If ever you have remembered the anniversary of some day whereon a dear friend was lost to you, tell me whether that anniversary was not purer and even calmer than the day before. The sorrow, if there should be any left, is soon absorbed, and full satisfaction takes place of it, while you perform a pious office to Friendship, required and appointed by the ordinances of Nature. When my Tulliola was torn away from me, a thousand plans were in readiness for immortalizing her memory, and raising a monument up to the magnitude of my grief. The grief itself has done it; the tears I then shed over her assuaged it in me, and did everything that could be done for her, or hoped, or wished. I called upon Tulliola: Rome and the whole world heard me. Her glory was a part of mine, and mine of hers, and when Eternity had received her at my hands, I wept no longer. The tenderness wherewith I mentioned, and now mention her, though it suspends my voice, brings what consoles and comforts me; it is the milk and honey left at the sepulchre, and equally sweet, I hope, to the departed.

The gods, who have given us our affections, permit us rarely the uses and the signs of them. Immoderate grief, like everything else immoderate, is useless and pernicious; but if we did not tolerate and endure it; if we did not prepare for it, meet it, commune with it; if we did not even cherish it in its season,much of what is best in our faculties, much of our tenderness, much of our generosity, much of our patriotism, much, also, of our genius, would be stifled and extinguished.

When I hear any one call upon another to be manly and restrain his tears, if they flow from the social and the kind affections, I doubt the humanity and distrust the wisdom of the counselor. Were he humane, he would be more inclined to pity and to sympathize than to lecture and reprove; and were he wise, he would consider that tears are given us by nature as a remedy to affliction, although, like other remedies, they should come to our relief in private. Philosophy, we may be told, would prevent the tears, by turning away the sources of them, and by raising up a rampart against pain and sorrow. I am of opinion that philosophy, quite pure and totally abstracted from our appetites and passions, instead of serving us the better, would do us little or no good at all. We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish.

From "Imaginary Conversations.»

M

ANDREW LANG

(1844-)

OST Scotchmen are serious, but by some miracle Andrew Lang escaped the North British sense of responsibility which would have made him great instead of entertaining. No one who knows him, however, will wish him to be other than he is. He is, perhaps, at his best in his verse of the Old French school, though he is an attractive prose writer on many themes. He writes old English with great purity and clearness, as he has illustrated in his translations from Homer. His "Ballads and Verses Vain" and other poems have been widely read in America, as well as in England, and "The World's Desire," a novel he published as joint author with Haggard, in 1890, is one of the most entertaining of all the stories of the Argive Helen. As an essayist and reviewer, Lang has long occupied a prominent place in the best English periodicals. He was born at Selkirk, Scotland, March 31st, 1844. After graduating at Oxford, he was made a Fellow of one of its colleges, and in 1888 Gifford lecturer at St. Andrew's University.

Jus

THE BERESFORD GHOST STORY

>>

UST as the anecdote of William Tell and the Apple occurs in various times, and among widely severed races, so, in a minor degree, does the famous Beresford ghost story present itself in mythical fashion. The Beresford tale is told at great length by Dr. F. G. Lee, in his "Glimpses of the Supernatural.' As usual, Dr. Lee does not give the names of his informants, nor trace the channels through which the legend reached them. But he calls his version of the myth, "an authentic record." To be brief, Lord Tyrone and Miss Blank were orphans, educated in the same house "in the principles of Deism." When they were about fourteen years of age their preceptor died, and their new guardians tried to "persuade them to embrace revealed religion." The boy and girl, however, stuck to Deism. But they made a compact that he or she who died first should appear to the survivor "to declare what religion was most approved by the

Supreme Being." Miss Blank married Sir Martin Beresford. One day she appeared at breakfast with a pale face, and a black band round her wrist. Long afterwards, on her deathbed, she explained that this band covered shrunken sinews. The ghost of Lord Tyrone, at the hour of his death, had appeared to her, had prophesied (correctly) her future, and had touched her wrist by way of a sign.

"He struck my wrist; his hand was as cold as marble; in a moment the sinews shrank up, every nerve withered. I bound a piece of black ribbon round my wrist." The black ribbon was formerly in the possession of Lady Betty Cobb, who, during her long life, was ever ready to attest the truth of this narration, as are, to the present hour, the whole of the Tyrone and Beresford families.

Nothing would induce me to dispute the accuracy of a report vouched for by Lady Betty Cobb and all the Tyrones and Beresfords. But I must be permitted to point out that Lord Tyrone merely did what many ghosts had done before in that matter of touching Lady Beresford's wrist. Thus, according to Henry More, "one" (bogie) "took a relation of Melanchthon's by the hand, and so scorched her that she bore the mark of it to her dying day." Before Melanchthon the anecdote was "improved » by Eudes de Shirton in a sermon. According to Eudes, a certain clerk, Serlon, made with a friend the covenant which Miss Blank made with Lord Tyrone. The survivor was to bring news of the next world. Well, the friend died, and punctually appeared to Serlon, "in a parchment cloak, covered with the finest writing in the world." Being asked how he fared, he said that this cloak, a punishment for his love of Logic, weighed heavier than lead, and scorched like the shirt of Nessus. Then he held out his hand and let fall a drop which burned Serlon to the bone

"And evermore that Master wore
A covering on his wrist.»

Before Eudes de Shirton, William of Malmesbury knew this anecdote, which he dates about 1060-1063, and localizes in Nantes. His characters are "two clerks," an Epicurean and a Platonist, who made the usual contract that the first to die should appear to the survivor, and state whether Plato's ideas or "Epicurus his atoms" were the correct reply to the conundrum of the universe.

The visit was to be paid within thirty days of the .death. One of the philosophical pair was killed, a month passed, no news of him came. Then, when the other expected nothing less, and was busy with some ordinary matter, the dead man suddenly stood before him. The spectre explained that he had been unable to keep his appointment earlier; and, stretching out his hand, let fall three burning drops of blood, which branded, not the wrist, but the brow of the psychical inquirer. The anecdote recurs later, and is attached by certain commentators on Dante to one Siger de Brabant. Now this legend may be true about Lady Beresford, or about William of Malmesbury's two clerks, or about Siger de Brabant, or about Serlon; but the same facts of a compact, the punctual appearance of the survivor, and the physical sign which he gave, can scarcely have occurred more than once. I am inclined, therefore, to believe that the narrative vouched for by two noble families is accurate, and that the tales of William of Malmesbury, Henry More, Eudes de Shirton, and Siger de Brabant are myths

"Or such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise."

From "The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories. »

THE

CELEBRATED LITERARY FORGERIES

HE most famous forgeries of the eighteenth century were those of Macpherson, Chatterton, and Ireland. Space (fortunately) does not permit a discussion of the Ossianic question. That fragments of Ossianic legend (if not of Ossianic poetry) survive in oral Gaelic traditions, seems certain. How much Macpherson knew of these, and how little he used them in the bombastic prose which Napoleon loved (and spelled "Ocean ") it is next to impossible to discover. The case of Chatterton is too well known to need much more than mention. The most extraordinary poet for his years who ever lived began with the forgery of a sham feudal pedigree for Mr. Bergum, a pewterer. Ireland started on his career in much the same way, unless Ireland's "Confessions" be themselves a fraud, based on what he knew about Chatterton. Once launched in his career, Chatterton drew endless stores of poetry from "Rowley's MS." and the muni

ment chest in St. Mary Redcliff's. Jacob Bryant believed in them and wrote an an "Apology » for the credulous. Bryant, who believed in his own system of mythology, might have believed in anything. When Chatterton sent his "discoveries » to Walpole (himself somewhat of a mediæval imitator), Gray and Mason detected the imposture, and Walpole, his feelings as an antiquary injured, took no more notice of the boy. Chatterton's death was due to his precocity. Had his genius come to him later, it would have found him wiser and better able to command the fatal demon of intellect, for which he had to find work, like Michael Scott in the legend.

The end of the eighteenth century, which had been puzzled or diverted by the Chatterton and Macpherson frauds, witnessed also the great and famous Shakespearean forgeries. We shall never know the exact truth about the fabrication of the Shakespearean documents, and "Vortigern," and the other plays. We have, indeed, the confession of the culprit; habemus confitentem reum, but Mr. W. H. Ireland was a liar and a solicitor's clerk, so versatile and accomplished that we cannot always believe him, even when he is narrating the tale of his own iniquities. The temporary, but wide and turbulent success of the Ireland forgeries suggests the disagreeable reflection that criticism and learning are (or a hundred years ago were) worth very little as literary touchstones. A polished and learned society, a society devoted to Shakespeare and to the stage, was taken in by a boy of eighteen. Young Ireland not only palmed off his sham documents, most makeshift imitations of the antique, but even his ridiculous verse on the experts. James Boswell went down on his knees and thanked Heaven for the sight of them; and feeling thirsty after these devotions, drank hot brandy and water. Dr. Parr was as readily gulled, and probably the experts, like Malone, who held aloof, were as much influenced by jealousy as by science. The whole story of young Ireland's forgeries is not only too long to be told here, but forms the topic of a novel, "The Talk of the Town," on which Mr. James Payn is at present engaged. The frauds are not likely in his hands to lose either their humor or their complicated interest of plot. To be brief, then, Mr. Samuel Ireland was a gentleman extremely fond of old literature and old books. If we may trust the "Confessions" (1805) of his candid son, Mr. W. H. Ireland, a more harmless and confiding old person than Samuel never collected early English tracts.