their loads at the extreme edge of the animals' hindquarters. With apparent precarious balance they trotted rapidly along the steep and rugged road, using no reins and making a small switch do all the necessary guidance. We saw one girl make her pony kneel down while she sprang up behind her creels.

We found a smartly-painted yellow car drawn by a pony in readiness for us on reaching the village. The little animal was not more than twelve hands in height, but it went at a good pace and seemed most willing.

To reach Doogort we had to drive through Keel. Here we made a digression in order to go down to the sands. We had first to traverse a wide stretch of green commonage bounded by a high ridge of round stones that the restless sea had piled up. On the other side of this ridge lay the sands, hard, level, yellow, stretching away for over two miles until they ended abruptly under the shadow of the grim Minnehaun cliffs. Famous here are the wonderful Cathedral Caves, so called because the fret and wash of the Atlantic for centuries has hollowed out the tall rocks into many arches and cloisters resembling those of some old-time cathedral, And I am sure that wind and wave make weird storm-music in those echoing caves while sea-birds hover and listen outside.

Doogort is a small village of neatlybuilt, whitewashed houses nestling at the foot of the Slievemore mountain. At the hotel we made the acquaintance of Mr. John Sheridan, widely known among the tourist world as sportsman, naturalist, and antiquary. As proprietor of the hotel he has entertained many celebrities in his time, and is proud to number Lady Zetland and Miss Balfour among his late visitors. He is full of information and anecdote about the island, and is never happier than when showing his specimens or antiquities to visitors.

Notwithstanding our drive I felt energetic enough afterwards to climb the great mountain of Croghan and see its wonderful cliffs, two thousand feet in almost sheer descent. We did not

find the ascent very troublesome. There was plenty of heather and grass underfoot, and the ground abounded in wild orchids and London pride. We reached the top in an hour and fifty-five minutes, including twenty minutes for rests at intervals. At every step the view grew more beautiful, till at length we reached the summit. Below lay the great Atlantic, with no land between us and America. Two schooners, sailing idly over the summer sea, seemed mere toy ships. Inland, all the world appeared to lie at our feet. The lodge was a tiny speck of grey, with only the smoke from its chimneys to indicate its whereabouts. Even great Slievemore looked stunted, while the Keem cliffs, that yesterday appeared to us so vast, seemed like small, green mounds. To the south, on the other side of Clew Bay, lay the islands of Innisturk and Innisboffin, and, beyond them, the long range of the Connemara mountains. A little to our right as we looked out to sea, and, as it were, almost at our feet, stretched Saddle Head and Achill Head, the latter a succession of dark, jagged peaks running out into the soft, grey sea. The gentle, languorous grey of evening was stealing over the eastern heavens, and a great bar of gold stretched across the western horizon on the pearl-colored ocean. It was a dream of the daylight.

After dinner that evening we all assembled in the glass-covered verandah to listen to some of the experiences of old Gaughan the guide. Sitting well forward on an inverted hamper, with a glass of his beloved whiskey in his hand, the old man looked curiously picturesque. His high forehead, lined and deeply wrinkled, terminated in a narrow bald crown, from underneath which straggled long, thin locks scarcely tinged with grey. Heavy grey eyebrows overshadowed small but keen and twinkling blue eyes. His nose and upper lip were very long. The lower lip protruded a good deal, and his chin, which receded abruptly, was fringed with scanty hair. Two deep furrows ploughed his face on each side, but not unkindly. Over his whole

countenance spread an expression of humor and geniality, which was intensified when he broke into speech-and Jack could not long be silent. He wore a coat green with age, a pair of heavilypatched, baggy trousers, and a red woollen comforter, which enfolded his neck many times.

Jack was first asked his opinion of whiskey, which has already been quoted.

"Did you ever taste champagne,

Jack?" asked one of the party.

"Ay, I did. There was a gintleman come here to go up Croghan, an' whin we got to the top he had for his lunch bread an' other things, an' champagne in thim gold bottles. 'Hallo! Jack,' sez he, 'here's a loaf an' some champagne for yez.' 'An' what is this for?' sez I, after tashtin' it. 'What is that for?' sez he. 'Yes,' siz I, 'what's it for?' sez I. 'Shure it's for sick women that's for,' sez I, 'that shweet thing! What's it good for but for sick women? It's so wake-it's no use.' An' no more it is," he added, after draining the glass he held, turning his twinkling eyes on us. "Well, Jack, you'd better have some more whiskey," said Mr. O'D"You don't believe in the Blue Ribbon Army, then?"

"Arrah! Good luck, good luck, your honor," returned the old man, holding out his glass to be refilled. "Is it the Blue Ribbon Army?" he added, with a fine contempt. "Arrah! It's a poor sort of army that."

We asked if he had ever seen a train. "I niver seen a train but ance," he said, "an' thin I wint in her as far as Claremorris, an' I wouldn't go on her agin. I'd sooner walk it. She's very dangerous; shure if she wint off the track isn't all that's in her killed? If the man that's dhrivin' her had a dhrap o' whiskey taken, wouldn't he kill all that's in her? I'll niver go in her agin, she roarin' an' rattlin', an' whustlin' an' scramin'! Arrah! I'll niver go in her agin-niver, niver."

We now varied the evening by a few songs, our guide giving us several ditties in Irish in a sort of weird, monotonous chant, ending each with a curious shout.

Mr. B― sang a comic song called "Mullarkey's Supper Party," in which the courting and love-making of Mr. Mullarkey's guests were described with the most vivid Irish humor. Gaughan was intensely pleased with this, punctuating the different verses with a delighted "Ha! Ha!"

"An' now mebbe the colonel will sing?" he said, turning to Captain S-, who, tacitly accepting his promotion at the guide's hands, disclaimed any musical ability. "Arrah! What's that?" said Gaughan. "Shure, doesn't the colonel sing whin he's marching at the head of his army!"

An anecdote followed illustrative of the belief of the peasant of the west in the varied powers of their priest. "Three months ago, ladies and gents all, there was no sand at Dooagh, only rocks, an' the poor people were losht for want of sand; so Father out into the sea on his pony, and ever since thin we've had lots of sand, an it's comin', comin' ivery day!"

rode

"Did you see Mr. Balfour when he was on the island, Gaughan?" we asked.

"Troth, I niver did see Mr. Balfour," he returned. "Och! musha, I wish I could see Mishter Balfour! Shurely ivery man in Achill would be dead but for him. If I was a jury or a barrishter fit to do it, I'd make a lord-liftinant of him. I'd make a king in Ireland of him forever, forever. Hadn't I as good piaties as any man in the island?-and I haven't eaten a piatie since Christmas. But for Mishter Balfour you couldn't walk in Dooagh for corpses, an', troth, I'd say it up to his face. An' three cheers for Mishter Balfour night and day! An' sorra night but I goes on me knees to pray for him to have luck at the lasht day thro' the grace o' God! An' may his sowl go to Hiven the lasht day! All the village pray for him night an' day."

When the old man at last rose to depart, he made us a little bow, and swaying gently over his final "drap o' whiskey," said, "Here's your good health, and may the Lord Almighty bless yez night and day, you ladies and

you gentlemen." With feelings of genuine regret we bade him good-bye. Ile was a good type of the old-fashioned western reasant-courteous, humorous. with a tact and acuteness of perception to be wondered at and envied.

The morning broke damp and drizzly, and at breakfast our spirits suffered a little. It was the end of a simple pleasure of which we had not partaken to satiety-pleasure of that sort which lingers longest in the memory. Regretfully we did our packing, and shortly after said good-bye to kindly Mrs. Gand her helpful daughter, and found ourselves on our way back to civilization.

M. B. PATTISSON.

From The Nineteenth Century. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

More than three years have come and gone since, amongst April blossoms, an English master in the literature of Italy was laid in his premature grave, within that most pathetic and most sacred spot of Rome where lie so many famous Englishmen. "They gave us," wrote his daughter in a beautiful record of the last scene, "they gave us a little piece of ground close to the spot where Shelley lies buried. In all the world there surely is no place more penetrated with the powers of poetry and natural beauty." All travellers know how true is this: few spots on earth possess so weird a power over the imagination. It is described by Horatio Brown in the volume from which I have been quoting, "the grave is within a pace of Trelawny's and a hand-touch of Shelley's 'Cor Cordium,' in the embrasure of the ancient city walls." Fit restingplace for one who of all the men of our generation best knew, loved, and understood the Italian genius in literature!

There are not wanting signs that the reputation of J. Addington Symonds had been growing apace in his latest

1 John Addington Symonds: a Biography. By Horatio F. Brown. With portraits and other illustrations, in two vols. 8vo. London, 1895.

years; it has been growing since his too early death, and I venture a confident belief that it is yet destined to grow. His later work is to my mind far stronger, richer, and more permanent than his earlier work-excellent as is almost all his prose. Even the learning and brilliancy of the "Renaissance in Italy" do not impress me with the same sense of his powers as his "Benvenuto Cellini," his "Michelangelo," his last two volumes of "Essays, Speculative and Suggestive." (1890), and some passages in the posthumous "Autobiography" embodied in the "Life" by H. F. Brown. For grasp of thought, directness, sureness of judgment, the "Essays" of 1890 seem to me the most solid things that Symonds has left. He grew immensely after middle age in force, simplicity, depth of interest and of insight. He pruned his early exuberance; he boldly grasped the great problems of life and thought; he spoke forth his mind with a noble courage and signal frankness. He was lost to us too early; he died at fifty-two, after a life of incessant suffering, constantly on the brink of death, a life maintained, in spite of all trials, with heroic constancy and tenacity of purpose. And as we look back now we may wonder that his barely twenty years of labor under such cruel obstacles produced so much. For I reckon some forty works of his, great and small, including at least some ten important books of prose in some twenty solid volumes. That is a great achievement for one who was a permanent invalid and was cut off before old age.

The publication of the "Life" by his friend H. F. Brown, embodying his own "Autobiography” and his “Letters," has his friends only partly understood, how now revealed to the public what even stern a battle for life was waged by Symonds from his childhood. His inherited delicacy of constitution drove him to pass the larger part of his life abroad, and at last compelled him to

make his home in an Alpine retreat. The pathetic motto and preface he prefixed to his "Essays" (1890) shows how deeply he felt his compulsory exile

And

εὑρετικὸν εἶναί φασι τὴν ἐρημίαν "solitude," they say, "favors the search after truth"-"The 'Essays,' he declares, "written in the isolation of this Alpine retreat (Davos-Platz, 1890), express the opinions and surmisings of one who long has watched in solitude, 'as from a ruined tower,' the world of thought, and circumstance, and action." And he goes on to speak of his "prolonged seclusion from populous cities and the society of intellectual equals"-a seclusion which lasted, with some interruptions, for more than fifteen years. during a large part of his life of active literary production, a period of scarcely more than twenty years, he was continually incapacitated by pain and physical prostration, as we now may learn from his "Autobiography" and "Letters." They give us a fine picture of intellectual energy overcoming bodily distress. How few of the readers who delighted in his sketches of the columbines and asphodels on the Monte Generoso, and the vision, of the Propylæa in moonlight, understood the physical strain on him whose spirit bounded at these sights and who painted them for us with so radiant a palette.

Symonds, I have said, grew and deepened immensely in his later years, and it was only perhaps in the very last decade of his life that he reached the full maturity of his powers. His beautiful style, which was in early years somewhat too luscious, too continuously florid, too redolent of the elaborated and glorified prize-essay, grew stronger, simpler, more direct, in his later pieces, though to the last he had still some savor of the fastidious literary recluse. In the "Catholic Reaction" (1886), in the "Essays" (1890), in the posthumous "Autobiography" (begun in 1889), he grapples with the central problems of modern society and philosophic thought, and has left the somewhat dilettante tourist of the Cornice and Ravenna far, far behind him. As a matter of style, I hold the "Benvenuto Cellini" (of 1888) to be a masterpiece of skilful use of language; so that the inimitable memoirs of the

immortal vagabond read to us now like an original of Smollett. It is far the most popular of Symonds's books, in large part no doubt from the nature of the work, but it is in form the most racy of all his pieces; and the last thing that any one could find in it would be any suggestion of academic euphuism. Had Symonds from the first written with that verve and mother-wit, his readers doubtless would have been trebled.

It has been an obstacle to the recognition of Symonds's great merits that until well past middle life he was known to the public only by descriptive and critical essays in detached pieces, and these addressed mainly to a scholarly and travelled few, whilst the nervous and learned works of his more glowing autumn came toward the end of his life on a public rather satiated by exquisite analysis of landscapes and of poems. Even now, it may be said, the larger public are not yet familiar with his exhaustive work on Michelangelo, his latest "Essays," and his "Autobiography" and "Letters." In these we see that to a vast knowledge of Italian literature and art, Symonds united a judgment of consummate justice and balance, a courageous spirit, and a mind of rare sincerity and acumen.

His work, with all its volume in the whole, is strictly confined within its chosen fields. It concerns Greek poetry, the scenery of Italy and Greece, Italian literature and art, translations of Greek and Italian poetry, volumes of lyrics, critical studies of some English poets, essays in philosophy and the principles of art and style. This in itself is a considerable field, but it includes no other part of ancient or modern literature, no history but that of the Renaissance, no trace of interest in social, political, or scientific problems. In the pathetic preface of 1890 Symonds himself seems fully to recognize how much he was used to survey the world of things from a solitary peak. His work then is essentially, in a degree peculiar for our times, the work of a student, looking at things through books, from the point of view of litera