truth is that genuine, out-and-out realism is the invention or the discovery of our own age, like the short story." I spoke with force.

Surely you do not present low life as it really is the lady asked with a slight shudder. "I presume you drape it in some sort of glamour or sentiment of romance."

"Not a bit; we gave up the drapery business decades ago," I answered smartly. "Our canons now prescribe actuality; we are photographic or nothing; we hold up the mirror to life as it is, and never soften the picture. Only thus can the true form and pressure of the time be shown."

My "Am

If I was a little rhetorical, my nerves were still far from steady. listener put on an offended air. I to understand, Sir, that we did not hold up the mirror with equal fidelity," she said; "and that our depiction of life and character was false because we acted on the old maxim that Art improves Nature?"

"Oh," I proclaimed recklessly, "it is notorious that the late Georgian novelists, especially the fashionable ones, were stilted and artificial. Compare them with those of our time, A——, B——, and C-, for instance [here I named several of my most popular contemporaries and rivals], particularly in the matter of their dialogues."

"Sir!" the lady cried with flashing eyes, "do you mean that I—”

ex

"Present company always cepted," I reminded her in haste, feeling myself grow pale.

She laughed merrily at my alarm, a rippling human cachination. "It is evident that you are all wonderfully proud of your skill in dishing up the talk and manners of the alley,gutter-broth it was called in my day— and that of uncouth peasants and artizans," she said, again restoring

herself with smelling-salts. "But I can assure you it is no discovery of your age. We could do it quite as effectively when we chose, only our taste forbade too great intimacy with the lives and habits of low persons. But, as you say, you have changed all that. To show you, however, that your vaunted realism is in no degree better than ours, and nothing new, I will read you an extract from my moral friend and acquaintance, Miss Edgeworth."

She had secured the volume and regained her seat before I could move. Then, after another sarcastic reference to my defective gallantry, she read the well-known apology of the Dublin shoeblack for murdering his mate:

"Why, my lard, as I was going pas the Royal Exchange I meets Billy. 'Billy, says I, 'will you sky a copper?' 'Done, says he. Done,' says I, and done and done's enough between two jantlemen. with that I ranged them fair and even, With my hook-em-snivy-up they go'Music!' says he- Scull!' says I, and down they come three brown mazzards. By the holy you fleshed 'em,' says he. 'You lie,' says I. With that he ups with a lump of a two-year-old and lets drive at me. I out's with my bread-earner, and gives it him up to Lamphrey in the bread-basket."

ye sit still a wee, man, an' let me speer after my auld freens at Glenfern? Hoo's Grizzy, an' Jacky, an' Nicky? aye warkin' awa at the peels an' the drogs-he, he! I ne'er swallowed a peel nor gied a doit for drogs a' my days, an' see an ony o' them'll rin a race wi' me when they're naur five score."

"Here," she said, "is the beginning of your famous Kailyard School, and considerably more vigorous in its infancy than in its old age."

66

I was astonished at the skill of her attack, which had something almost Japanese in its agility; but my protests of unfairness were only halfframed when she darted to a shelf of ancient newspapers, and withdrew an old Gazette of the First Gentleman's reign, her own most prolific period. Here," she said, on once more regaining her seat, "is an example of the light table-talk of a man of genius and world-wide fame, hit off to the life. I trust you will find it neither stilted nor artificial. But although published in my own time it refers to an incident seventy years earlier, a breakfast-meeting with the great composer, Handel. That glorious musician (to whom you owe the MESSIAH, the DEAD MARCH, and other immortal pieces) having slept supperless by his physician's command, crosses the Thames to his friend Mr. Zachary Hardcastle in the Temple, and is moved to admiration by the sight of food:

Upon my word, that is a picture of a ham!" he exclaims to the assembled company, which includes the poet, Colley Cibber, and certain famous fellowmusicians. "It is very bold of me to come and break my fast with you uninvited, and I have brought along with me a notable appetite; for the water of old Father Thames, is it not a fine bracer of the appetite ?"

"Pray, did you come with oars or scullers, Mr. Handel?" asks one of the famous musicians.

"How can you demand of me that

silly question, Dr. Pepusch?" answers Handel, in his German-English. "What can it concern you whether I have one waterman or two watermans, whether I pay one shilling or two? Diavolo! I cannot go here, I cannot go there, but someone shall send it to some newspaper, as how Mr. George Frederick Handel did go sometimes last week to break his fast with Mr. Zac. Hardcastle; but it shall be my fault if it shall be put in print whether I was rowed by one waterman or by two watermans."

"In conclusion," said my instructress, "I can only give you his lively outburst on his former professional associates and enemies, for the account though vivid is of some length."

"Gustus," he cries to an old friend at the table, "do you not remember as it was almost only of yesterday, that shedevil, Cuzzoni, and that other precious daughter of iniquity, Beelzebub's spoiled child, the pretty-faced Faustina ? the mad rage that I have to answer for, what with one and the other of these fine ladies' airs and graces. Again, do you not remember that upstart puppy, Senesino, and the coxcomb, Farinelli ? Next, again, my sometime notable rival, Master Bononcini, and old Porpora ? Ha, ha, ha! all at war with me, and all at war with themselves. Such a confusion of rivalships, and double-facedness, and hypocrisy, and malice, that would make a comical subject for a poem in rhymes, or a piece for the stage, as I hope to be saved!"

She laughed again as she ended. It is impossible for me to describe her admirable rendering of these extracts; despite a somewhat obsolete pronunciation, it was the revelation of an art long perished, like the proper reading of poetry.

"I could find you thirty more on the same shelf," she said; "and yet you suppose realism to be the invention of your own age!"

I swelled angrily with objections. These were mere exotic instances, oases in a desert, exceptions that

proved the rule. But she waived me aside.

"You wondered," she said, "in your facetious censure of my poor amateur tale, what we Georgians thought of your modern realism, and I will tell you. I have read many of the pieces in your new picturemagazines, and know what it is,-it is like the old Dutch paintings, all detail and no real life. This will surprise you, for you think it is all life; but my censure is just, for life is feeling, and your realism is without real feeling. The old ponderous moral critics of our time used to complain that we were blasé, sophisticated, artificial, worn-out; but even the most hardened and affected of us,-even the graceless wits and dandies of the Regency-had feelings, emotions, passions, loves, and hopes and fears, that could not always be hidden. We had sentiment and sensibility; words that you Edwardians have no occasion for, for the real things are dead. You are clever, minute, painful; you have the corruscation that you love; but you, and your young ladies that play hockey and golf-have about as much feeling as an iron kettle, or one of your big locomotives, or

"Madam," I interrupted sharply, "you generalise without the facts, and with prejudice. Give me concrete examples, modern instances." I was irritated and careless of her ire.

"Here is one," she said, taking a recent magazine from the table beside her. "It is a short story of an intrigue among people whom I infer from their conversation to be bargees or ship-chandlers, by one Reginald Franey, an author who exhibits all the defects of taste and sentiment that I have named. I presume——”

This was more than I could bear, -the story was my own! It had cost me a week on Limehouse Reach, getting up the necessary local colour and profanity.

"Madam, your presumption," I began, but was stopped by a singular change in her appearance. The afternoon sun shot a ray into the hitherto shadowed corner in which she sat, and to my horror I perceived the frame of her chair and the covers of the books behind her show plainly through her person, through her person, high waist, puffed sleeves, frilled cap and all! In an instant, however, her form had dissolved into the dusty, mote-filled air through which the sunbeam ploughed its path. I stepped to the low window, and looked out; there was nothing to be seen but the old-fashioned garden, with its formal flower-beds, antique dial, and a resplendent peacock strutting on the sunny lawn. I grasped the window-ledge for support: then the tea-bell rang.

"My dear Reginald," said my grandmother, as I joined her in the drawing-room at the recuperative feast, “you are as white as a ghost and I declare as cold! You shouldn't stay so long in the library; it isn't good for your health."

"My dear grandmother," I replied as she filled my cup, "you are right. The place is haunted by all kinds of ghosts, some of them,-the female ones especially-the most infernally impudent and conceited that I ever met in my life. I should have it turned out and scrubbed with carbolic, and a brand new installation of electric lights put in. That might teach them to mind their manners and their own business."

REGINALD FRANEY.