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making him use his wealth. Alan was eminently receptive of ideas. And Paul Rondelet marvelled that he had neglected to exploiter this wealthy mine during so many years. His own disciple, almost-his admirer, always -one who believed in him-it was absurd to think of going out into poverty with Alan at his back.

He made his way to the Shepherd Squire's comfortless cottage, and waited there for his arrival.

Nothing was changed in the cottage since that first day when Alan went to sleep by the fire, and awoke to find his breakfast stolen. There was the wooden chair beside the deal table; the shelf of books; the stack of papers, the cupboard door open, showing the common china and the materials for making tea, bread-and-butter, and other simple accessories of a hermit's life. The kettle was on the hob, though the fire was not lit; and a couple of candlesticks stood upon the mantel-shelf.

Paul Rondelet lit the candles, sat, and waited. This cottage life, he re membered, was one of the dreams of a certain stage in his own develop

ment.

He thought how, in their ardent youth, they had taken their claret in Alan's rooms, which looked over the stately college gardens, and discussed the life of self-sacrifice which was to regenerate the world. There

were a dozen who formed their little set of theorists. Out of them all one alone was found to carry theories into practice, and realize a dream. What about himself? What about the rest? It was not enough to say that they were men who had to make an income for themselves. He could no longer comprehend the attitude of mind which made such a dream as that former one possible. He had

grown out of it, he said. He had sunk beneath it, conscience whispered; but then the Advanced School does not believe in conscience. And the rest? They were all at work: practising at the Bar, writing, teach

ing, even-melancholy thought!-curates and parish priests.

What he could no longer understand was the nobleness of the nature which thus simply converted theory into practice, and became what the others only talked about. What he failed to see was, that, living in slothful ease, which he mistook for intellectual activity, he had lost the power to conceive any more, far less to execute, the noble dreams of his youth.

He sat and wondered. Six years before, his heart would have burned within him, and his spirit would have mounted upwards, to join that of Alan Dunlop. Now he only wondered.

Presently Alan came. His manner was listless, his face was haggard. Alma had been more than usually unreceptive that evening. She had been sulky; she had returned rude and short answers; she had tried his patience almost beyond his strength. His father, too, he had learned, was at the Abbey and he did not dare go to see him, lest in his tell-tale face, or by his tell-tale tongue, it should be discovered that he had made a great and terrible mistake, beyond the power of an honourable man to alter.

'You here, Rondelet?' 'Yes, I have been waiting for you. Let us have a talk, Alan.'

Paul Rondelet produced his roll of papers, while Alan, with a rather weary sigh, took down a pipe from the mantel-shelf, filled it, and sat listlessly on his deal table.

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Go on, Rondelet; I am listening.' Paul Rondelet began, with a little nervousness unusual to him, to expound his project. Had Alan cared to read between the lines, his speech I would have been as follows:

'I am driven to the necessity of doing something for myself; in a few months I shall have no income. I can find no way of fighting as men generally do fight. I can discern no likely popularity in what will fall from my pen. I want to get, somehow or

other, endowment. You are a very

rich man.

You shall endow me.'

What he really said at the finish was this:

'I will leave the Prospectus with you. I shall be able to find a publisher on commission-easily. It is a crying shame that a magazine purely devoted to the followers of the Higher Culture does not exist.'

There are the Contemporary, the Fortnightly, the Nineteenth Century.'

'My dear Dunlop !'-he held up his handspray do not think that we are going to occupy that level. We shall have none but our own as circle readers, writers, and supporters.'

'Will you depend on names?'

'On some names, yes. Not on the names of ex-Premiers; only on the names of those who are men of mark among ourselves.'

'But--do you think it will pay?' 'Not at first, I suppose-eventu ally. And that brings me to my next point. I have drawn up a note

of expenses. I put myself down as editor, with eight hundred pounds a year. You do not think that exces sive, Dunlop ?'

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that we want, but the acted life.' That was just what Alan, in a different way, had always maintained. 'Let the lower herd, the crowd, see how we live, read what we write, and learn what we think.'

"Y-yes,' said Alan doubtfully; ' and the probable amount of the guarantee what one might be asked to pay, month by month?'

That,' said Mr. Rondelet airily, 'is impossible for me to say. Perhaps a thousand in the course of the year. Perhaps a little more. We shall have, of course, a great quantity of advertisements to fall back upon. I have no doubt that we shall rapidly acquire a circulation. People want guidance -we shall guide them; they want to know what to think--we shall formulate their thoughts; what to readwe shall publish a list of selected ar ticles.'

"That sounds possible,' said Alan, softening.

You and I, my dear Alan,' went on the tempter,will be registered joint proprietors. You shall find the You money-I will find the staff. shall start us-I will be the editor. And we will share the profits.'

'Yes. I was to share the profits of my farm; but there are none.'

There will be, in this magazine. Fancy a monthly journal without a trace of Philistinism in it. Positively no habitant of the Low Country allowed to write in it. The Higher Thought demands a style of its own. There have been articles, I own, in the Fortnightly, especially written by members of our own school, which none but ourselves could possibly understand. Picture to yourself a på per absolutely unintelligible save to the disciples of the New School. As for the other things, what can be expected from magazines which allow Bishops, Deans, Professors, and people of that sort to contribute?'

Paul Rondelet shook his head sadly, as if the lowest depths must be reached when you come to Bishops. Alan was

shaken, but not convinced. Sitting as he was among the ruins of his own schemes, he was naturally not anxious to promote new ones. And yet, the old influence of Paul Rondelet was over him still. He still believed that this man was a power. The first and the lifelong heroes are those of school and college. It is sad, indeed, when chance brings one face to face, in after years, with the great and gallant Captain of the school, to find that he is, after all, no greater than yourself, and, in fact, rather a mean sort of person. Next to the school hero comes he who was a hero among undergraduates. Alan believed formerly in that bright, clever, and conceited scholar who assumed every kind of knowledge, and talked like a Socrates. It was difficult not to believe in him still. He reflected that this would be his chance he thought that it would be a great thing to let Rondelet prove his greatness to the outer world.

'I will guarantee the expense,' he said at last, 'for one year.'

Paul Rondelet, shortly afterwards, stepped out of his Fellowship with ease of mind. The magazine was

started.

It was exactly a year ago. It ran for nearly a year; it contained the Poem of the Sorrowful Young Man;

The Sonnet to Burne Jones; papers by Paul Rondelet on the Orphic Myth, on the Bishops of the Renaissance, on certain obscure French poets, on the Modern School of English Painting, on the Italian Woman of the Fifteenth Century, on the Fall of the Church, and other papers. Nobody except 'the Circle' bought that magazine ; nobody advertised in it. And after ten months, for very shame, the publishers advised Mr. Dunlop to pay the editor his salary for the year and stop it. Paul Rondelet now writes for the Daily Press. He contributes leaders to a penny paper. He glories in this occupation. It is not writing for the common herd any longer; it is 'swaying the masses. His articles may be known by frequent quotations, not from the poets loved by the world, but from modern writers, such as Morris and Rossetti; by references to French writers not generally known to mankind, such as Catulle Mendes, Baudelaire, and Theodore de Banville; by the easy omniscience which is at home among pre-historic men, or among the scholars of the Renaissance or with the Darwinians; by an absolute inability to enter with sympathy into any phase of real life; and by an irrepressible tone of superiority. Whatever he says, this writer is always Paul Rondelet of Lothian.

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brought thoroughly under the control of ministers responsible to Parliament. The Marshal resisted, as all soldier kings do, and the result is his deposi tion and the installation of M. Grévy in his place. Constitutionally, this is right; but practically there may be some ground for apprehension. It is the Alpha and Cmega of statesmanship to see things exactly as they are. The French nation thinks fit, for pur poses of ambition or revenge, to keep up an enormous army. That army is

the master of France, and might, if it pleased, to-morrow, overturn the Republic like a house of cards. Its omnipotence has been more nakedly revealed since the total failure of the civic forces in the siege of Paris. It must also be perfectly conscious of its power, and know well that seven times, by active interference or passive defection, it has changed the government of France. Its professional instincts, like those of all armies are anti-republican, and in some portions of it, notably in the cavalry, a strong Imperialist feeling still prevails. To keep it loyal to the Republic ought therefore to be the first object of Republican statesmen. This the Presidency of Marshal MacMahon seemed well calculated to do. The Marshal was a soldier of distinction, thoroughly identified with the army in feeling, in fact its very best representative; and its pride was satisfied by seeing him at the head of the State. On the other hand, he was not distinguished enough to be dangerous: the cypress rather than the laurel wreathed his brow; and he could not possibly conceive the hope of making a military revolution in his own interest. Political ideas he had none beyond the vague Conservative tendency which the discipline of the camp always inspires; in the attempt of May 16th, he was evidently a mere tool, and since its failure he seemed in good faith to have laid down his arms and capitulated to the Republican regime. If he was tenacious about a few military appoint

ments, which he fancied to be essential on professional grounds, he might have been humoured without a serious breach of principle, considering the great advantages gained by his adhesion to the Republic. His wife, a devout and intriguing woman, was perhaps more dangerous; but she must have known that she could not herself be Empress; it was not likely that she would wish to make any other woman Empress over her head; and the personal feud with the Simons, which led her to precipitate the attempt of May, seemed in no way to have extended to Dufaure. It will be interesting to see whether the army considers itself deposed in the person of MacMahon, and, if so, how it will take its deposition. Is the army satisfied was the first question that Napoleon asked of one who visited him at Elba, and unfortunately it is the first question to be asked still. Not till she has got clear of the military regime, military sentiments, military manners, will France be securely a Republic.

Not only to the army but to the priesthood a challenge is flung by the election of Grévy, who apparently belongs to that element in France which is not so much hostile to the Church as absolutely alien to her, regarding her with no more interest or emotion than the Church of Jupiter or Osiris. It was said that when he was Presi dent of the National Assembly, having to attend service officially at Notre Dame, when the sacristan presented him the holy water at the entrance of the church, he, not knowing what was meant, took the brush from the astonished sacri-tan, shouldered it and marched with it to his stall. Against him, no doubt, the clergy will marshal all their powers; and in the clergy, together with the aristocratic and military elements, lies now the strength of the resistance to the final establishment of the Republic. The dynastic pretenders and their personal interests are nowhere. Henry V. is a de

votee, who ought to be Chamberlain to the Pope, and who, with perfect simplicity, tells the French a century after the Revolution that, in order that he may reign despotically over their bodies, it is necessary that the priest should reign despotically over their souls. No one will embark in such a ship who does not believe in the miracle of La Salette. The attempt to fuse the Legitimnists with the Orleanists by a family reconcilia. tion has totally failed. It is not a question of pedigree but of regimes. The spirit of St. Louis will not make peace with that of Egalitè, nor will the Oriflamme blend with the Tricolour. The Comte de Paris himself is virtuous, amiable and cultivated; but not the man to grasp a crown. His uncle, the Duc d'Aumale, would seem to be an object of greater apprehension to the Republicans, if it be true that he has been relieved of his military command; but he is growing old, and he is supposed to have sunk into habits inconsistent with the vigour of ambition. The Young Ascanius' of the Bonapartists may now be set down as an acknowledged disappointment. If the recent accounts of his condition are true, the poor youth would appear to have imbibed in his cradle the morality of the Second Empire. It is evident the hopes of the party are rapidly declining. Baron Haussmann was the great edile, and one of the most devoted and best paid satellites of the Empire. But he is one of those politicians who always watch how the cat jumps, and call it studying the spirit of the age. It has been long suspected that he was meditating a submission to fortune; and we are now told that he was among the first to offer his congratulations to M. Grévy.

Hereditary monarchy is apparently dead in the land of Louis XIV. In the land of Philip II. it draws a faint and failing breath. What are its prospects of propagating itself in lands which have never been its own? There

are people who, floating on one of the backstreams of which history is full, mistake it for the main current, and think that the river of human progress has turned back to its source.

Of course the air in France is full of rumours of constitutional change in an ultra revolutionary and even in a communistic sense. It is not likely that anything of the kind will be attempted at present. Grévy is a coolheaded old lawyer and man of business; and the history of the last five years has shown that beneath the rhetorical fire of Gambetta lies prudence cold as snow. It is scarcely possible that the French Republic should go on for ever with a cumbrous and jarring counterpart of what people are pleased to call the British Constitution. A system, if the accidental survival of two old feudal estates deservethe name, which is rendered practi cally consistent with good government, in spite of its obsoleteness and defects, by the special qualities and peculiar training of the British peo-ple, when imported into a nation devoid of those qualities and that training, produces nothing but embarrassment, collisions and confusion. The whole Parliamentary history of France testifies to the unmanageableness in that country, of great elective Assemblies and Legislature with two Chambers. But modifications in this direction would not be more revolutionary than conservative; and universal suffrage being already established, and having triumphed, by the deposition of the Marshal, over the last remnant of personal power, there is not much in the political line at present for even the most ardent revolutionist to do. It is in the line of public education that the victorious Republicans may rather be expected to move. Experience has taught them that political change is at once superficial and precarious when attended by no change in the fundamental beliefs and character of a nation. It is pro-bable that they will try to take the

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