Added, in Mr. Copley's own hand, to a

few of the letters.

P.S.-It is not my wish to intrude business, but I feel it would be wrong not to take this opportunity of informing you that I have just received a particularly advantageous line of preserved fruits, which I can do at extraordinarily low terms. No time should be lost in ordering.

II.

Miss Mill to Mr. Jabez Copley. Dear Mr. Copley,-I had no idea that the Station-master was going. How interesting to find that his name is Missenden! It was the name of my mother's favorite cook. She came, I think, from Esher, or it may have been Exeter. It is odd how long one may live without knowing the name of one's Station-master, although my niece tells me it has to be printed up somewhere, like a licensed victualler's. I think I should like to try a box of the preserved fruit if it is really nice. Yours truly, Lydia Mill.

III.

Sir Charles Transom's Secretary to Mr. Jabez Copley.

Dear Sir,-Sir Charles Transom directs me to present his compliments and to express his regret that he must decline to lend his support to the testimonial to the Great Burley Stationmaster. Sir Charles dislikes to see this kind of premium put upon duty, nor can he forget the want of sympathetic zeal and alacrity displayed by the Station-master in the autumn of 1898 in the matter of a lost portmanteau containing the manuscript of Sir Charles' monograph on the Transom family. Believe me,

Yours faithfully,

Vincent A. Lincoln.

IV.

The Vicar of Great Burley to
Mr. Jabez Copley.

Dear Mr. Copley,-I am afraid I cannot associate myself very cordially with the terms of your testimonial to Mr. Missenden. Eight years are a very short period to signalize in this way, and I do not care for the part played by the "King's Arms." I am sorry to have to take this line; but we must act as we believe. I should be seriously vexed if you got up a testimonial for me after so short a term of work. I am, Yours sincerely, Reginald Lowther.

V.

Mr. Jabez Copley to the Vicar of Great Burley.

Reverend Sir,-I regret that you cannot give your valuable and esteemed support to the testimonial to Mr. Missenden, but I respect your motives. I should like to say in reply to your sug gestion about a testimonial to yourself and my connection with it, that I should never, I hope, so far presume as to take the leading part in a movement of this kind for a gentleman like yourself. My rule in life is that station should keep to station, and I trust I shall never be so foolish as to depart from it. But although I should not presume to take a leading part in your testimonial, as you kindly suggest, I should however contribute to it with a whole heart. Believe me,

Yours obediently,
Jabez Copley.

Hon. Sec. and Treasurer of the
Missenden Testimonial Fund.

VI.

Mr. Aylmer Penistone to Mr. Jabez Copley.

Dear Mr. Copley,—I do not quite feel disposed to give anything to Missenden.

LOUISE

The biographical dictionaries say little about Louise Michel,-perhaps they never will, for legally recognized position or official rank is often thought better worth chronicling than sheer upside-down careers such as hers. But what an amazingly interesting life it was which began no one seems to know exactly when-probably at some date between 1830 and 1836-and ended at Marseilles on the 9th of January. Look at the queer, wild picture with which it opens,-the illegitimate child of a maid-servant and a dissolute noble playing with the menagerie of animals at the ruined château; walking with her arm round the neck of a tame wolf or deer; loving the boars and hounds, owls and quails, mice and bats, horses and cattle, which went in and out of the château as they pleased, so much that for years she would not touch cooked flesh; actually collecting toads to throw at the heads of people she hated, until one day it struck her that she ought not to be cruel even to toads. Something of the wit of her wild father, perhaps, she inherited; for she was very young when she began to write poetry good enough to be published in a local journal, and was only a girl when she wrote an ode to Victor Hugo, then in exile, and another to Lamartine. It may not have been very considerable work, but it was good enough for Hugo to write back, "Beau comme votre âge," and to send her a finely bound copy of "Notre Dame de Paris." (Was she, perhaps, born in 1831, which was the year in which "Notre Dame de Paris" was published? She evidently stated her age in her letter to him, and he may have thought that particular book appropriate.) Lamartine told her that she was "a veritable Thalia from Mount Parnas

MICHEL.

sus," which, however, is too near flattery to be pleasant. But possibly she gained her greatest praise from Larousse, who described as "not without merit" her "Livre du Jour de l'An,"a number of short stories written for children. Would she ever have been heard of if it had been possible for her to go on living in her home in the country? It is difficult to suppose that such a character would not have burnt a mark somewhere; but if anything is certain, it is that it was the iron of poverty actually felt which turned her furious against the perpetual laws that make poverty possible. When the owner of the château died, and his retainers were dismissed, it was only a few months before the small legacy left to the Michels was exhausted. After that the stages in her life move quickly, but how strangely the scenes change. It was the same girl who petted the wolfhounds and the deer, wandering in and out of ruined buildings, who succeeded in establishing in Paris a school of a hundred and fifty pupils, many of whom loved her deeply; and who, when the Commune broke out, decided that the right thing to do was to get Thiers killed,-imagine doctrine of that kind eating its way into the minds of the young girls she taught. To the end of her life she is said to have hated to think that she took Ferré's advice, and did not have Thiers shot or stabbed. A great deal of the history of the Commune has not been written, and never will be writ ten, even if only because in fevers men become delirious and cannot remember; but, at all events, Louise Michel-she was not afraid of speaking the truthnever denied that it was she who taught the scarlet-petticoated pétroleuses to pump oil on the floors of the Tuil

eries. She admitted, indeed,-no, she proclaimed, rather-in open Court that she desired "to oppose a barrier of flame to the invaders from Marseilles." Somewhere in her Memoirs she writes that, dressed in the képi and the trousers of the National Guard, fighting at the barricades, she stopped firing her rifle to catch a cat and take it out of danger. And it was she, as she actually boasted, who originated the idea that until the demands of the Commune were accepted a hostage should be killed every twenty-four hours,--she who could not bear the idea of hurting a toad. Only a woman, surely, could have the strength to carry such a notion about with her day after day. But if the girl who played with the animals at Vraincourt, and the woman who drew deep affection from her school pupils, and the revolutionary who got riflemen to follow her when they would follow no one else, was essentially feminine-they called her the Red Virgin-what was the emotional mainspring which, as it were, drove her? It was by no means irresponsible madness, for she was at least sane enough to be consistent in her methods. Most certainly it was not desire for notoriety, for if any one stood to gain anything by what she said and did throughout her life, it was not Louise Michel. If she had money she gave it away, and there were a hundred obscure forms of suffering which, if she thought she was helping on her whirling notions, she had no hesitation in accepting. If the chief driving energy which impelled her to wild revolution against governing power-to the consuming idea that existence under authority is only another phrase for corporate disease-can be diagnosed, it can be summed up, perhaps, as a monstrous sense of pity. She was clearly sincere, but the notion that a section of her fellow-creatures were suffering, no matter from what cause,

while other richer men were apparently happy, made her rebellious against exerted authority as, in its essence, grinding and cruel. She was always on the side of the man against his master, no matter how kind the master might be.

Women have never led Englishmen as Louise Michel led, and was admired by, Frenchmen. Perhaps, for that matter, the conditions of life among the English poor-it is only the poor who throw up characters of her kind-have nearly always during the last halfcentury been sufficiently comfortable to prevent any torch from setting fire to the straw. Louise Michel, at all events, doubted whether she would ever have led the poor of London as she did the poor of Paris, or have had occasion to do so. She was taken, not long ago, over one of the great London Unions, -buildings which, above all so-called "homes," the reduced working-class man loathes to think of entering. But she, whether or not she realized why the Englishman hates the idea of the workhouse even though it means respite from starvation, looked at what she was shown with wonder and admiration. "If we had had that in France," she said, "there would have been no Commune." If that means anything, it means that she deeply realized what every stirrer of revolt has come to know,-that if men can get bread, even if it is bad bread, they will keep quiet; but that if they cannot get bread of any kind, they will go, in their rage, far beyond mere murder. They will not move in a choleracamp, will merely ask "What is it?" but they will never starve in masses without trying to kill. She had not only seen starvation at work, but she had herself felt its pain, and in her monstrously exaggerated pity for those whom she saw to be suffering she preached hideous remedies. Would such preaching ever take root if the

seed were dropped among ourselves? That depends, perhaps, less upon the vitality of the seed than upon the nature of the ground. It is not essentially difficult to imagine some English labor revolutionary overwhelmed-over-balanced, rather-with a sense of the general unfairness of things, which places this or that man in apparently certain prosperity, free at all events from fear of hunger, and which sets other men day after day and year after year wondering where the next meal is to come from. Why, he might ask, should these great strong laborers earn so little? Honest men whose sons, maybe, are soldiers, and whose daughters, maybe, breed soldiers,-why should it not be possible for them to earn more than eighteen shillings or twenty shillings a week? Such questions, answered in one way, mean revolution such as has twice crushed auThe Spectator.

thority in France, and may yet alter its nature in Russia, though the Russian peasant is as slow to resent bullying with violence, and is perhaps naturally as good, as the English. The English character takes fire slowly, and it may be that it has only been the Poor Law which has saved the country from revolution among the hungry poor before now. But if that is true, it is none the less true that revolution in England has always been led by men, and that an English Louise Michel is never likely to arise, simply because she would be laughed at if she suggested violence. She would only be followed with enthusiasm if, like Florence Nightingale, she preached the immediate alleviation rather than the creation of pain,-even though the creation of pain were a means to an end.

"Peter Pan; or," adds Mr. Barrie, "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up." And he himself is that boy. That child, rather; for he halted earlier than most of the men who never come to maturity-halted before the age when soldiers and steam-engines begin to dominate the soul. To remain, like Mr. Kipling, a boy, is not at all uncommon. But I know not anyone who remains, like Mr. Barrie, a child. It is this unparalleled achievement that informs so much of Mr. Barrie's later work, making it unique. This, too, surely, it is that makes Mr. Barrie the most fashionable playwright of his time.

Undoubtedly, "Peter Pan" is the best thing he has done-the thing most directly from within himself. Here, at last, we see his talent in its full ma

turity; for here he has stripped off from himself the last flimsy remnants of a pretence to maturity. Time was when a tiny pair of trousers peeped from under his "short-coats," and his sunny curls were parted and plastered down, and he jauntily affected the absence of a lisp, and spelt out the novels of Mr. Meredith and said he liked them very much, and even used a pipe for another purpose than that of blowing soapbubbles. But all this while, bless his little heart, he was suffering. It would have been pleasant enough to play at being grown-up among children of his own age. It was a fearful strain to play at being grown-up among grownup persons. But he was forced to do this, because the managers of theatres, and the publishers of books, would have been utterly dumfounded if he