hammock into a downy couch; he was equally generous now to the dispirited and impecunious litterateur, who had sought the rigid embraces of Mrs. Brown's horsehair monstrosity. He did more; he consigned the sleeper to the care of his chief minister, Phantastes, with instruction to waft him to the Land of Plots.

A form of the conventional angelic type presently stood beside Oscott. The god was crowned with pink poppies, and his wings resembled those of the sulphur butterfly. His wondrous eyes and mobile features were ever changing their light and expression, passing in an instant from the gay, careless, voluptuous beauty of a faun to the stern and implacable rigour of a Medusa, or the derisive mask of a Momus. He lightly touched the sleeper. Arise and follow me," he whispered.

Surrendering himself without question or wonder or fear -for such is the wont of dreams-to the guidance of the god, Oscott found himself in a moment in the midst of a forest, vast and umbrageous, intersected by countless paths and alleys, and bathed in light, changeful and various as the phases that flitted across the countenance of Phantastes.

Striking into one of these ways, they soon emerged upon a kind of sylvan theatre, like that in A Midsummer Night's Dream, flooded with a roseate effulgence. In the proscenium a young man, his hand upon his heart, knelt before a girl-he had just rescued her in the nick of time from imminent peril -whose shy and beautiful face was only half averted from him, and whose little hands trembled as he eagerly grasped them. Notwithstanding the halo of couleur de rose around them, our hero was irresistibly reminded of the rejuvenated seniors in Hawthorne's weird tale, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"; for he could not help noticing that the attitude of the couple was unreal and constrained, that their attire was worn and threadbare in the extreme, that their voices sounded strangely cracked and thin, old and unnatural, and that the stage-properties were as shabby and antiquated as the dresses of the actors.

Phantastes looked with grim contempt upon the pitiful performance.

"The sexual

"The venerable love-story!" he muttered. instinct etherealised and glorified. The eternal feminine'! The perennial stock-in-trade of those insults to human intelligence, ladies' journals, with which the baser literary market is flooded-miserable and ephemeral productions, edited and written by fools for fools."

Virgil and Dante, in the Inferno of the latter, did not pass the angels who stood neuter in heaven's great controversy with a finer scorn than that with which Phantastes and his pupil turned their backs upon these snivelling and drivelling victims of Nature's secular kriegslist.

The god now drew Oscott to another quarter. Here an electric light, cold, fierce, and revealing, beat upon the stage with Corellian intensity. The hero and heroine had evidently just retired, and the villain of the piece, a veritable Guido Fawkes, in drooping Spanish hat and feather and funnelshaped boots, was shaking his fist after them and muttering, while he sneered a Mephistophelian sneer, "The day will come," thereby exciting the derision of the conventional cherub aloft in the flies, who presides over the destinies of faithful lovers, and who knows that despite the menaces of the conventional ruffian-despite the poisoned bowl, the treacherous darger, the appalling shipwreck, and the awful conflagration, all will come right in the end.

It was the mortal's turn to criticise.

"Vulgar and transpontine, and smacking of the Surrey and the Britannia," he witheringly remarked.

Phantastes next conducted our hero into another shady alley in the mystic forest. Here a lady who possessed a smattering of encyclopedic knowledge, from the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus and the rubbish of the Talmud down to the most recent scientific discoveries of Edison and Tesla, was exhibiting a series of bastard miracle plays, adapted to modern tastes and requirements, and modestly aiming at revolutionising the religions of the world. The Supreme Being was represented as an electric x; while the "formal vice Iniquity," divested of unsightly mediæval horns and tail and cloven foot, figured as a sorrowing and sentimental Werther, in correct claw-hammer coat. All was clothed in a light blue as the garment of a Madonna of Cimabue-or the

stockings of the gifted author; stage-thunder rumbled, and stage-lightning flashed, and yet!-oh, bathos-for all the grandiose efforts of the fair and inspired writer, one was ludicrously reminded of a Punch and Judy show.

"Were the lady's knowledge and abilities only equal to her sublime assurance," quoth Phantastes, "the world had witnessed the strange spectacle of a Mohammed in petticoats, and ecstatically proclaimed, 'There is but one God-an electric one-and Marie is his prophet!' Let us leave her to her twaddle."

So on they fared.

Endless and bewildering were the marvels upon which Oscott gazed. Every woodland glade contained its own special theatre in this dreamland forest of Arden; never had there been assembled such a wealth of plots, situations, and denouements; but he noticed that in nearly every case, theatres, stages, properties, and actors were all tawdry and tottering, old and musty, diffusing a most " ancient and fish-like smell." A few flashes of novelty and originality scintillated for a moment here and there, but the uncongenial atmosphere speedily extinguished them.

In this Vanity Fair he was amazed to see a wily Switzer posing as a Parisian of noble lineage aud unparalelled experience, and pouring into the guileless ears of Southampton Street scribes a turbid tale, à la Lucian and Swift, of people he had never seen, places he had never visited, and things that neither were nor could by any possible means be true. And he was still more amused to find this modern edition of the "True History" and "Gulliver's Travels " gravely reproduced as gospel in a magazine whose very watch-word is veracity, and whose morals are, or were, like Cæsar's wife, above suspicion.

At last the spectator lost all sense of locality, and the laws of perspective fell into temporary abeyance. The various scenes became mixed up in a kind of diabolical phantasmagoria, to the accompaniment of an equally diabolical charivari. Precocious "Little Lord Fauntleroys" of ten ran hither and thither, pursued by the vengeful shades of Greek philosophers; mysterious and ubiquitous members of the medical profession, gifted with occult, magnetic, hypnotic, and telepathic powers,

whirled round and round, with black cats of infernal strain swearing and spitting on their shoulders; mummified Egyptians of uncertain age, and with Greek names, madly endeavoured to escape the unwelcome attentions of White Horrors from the Pyramids; and hospital nurses performed a vigorous cancan, with misguided and erratic curates as their vis-à-vis. Things in the Land of Plots had evidently degenerated into a walpurgis nacht—a witches' Sabbath with a vengeance.

All at once the surprised observer heard distinctly amidst the hubbub the solemn voice of Phantastes.

"Eschew these vanities," said the god. "Draw your plots from your own brain, not from the British Museum, and let your heart do the rest."

Then a crash of thunder boomed above the leafy arcades, and scenes, actors, and guide all vanished.

Oscott started from "Damien's bed of steel." The flames of the lamp, left untended, had gradually risen, and at last broken the chimney. The resultant explosion was the thunder which had recalled our hero to reality from the Land of Plots.

JOHN INGLESANT.

BY L. C. BLAIR.

THE human mind is so delicately formed, so sensitive to its surroundings, and so imperceptibly impressed, that nearly every book we read, every conversation we hear, and every circumstance of our daily life leaves an impression upon it.

One feels the truth of the above statement after reading "John Inglesant," written by J. H. Shorthouse, and perhaps a greater compliment cannot be paid to the author than to say -he has written a book that will live.

Its tone is smooth and spiritual, yet one feels at times disappointed that John did not make more out of his opportunities, yet in that he but resembles most of us. Look at this picture of his first schoolmaster, an etching almost, in a few choice words:

"He had large and melting eyes that looked straight into the hearts of those who met him, as though eager to help them and do them good."

The same schoolmaster showed by his conversation that his "large melting eyes" were the windows of a beautiful soul, which reflected a clear spiritual light upon all who approached him.

The following extract is part of a conversation with his pupil, who, grown to manhood, felt his spiritual difficulties commencing to overwhelm him, and naturally turned for counsel to the good old man. Listen to the words of the worthy seer:

"It seems to me more and more that the soul or spirit of every man in passing through life among familiar things is among supernatural things always, and many things seem to me miraculous which men think nothing of, such as memory, by which we live again in place and time and the love of one another, by which we are led out of ourselves, and made to act against our own nature by that of another, or rather by a higher nature than that of any of us; and a thousand fancies and feelings which have no adequate cause among outward things. Here are withered flowers, which I have gathered in my rambles, and keep as friends and companions of pleasant places, streams, and meadows, and of some who have been with me, and now are not. Faded flowers have something to me miraculous and supernatural about them, though in fact it is nothing wonderful that the texture of a flower being dried survives. It is not in the flower, but in our own immortal spirit that the miracle is. All these delightful thoughts that come into my mind when I look at this flower-thoughts and fancies and memories-what are they but the result of the alchemy of the immortal spirit, which takes all the pleasant fragile things of life and transmutes them into immortality in our own nature? And if the poor spirit and intellect of man can do this, how much more may the Supreme creative intellect