philus. Hum!... another proof if any were wanted, that the old Roman drama, if only represented with conscientious care for accessories, can still please a nineteenth-century audience."

Mr. Tuck shook his head in compassionate remonstrance with himself, and drew his pencil through many of these passages and altered others. The second edition of the last, for instance, contradicted the first just as if it had been an evening paper. "Another proof," it ran, "if any were wanted, that the old Roman drama, even when presented with the most conscientious care for accessories, cannot please a nineteenth-century audience. The connoisseurs, notoriously the Premier, were visibly bored. The whole thing was flat, dead, and heavy. Nor is this to be wondered at. The sentiment of Terence's day is opposed to the modern spirit-not in that nobler sense in which, as Hegel puts it, opposition fuses into larger agreement; we still enjoy the Epic of Dante, for instance--the sexual and servile relations with the emotions generated by them are twenty centuries ahead. . . . Mr. Greville did his best with the ungrateful part of Davus; but there is little to praise except his really comic gestures, which were too few and far between to redeem his wooden delivery. To tell the truth, Mr. Balden could make little of the more promising Pamphilus.. Of course we are fully prepared for a deluge of uncritical praise and insincere admiration, but let the reader refuse to be misled by it. No honest man who witnessed the performance can pretend to have been edified thereby, and perhaps the archæological ghouls who have temporarily galvanised Terence, will now allow him to rest in peace in the shadow of his royal Aldines, and in the tomb of his precious Elzevirs."

Hurriedly scribbling off these remarks, the critic made his way to the Premier, carrying with him a bland expression of depreciation which was much noticed and admired.

"I hope I am not over-creetical," he remarked after the first greeting, but I certainly find this verra depressing."

"Sickening!" said Floppington, with a gesture of weariness. "Who the devil can understand it?"

"You are right. Tempora mutantur. What does the nineteenthcentury man know of the Romans as they really lived, of the Romans in the flesh ?"

"True. He knows them only in the dry Bohns," Floppington interrupted.

"The verra metaphor I intended."

"I thought so," said the Minister, with a diplomatic smile. "As for the actors, I've seen better ones at the Brit--"

“At the Brit?” gasped Mr. Tuck.

"ish Museum," concluded Floppington calmly. "The Mummies, you know. There isn't that superabundance of gesture."

"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed the critic. "You've heet the verra flaw that distressed me. Perhaps one might make an exception in favour

of Davus?" he continued cautiously, hoping to profit by the Premier's well-known powers of delicate psychological analysis.

"Not at all," replied the Premier. "One must expect that character to be the worst represented, for, as a matter of fact, no Englishman can represent it."

This dictum the critic received with a respect as profound as he thought it was itself. He shook his head sagely, but before he could elicit the grounds of the opinion, the curtain drew up on the fifth act, and he picked his way to his place with pondering, corrugated brow. The result of his meditations appeared next day somewhat as follows:

"And if Mr. Greville errs by defect of fun, he errs none the less by excess of gesture. So lavish is he in this respect that we are convinced that if he had to enact the part of a mummy, he would wink at least three times. Perhaps, however, he has attempted the impossible. As Coleridge remarked (and who but the subtle analyst of Othello and Leontes could rise to such accurate and unfaltering visualisation?), the character of Davus is intrinsically unactable by an Englishman. The more one ponders this dictum, the more one confesses its truth. For is not the personage absolutely unrealisable by the Anglican mind? The lighter spirit, the less stringent moral relations of the Frenchman might, haply, overcome this initial difficulty, but for the thorough perception of the canny and quaint humour of Davus, his shrewd worldliness, and his mingling of self-reliant and servile impulses, one must turn to America. The ideal Davus would be a liberated American slave of the better sort. But a black Davus is, as Lamb would say, not a man to like; and so, we fear, the ideal Davus must remain, like so many other ideals, but the dream of the visionary.'

"I don't believe he saw the joke," soliloquised the Premier when the critic left him. "Not that it was a very good one for me. Still I don't suppose Punch will find anything better to say than that Britons can't be slaves. And, by the way, good Mr. Thomson with your Rule Britannias, it seems that I can turn your Britons round my finger pretty much as I choose."

The Premier's behaviour at the play was, during the next few days, the theme of universal comment. He knew it, and gloried in his notoriety. As an example of how the critic was criticised, we make the following extract from an article in the World, entitled "Ministers in the Pillory:"

"It was said of a certain Government that its members had every virtue under the sun except resignation, and in another sense this saying might, with one conspicuous_exception, be applied to the Ministers of the present Cabinet. Instead of emulating the serene dignity of the mastiff of Landseer's picture, they have always winced before the yelping of any puppy, however insignificant, and have not hesitated to wield tooth and claw in reply. It is to be hoped, however, that the quiet contempt with which the Premier treated the savage, if wily attacks of the Chartreuse wags, will have

some effect in restraining the ebullitions of temper of those who serve under his banner. Whether it was good taste on the part of the youthful politicians to let fly their keen-tipped arrows at the actually present form of the Minister (and some of the lines might well have been omitted for other considerations), is questionable; but there can be no question as to the polished propriety of the Premier's bearing under fire. Where the Irish Secretary would have visibly quivered with suppressed passion, the keenest observer could see nothing but a saintly smile on the face of Mr. Floppington. Nor will those who were present soon forget the exquisite because silent causticity of the Premier's reply. Mr. Floppington's true vocation is the stage. Cynics will probably exclaim that everybody admits he is a great actor, so we venture to forestall the tribe of Diogenes by informing them that we refer to his greatness in facial expression. Lord Thespis, whose attention was early directed to the remarkable by-play off the stage, remained fascinated. He asserts that as the play proceeded, the Premier (than whom no one has enjoyed Terence more in previous years) managed to mould his features to every nuance of non-enjoyment; running through the whole gamut with the most delicate half, and even quarter notes. Indifference, ennui, boredom, sleepiness, annoyance, disgust, sense of the ridiculous, sneering contempt, flitted with subtle transitions over the countenance of the pantomimic critic. Mephistopheles himself could no more. Perhaps the old gentlemen who grumble that Floppington has gone to the devil, are right. But if so, it has been for the innocent purpose of taking lessons in the dramatic art.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE PRODIGAL SON.

THE painter trudged silently at his mother's side through the sleeping streets, and wished himself deaf. Yes, Mrs. Dawe had regained possession of her truant and recreant son, and the method of re-capture was characteristic of her. She had stolen him from under the very guns of the enemy, and this is how she did it. The perpetual interrogatories and reproachful accusations of the keeper of the cook-shop having apprised her numerous circle of her son's desertion of her, their curiosity caused unofficial inquiries to be set on foot in all the quarters of London in which any of them had friends or acquaintances. No surprise was expressed that the peripatetic painter should have flown off at a tangent from his usual orbit; the quidnuncs even essayed to console Mrs. Dawe by the reflection that it was lucky she wasn't his wife, for it wouldn't

have weighed a pin with the heartless runaway. At last Mrs. Dawe learnt from one person that a gentleman resembling her son had been seen at an open window in Hoxton, and from another, that a speaker named "The Converted Painter" was advertised to appear the same night at a midnight meeting at a Salvation Hall in the same district.* Obeying the impulse of instinct, the horrified dame repaired to the place of assembly as soon as the stress of business would permit, and sure enough found her backsliding son exhuming the lesson of his spiritual experiences for the benefit of a motley crowd. The presence of the painter on the platform needs no explanation beyond the fact that he had never had any intention of appearing there. Captain Bertram, "The Reformed Rake," as his friend was called, had inveigled him into his somewhat ambiguous position by enticing him to witness one of his battalion's pitched fights with the devil, and, relying upon his weakness, had taken upon himself the responsibility of announcing him with flourish of trumpet. The painter had already refused the tempting offer of a Lieutenancy with the privilege of adding to his income by a percentage on the sale of copies of the War Cry, The Little Soldier, and other publications of the Army, and he felt that it would be ungracious as well as unworthy of a student of life to refuse the simple invitation to be present at a prospective destruction of the citadel of the Fiend of Darkness. This last phrase was the very language of the heralding placard, for the most illiterate private was strongly impressed with the idea of preserving consistency of metaphor, and proudly spoke of such things as "volleys," "knee-drills," "cannonades," "fusillades," and "colours;" though, in curious confusion with these blood-and-thunder figures of speech, there ran through all the literature and oratory of the Salvationists threads of Scriptural tropes and of every-day popular and even vulgar idiom; the various filaments blending into a tissue of equal profanity and absurdity. Indeed, the audacious blasphemy of the writings of the members of this commercial, musical, and religious association transcended even the hob-nobbing familiarity with the supernatural displayed in all civilised ages by a concrete-loving peasantry. That sermonette of Jack Dawe's, which his mother peremptorily cut short, was far from orthodox in its vocabulary; as was painfully felt by washerwomen fresh from the inspiriting addresses of Black Pudding Lucy and the Redeemed Knife Grinder, and from the sensuous images of the latest hymn. It would probably have moved few to weeping, and howling, and gnashing of teeth, and still fewer to frenzied prostration at the penitent-form; so that when the Converted Painter was interrupted by the slapdash entrance of a red-shawled personage, who must have seemed

* For a good historical and descriptive account of the picturesque movement headed by General Booth, see a German monograph on the Salvation Army, of which a faithful, though unidiomatic, translation has just been brought out by the State Fress, and which is responsible for the statements here reproduced.

a very avatar of the Spirit of Evil, few of the auditors regretted tat he had not been allowed to finish his subtle illustration of egeneration by reference to the political career of Floppington. They enjoyed more the eerie humour of the farce which followed the arrival of Mrs. Dawe--the assemblage thrown into inextinguishable laughter and hopeless confusion by the relaxing sight of the imperious old lady fighting her way sternly to the platform, recalling her errant son to his duties in her own grotesque fashion, lecturing him publicly on his sins of omission and commission, and marching him off home after a dignified rebuke to the body-stealers present, and a sternly contemptuous denunciation of their theological teachings and the immoral tendencies of their nocturnal gatherings.

The night was divinely beautiful; and, as Jack Dawe walked along, he endeavoured to lose himself in the celestial splendours. He tried to look up at the far-sparkling heavens and concentrate his thoughts on the calmness of the planetary system that had assembled in its millions for a midnight meeting in the firmament, where all the stars sat together in mute communion, wrapt in golden silence like the Quakers of Elia. But the attempt was vain. The discordant voice of Mrs. Dawe broke the music of the spheres. The infinite Universe was at rest, but this woman was a central agitation subsist ng at the heart of endless calm. Her invective flowed along in one everlasting flood, not weak and washy, but strong and fiery. It was like Sheridan's impeachment of Warren Hastings for length and passion, and every now and then it was emphasised by the irresponsible whirl of the huge umbrella which she carried as a protection against burglars, gallants, mad dogs, and rain. The painter shivered under the amused glances of the policemen and the few belated pedestrians; but he was becoming hardened. By his public humiliation he had sounded the bitterest depths of degradation. Nevertheless, he was not sorry when the well-known Liliputian cook-shop, like a sunken valley in the heart of its Brobdingnagian neighbours, hove in sight. The door was open, and Sally stood outside it, slipshod and unkempt as ever. She was looking anxiously the other way, but hearing the sound of footsteps, she turned round, uttered a cry of joy, and ran to meet the wayfarers.

"Ye've found him!" Sally ejaculated.

"Yes, I've found him!" Mrs. Dawe replied in hysterical tones, viciously pushing the unresisting painter before her, and bundling him into the shop. "I little thought a son o' mine would ever grow up to be a foundlin'!"

This new view of the case so overcame the highly-wrought mind of the old lady that she sat down on the counter and burst into tears. Her son made no attempt to kiss them away. Shuddering at the contrast between his old home and the comfortable apartments he had just quitted, he dragged his faltering limbs into the parlour and threw himself on the sofa in blank, apathetic