allah achbar! he again plaintively cried, deaf to such remonstrances, "when did misfortunes ever equal mine?" A vizier attendant endeavoured to console him by declaring that misfortune often rendered men as illustrious as prosperity, if magnanimously borne. The feeble prince drew a sigh only in reply, and the spot where he breathed it is still designated El ultimo suspiro del Moro, 'The last sigh of the Moor,' but his stately mother refused to receive any such consolation.

With the fall of Granada, the fall of the Moors in Spain was consummated. The Cid, though he essentially contributed to their overthrow, died, it will be observed, long before its conclusion; yet his name is generally associated with the event. His deeds and his importance have perhaps been exaggerated, and a considerable share of imagination is united with his history. Still it is impossible to deny that, like Wallace, Tell, and most of similar heroes, whether his character be immaculate and his achievements true or baseless, his career and renown have exerted a momentous influence on the fortunes of his country, an influence perhaps in some degree traditional, but which the great body of the people will long continue to cherish, and never willingly let die.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE.

I NEVER remember a fairer summer's day than that on which our little party first gathered together at The Cedars. I had been there more than a week and was already enfant de la maison, renewing my early boyish intimacy with Ada, and studying her now with no small anxiety to discover whether she was really and indeed a wife worthy of Raymond, and likely to secure his happiness. My brother had arrived the day before. Shirley had joined us only that morning. The last comer is always a little uneasy, and Shirley was still, as Raymond laughingly told him, "a shade too much polished to be thoroughly comfortable." Ada, however, was the only one of us who had any right to be really shy. She must have known that she was the subject of eager though not unfriendly inspection to all three of her guests. She must have seen what we all thought of Raymond, and could not but expect us to be fastidious in our judgment. Somehow or other she carried it off remarkably well. She seemed so undisguisedly desirous to please us, and so very much afraid of not doing so there was such a deprecating expression in her bright hazel eyes, such a pretty, timid, coaxing tone in her voice, that we must have had hearts as hard as the nether millstone if we had not liked her. My brother-always a little cynical, at least in theory-was the only one who reserved his judgment, and Ada shewed the quickness of her perceptions by her manner to him. Courteous and

attentive as he was to her, she evidently thought him the most terrific of the party. She was in the habit of frequently interlarding her conversation with little appeals to her husband-but when she spoke to my brother she scarcely ventured to make the simplest assertion without claiming this support for it. I believe if she had told him that she was twenty-three last birth-day, she would have thought it necessary to avouch her statement by a beseeching "wasn't I, Raymond ?”

We were enjoying the evening most luxuriously. Above the flower-garden was a double terrace of the closest and softest turf, divided by a sloping bed of roses, pegged down, so that they entirely covered the ground, and now presenting one unbroken sheet of bloom and fragrance. We were on the lower terrace; a carpet and cushions had been brought from the house to furnish us with all appliances for reclining at our ease; at our feet was the gay parterre, multitudinous in scents and colours-beyond it, the wide smooth lawn with its superb group of cedars-and further yet, where the rich plantations opened, a distant view of wood and vale, and upland, crossed by the gleam of silver waters, and backed by a filmy rampart of blue hills. Here we lounged, and sipped our coffee, and chatted; my brother a little apart with an open

book on his knee; Ada with her work in her hands, but far too busy talking, listening, and looking, to do a stitch of it; and Raymond with his arm over the neck of his favourite Czar, the most magnificent dog I ever saw, a pure mastiff, iron grey with black muzzle, and eyes as dark and speaking as his master's.

"Is not this the perfection of the dolce far niente?” said I, stretching my hand to pull a rosebud, and making a feeble attempt to stick it behind Czar's ear.

"All of us enjoying it except that inexorable Lyndwood, whose only notion of repose is a change of labour," observed Raymond, glancing at my brother. "Labour !" echoed Shirley rather contemptuously, "when he is only reading a novel !"

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Reading a novel is sometimes very hard labour indeed," said Raymond, "and Miss Austen of happy memory, might teach us that a worthy reading of the best of novels is any thing but idleness. Don't you remember her indignant appeal against your scornful phrase, 'Only a novel !'" "True," said Shirley, "and in these days one cannot venture to despise novels en masse, notwithstanding the great river of nonsense which flows under the name. But one may regret, and I own I do regret, that modern genius should have chosen this special form for its manifestation."

"And why, pray?" enquired Raymond, raising himself on his elbow. "Why?" repeated Shirley. "Because it is-at least, because I think it an unworthy form. The natural business of the novelist is simply to amuse; artists and moral teachers are wasted in this capacity. I may recognise Rembrandt's genius as heartily as any man, but that would not make me admire his style or his subjects.

Ray. The simile does not fit. Rather say, "I, being a dabbler in water-colours, think it unworthy of Raphael to have painted in oils." My dear fellow, what signifies the vehicle-it is the monarch who rides in it, the genius, at which we ought to look. And there can be little question that in these days the novel has taken the place both of drama and epic in our imaginative literature; we have novels and lyrical poetry, nothing else. The poet whose soul says to him "Thou shalt create," Las no choice but to write novels.

"Nevertheless," said I, "I think there is a reason for the popular prejudice against novels, as for most popular prejudices. The form is too easy, at least to superficial critics."

Ray. Aye, metre was a strong rampart, it needed a little courage to storm it. It was a good test also the pretender was exposed at once. A pickpocket manages to pass for a gentleman well enough in tight broad-cloth and polished boots, but he would have found it a harder matter to carry a cloak and a rapier and be detected neither by stumbling nor swaggering.

"Men write novels," said I, "who have served no apprenticeship, either to nature or art. Every one who can write a letter thinks that he wants nothing but leisure and resolution to enable him to

write a novel. And the mere process of narration, the mere recurrence of names, has something stimulating to lazy and vacant minds. However bad it may be they dawdle through it, and think it only less interesting than a good bout of gossip."

Shir. Thank you, gentlemen. You are proving my point for me. Does not all this shew that novels are intrinsically and of necessity a low class of composition, and that a man of real genius ought not to make them the principal instrument by which he reveals his mind to his generation.

Ray. (eagerly) Not at all! This easiness of form is only apparent, a disadvantage I grant you, but by no means a defect. I am persuaded that the novel is the most difficult of all forms in which to produce a great work of art. Which is easier to climb a mountain when you have nothing but rock and heather between you and the towering summit, or to find your way to the same summit through a pathless forest where your course must bend a thousand times to pierce the brushwood, or wind around the trunks of the trees?

Shir. (laughing) I am no match for you in metaphor-but the question is whether your summit is worth reaching after all?

Ray. That is a question which concerns all art, not the novel only. You may argue if you like that art was only intended as a relaxation; I will set Ruskin upon you, and contend to the last gasp that it is one great means for the ennoblement of human nature, and rightly used, teaches not the less surely because it teaches indirectly. Mind, I am no bigot. If there be a falsehood against which more than against any other my whole being rises up in wrath, it is that one class of temperaments ought to legislate for another, and determine what means it shall use and what leave untouched, for lifting itself a step upward in the scale of humanity. I abhor the idea. God is the author of temperament as of life, and of art as of nature. Let the puritan, whether he be intellectually or spiritually a puritan-choose his own path for approaching the One Unchangeable Truth. We are climbing the same mountain, but he trusts to his feet only, while I clasp thankfully each invisible hand which is stretched forth to encourage or aid the ascent, and believe with all my soul that they are the hands of angels. Let him renounce beauty and starve the senses; let him shear away the ornaments, and blot out the colours, and shut up all the avenues (which, remember, God made) except the one which he has chosen for himself to walk in-and there let him walk as cold, and bald, and steady, and contented, as he likes. have nothing to say to him, let him have his way, if he will. Music was not meant for the deaf, nor colours for the blind, but shall there be therefore no music and no colours?

I. (interrupting) Come, come, Raymond, you are no bigot! Ray. Well, I must confess I was a little hard upon the puritan, but only in theory, not a jot in practice. I not only give him leave to make his own selection among God's gifts, but I assert that he

is perfectly right in doing so. Whether he has no appetite for what he renounces, or whether he likes the food, yet finds or thinks it injurious, the result is the same to himself. Far be it from me to think of forcing it upon him. I would as soon feed Czar upon the honey of Hymettus; poor old Czar! don't be affronted at the comparison! But what I complain of is that he should stand up and say to a class of men whom God has made with faculties and tastes in which he is deficient-men who hunger for that which he rejects, and thrive upon what he cannot digest-"the utterances of my soul and the workings of my intellect shall be all according to the fashion which my temperament demands or which my judgment has selected, and you who are born with another temperament and whose judgment has led you to a different conclusion shall follow the same fashion. Therefore I will spend my life in a perpetual state of grim self-satisfaction, and you shall spend yours in a perpetual state of indignant self-denial."

Shir. Nay, but do you allow nothing for the wisdom which springs from experience? May not I, in this evening of time gather up the works of the day, and say, "I see that such seeds bear no fruit, or bitter fruit, and therefore they shall not be planted ?"

Ray. Yes, of course, in your own mind.
Shir. But may not I guard others?

Ray. Yes, of course, if you are infallible.

Shir. You accept no advice then unless your counsellor is infallible!

Ray. Ah! advice! I was talking of laws, enforced by pains and penalties. My dear fellow, let the ascetic advise the artist all his life through. I have nothing against it except certain secret twinges of pity. Why the very fact that the one uses a greater number of faculties than the other, proves that he is exposed to a greater number of dangers. Every path is dangerous-every privilege brings responsibility with it; there cannot be too many warnings. Only it is a fundamental article of my creed, that every faculty which God has given us He means to be exercised, developed, disciplined, and used. That it exists proves that it was intended to fill a place and do a work, not to be crushed and starved. Fix the limits of its sphere as jealously as you like, only allow that it has a sphere. And now ascetic! (with his hand on Shirley's shoulder) what admonition have you for me?

Shir. Only this, artist! Beware, lest in your strong assurance that there are many avenues to truth, you fall into the error of supposing that there are many truths!

Ray. A wise counsel! A just admonition! No, no, the throne of truth is unchangeable, and if you could shew me that any one of my paths led in an opposite direction, I would turn my back on it at once. And with regard to spiritual truth, I would not have you suppose for a moment that because I think the accent in which the creed is uttered may vary, I would tolerate a variation in the creed