lately as 1855, we find him returning to the old strain of despondent weariness and hopeless disgust of life. "The misery of this existence of ours," he observes, "is owing to causes quite foreign to the difficulties inherent in a literary life, and to a vulgar deprivation of cash." Then he endeavours to give a reason for this strange, morbid wretchedness, which he saw infecting so many of his friends. "The progressive invasion of dreams rendered by degrees the life of Gérard de Nerval impossible in the midst of the crowd of moving realities. . . . His spiritual nature predisposed him to illuminism and mystic exaltation. . . . His long, solitary walks, during which his thought grew excited, . . . detached him more and more from the sphere where we remain in durance beneath the heaviness of positivism. A happy or unhappy love... carried this exaltation, previously interior and restrained, to the last degree of paroxysm. Gérard no longer had command over his dreams." Here, we think, Gautier has probed the "disease down to its secret sources. Every possible pleasure of life, instead of being enjoyed in natural fashion and kept wholesome by a contrariety of hard work, was drawn inwards to the dim dream-chambers of the interior life, and there dramatised with all the exaltation of the imagination, with all the allurements of the wanton exercise of the sensitive psychological faculties, until the outer senses were completely demoralised. Thenceforward the simple pleasures of the world seemed gross or heavy, and its simple duties as burdensome as fetters of clay. At the time when there was homely, earthly work to be done, the nerves would be relaxed and weak from their high electric tension, and the imagination, chill and contracted, would be

engaged in an endeavour to analyse its hallucinations. What wonder that the details of life seemed dry and oppressive under such condi tions as this? Then the victim of overwrought nerves would betake himself to opium or hasheesh to recover the lost exaltation, the fading inspiration, the burnt-out paroxysm, and the last state of that man would be worse than the first.

Such spiritualism of wantonness and degradation, which seems for the most part to be found in those whose minds are not well filled and steadied by experience, or lit by the spiritualism of aspiration, Gautier does indeed appear to have outlived. The ennui and morbidness of his earlier years have been attributed to his living in an age when all political experiments had been tried, and blank want of faith was the result. A monotonous reversion to a dead-grey and starless horizon might, indeed, quench the spirits of a too sensitive thinker; but for an artist like Gautier some other cause must be discovered more closely personal, and of some such nature as that abuse of the imagination to which reference has been made.

In spite of Gautier's moral lapses we seem to detect in much of his work a shy, remote purity of spirit. It is as if he were saying to himself sometimes, "There is such a thing as purity, far away and unreached." When we ask why this ideal was not brought closer to his life, we have, by way of answering ourselves, to take circumstances into consideration. In Paris, the true woman's influence was deplorably wanting. Young women there are presumed not to be acquainted with the questionable romances of the other sex; but none the more for their ignorance are they overflowing with the pure feminine virtues. There is little of true marriage in

Parisian society, with much of what must tend to banish the true idea of it. The silly young girl leaves school full of frivolous and idle dreams, and innocent of experience or of the practical and useful; she becomes straightway the unwooed and unloved partner of a man she has not chosen, and whom she may have seen but once. Mutual suitability is not of supreme importance, for the traditions of marriage do not show unlimited faithfulness to be a necessity. Can we say that the idea promulgated by such as Gautier, of a mistress who is the courted companion of a man, were but the idea of constancy included therein, is more depraved than the conventional notion of a wife who is the haphazard allotment of society, and not necessarily either suitable, lovable, or true? Treated as they are, and with society as it is, there are rarely to be found in Paris women able to win and redeem and bind to themselves a man of the calibre of Gautier. In "Mademoiselle de Maupin" there is a sort of mournful appreciation of all this. The heroine, who goes through so many most questionable and unwomanly adventures, takes for her text an idea which we cannot but think it would be good to have promulgated: "Hélas!" she deplores, "les femmes n'ont lu que le roman de l'homme, et jamais son histoire." She proceeds in a very unnatural manner to discover that history; but Gautier does not profess to be a philosopher or utilitarian. found women grown like very perishable exotics, and always under dim glass; he has depicted one emerging from conventional trammels and plucking for herself the apple of knowledge of good and evil after a very strange fashion, it is true; but it is something that the idea of the necessity of some knowledge on the part of

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woman should have been suggested by him. He makes us feel, at least, how much amongst frivolous women, feebly affecting religion, sentimental and unpractical devotees, bread-and-butter girls without ideas, and old women with only vicious ones, Parisian men were to be pitied. With pure women as their companions, men would dream little of morbid Messalinas haunting the chambers of their souls. Whose fault it is that the Parisian social system is as it is, who can tell? It certainly is not wholly Gautier's; he is, at least, in part, a victim, and not wholly "infernal," as some of his critics tell us.

Gautier was an artist, and mollibus medullis, yet strong with a beauty that could transform common things and make them glow with a magic life unseen before. He had all the artist's weaknesses. He was weak enough, in his early manhood, to bid for popularity with a public greedy of novelty and seeking the piquant sensationalism of evil. He was weak enough to permit his soul to swoon for a time before the evil allurements which he conjured up. He never attained to the power of obedience, and was a revolter against laws of healthy art, as well as against laws of simple morality. He re-acted against conventionalisms blindly, and without seeing that he was wandering away into a wanton region of capricious and vagrant ideas and false paradoxes. And, lastly, he was not even quite a genuine Pagan, but failed sadly of his religious professions. His want of faith in the beauty of life and of its healthful needs we have shown already. He was not serene before the vision of death; and, worst of all, he was not reverent in the very temple of Nature, where he professed to worship. For the true Pagan there are groves that

ought not to be profaned, and shrines which it is impious to violate. There is a modesty which a boy or a girl learns instinctively on passing out of childhood. This is a natural and not a conventional virtue; and M. Gautier, in failing to respect it, has erred. Had his love for art been single, and his Paganism instinctive, instead of partly affected, he would have learned the true Greek religion, which would at least have preserved him from indecency and from morbid inebriations, and have taught him laws of order and moods of serenity.

With all his faults, Gautier was capable of inspiring true affection in friends. He was unselfish, save for the indulgence of his immoderate passion for art. He would always renounce with contempt a reality of bourgeois comfort for an idea of roses.

Dumas, as Gautier's friend, was careful to state over his grave that he was not "an eccentric and disordered character, an incorrigible Bohemian." On the contrary, he was "a family man, as much as any one else," working "patiently,

regularly, nobly, silently, for his children." We ought to take this fact into consideration when we are led to estimate him too meanly by the infirmities of his earlier years, or by the character of his imaginative conceptions.

Gautier was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1858. He several times was a candidate for the honour of a place in the Academy, but the ballot was always against him. He is none the less a master of style, both in prose and poetry, and a perfect critic.

The poet, who professed to abjure politics, but is said by his friends to have been a true patriot at heart, is buried at Montmartre, which the allies passed through in 1814, in entering Paris; and the church at Neuilly where his remains rested bore at the time the shotmarks of the more recent strife. That miserable and fratricidal conflict, and the devotion of Gautier— the man who professed to be so careless-to the beautiful, if evil, mother Paris, aggravated, it was said, the disease of which he died.

hand" said the juggler, "see what you have got, and tell me if it is a coin of the country you thought of." It was a five-franc piece, and Mr. Smyth had thought of France. He was going to hand the coin to the conjuror, but the latter said No, pass it to the other sahib." Mr. Smyth accordingly put the fivefranc piece into my hand; I looked closely at it, then shut my hand and thought of Russia. When I opened it I found, not a Russian but a Turkish silver piece about the size of the five franc, or of our own crown piece. This I handed to Mr. Smyth, and suggested that he should name America, which he did, and found a Mexican dollar in his hand. The coin, whatever it was, had never been in the conjuror's hand from the time the rupee was bor

rowed from the Parsee merchant. Mr. Smyth and his bearer had both of them closely examined the rupee, and Mr. Smyth and I turned over several times the five-franc piece, the Turkish coin, and the dollar; so the trick did not depend on a reversible coin. Indeed it could not, for the coin underwent three changes, as has been seen. I need only add, for the information of those readers who know not India, that a rupee is only about the size of a florin, and therefore about half the weight of a five franc piece.

The juggler performed several other tricks that day, but they were of a common-place kind and in no way comparable to the coin trick, which I have never seen rivalled by any other conjuror in India or Europe.

The following evening Mr. Smyth and I were to dine at the mess of the 28th Native Infantry. We told some of our friends in the regiment of the tricks our juggler had shown us; they asked us to invite the man to perform after dinner in the mess drawing room. He came

accordingly, and began by showing some very common-place tricks. I wanted him to do the coin trick, but he made some excuse. I should mention that one of the officers was himself an amateur conjuror, and Mr. Smyth introduced him and our juggler to each other as comrades in art magic. Possibly our juggler may have been afraid that the captain would detect his method; or perhaps he only felt nervous about repeating a trick which must have depended very much on mere guesswork. Be that as it may, he would not perform the coin trick at the mess. But he did another almost equally wonderful.

As before, he was seated on a white cloth, which this time I think was a table-cloth, borrowed from the mess sergeant. He asked some one present to produce a rupee, and to lay it down at the remote edge of the cloth. The cloth being three or four yards in length, the conjuror could not have touched the coin without being seen, and, in fact, did not touch it. He then asked for a signet ring. Several were offered him, and he chose out one which had a very large oval seal, projecting well beyond the gold hoop on both sides. This ring he tossed and tumbled several times in his hands, now throwing it into the air and catching it, then shaking it between his clasped hands, all the time mumbling halfarticulate words in some Hindostanee patois. Then setting the ring down on the cloth at about half-arm's length in front of him, he said, slowly and distinctly in good Hindostanee, "Ring, rise up and go to the rupee." The ring rose, with the seal uppermost, and resting on the hoop, slowly, with a kind of dancing or jerking motion, it passed over the cloth until it came to where the rupee lay on the remote edge; then it lay down on