lecturer on English Society, there are-as there ever have been in the case of all well-known Englishmen who have visited the United States in a public capacity-two opinions; but of one thing there can be no question: it laid the foundation-stone of the prosperity that during the second half of his life he was to enjoy. The best testimonial to his practical success on the other side of the Atlantic is the circumstance that it induced George Gordon Bennett to offer him the post of European correspondent-in-chief of the New York Herald. The emoluments thus derived enabled Edmund Yates to start the World newspaper in London, and the position was retained by him some while after he had become an editor on his own account.

As the experiences gained in the Post Office were instruments of literary success, or yielded material invaluable for the plot and action, as well as character rôles of his novels, so he returned from the New World, not only with an exchequer replenished for the great literary venture of his life, but with enlarged ideas of journalistic possibilities, and with a thorough mastery of American literary methods, as well as with a troop of Transatlantic friends whose staunchness never failed him. There is some reason for thinking that the commercial success of the World, in point both of rapidity and extent, exceeded the most sanguine anticipations of its projector, who was certainly neither an unhopeful nor a self-distrustful man; that success, as has been already said, was of his manufacture and his alone. Associates and coadjutors he had, but his was the hand which was ever on the public pulse; his was the brain which planned nearly all its most distinctive or successful features; his was the inventive faculty, which, with a felicity not unworthy of his great master, Dickens, discovered for some of the most effective articles he published frequently their most attractive titles.

As editor of the World, Edmund Yates was uniformly a happy, not less than a successful, man, and it was not his fault if those who worked with him or visited at his house as private friends were not equally happy too. If, like Dickens, with whom he had many points of social resemblance, he possessed something of the egotist in his nature; if, like Dickens, it pleased him to know and to feel that, not less in his moments of social relaxation than of hard work, he was en evidence as little as possible out of the public sight or mind-there was a large admixture of unselfish generosity with the more selfregarding quality. As, according to all accounts, Dickens was never

more delighted than when communicating enjoyment to his guests at Gadshill or Ramsgate, so his disciple was at the very acme of enjoyment, when he was in a position to keep literally open house for his friends in Portland Place, at Hyde Park Gate, or in some villa on the banks of that Thames which he loved, as Wordsworth himself may have loved the clear depths of Rydal Lake, or the more tawny levels of the Severn Sea. There are not many persons of whom it can be said that, having been ground by the mills of a tolerably severe apprenticeship to life, they have passed through the more drastic ordeal of prosperity less unbecomingly and unamiably than Edmund Yates. Like Tennyson's father in In Memoriam, "whose youth was full of heat and noise," Edmund Yates was now a prudent and prosperous man, not only "among his boys "the sons whom he loved. with all his heart, and laboured for with all his energy-but among friends from every quarter, of every kind, and of every degree. An editor must have a power in his craft of no mean order when he can drive a team variously composed, and, as some might think, incongruously assorted, like that of which Edmund Yates in the World handled the ribbons so smoothly, so wisely, justly, with so few ugly jolts, and so little serious friction.

A man must have in him merits much above the common when, after a long life, it can be said that of the comrades whom he knew in his struggling era, there survives not one to whom he turned a cold shoulder in the day of his good fortune, or for whom in the hour of need, he was not ever ready to take up the cudgels. As editor of his newspaper he showed himself a real leader of men. He always wished to requite loyalty with loyalty, to render service for service, to identify himself with the interests of those who worked for him, and to maintain their cause when others spoke disparagingly of their merits. The happiness of Edmund Yates's home life has already been hinted at. It would be impertinent to draw the curtain on that privacy, but it is not improper, it is only not dishonourable or ungrateful for one who was closely connected with him in work during many years, and to whom his hospitality was ever open, to bear his tribute of grateful recognition and sympathetic regard to the benignan and highly-endowed lady who was his good genius and his best counsellor through his course, and who now mourns him who was more than half her life, taken away by an unexpected, if not a premature, death. T. H. S. Escott.

Vol. XI.-No. 62:

H

N°

GILES DEARLOVE.

O one in the village cared much for Giles. His nature was morose, people said, like that of his dog. If he were given an opportunity this was the statement of the village wags—if he might, he would surely not remain content to imitate his own Cerberus and merely show his teeth and growl; he would fasten the said teeth inextricably in the calf of somebody's leg. So young a man, Giles Dearlove! Not ill-looking, for the matter of that, neither. All the more a pity. Well, let everyone give him and Cerberus alike a wide berth. Such a mouthful of a name, Cerberus! Heathenish, it was understood to be. Worse, perhaps-bordering on the black art, possibly! Who could undertake to say?

A hundred years ago folks were still greatly inclined to attribute whatever displeased them to the influence of magic. There are those yet alive whose fathers and mothers have seen inoffensive but solitary old women ducked or pelted for witchcraft.

Cerberus was a repulsive-looking animal, with somewhat of the bull-dog in his mongrel pedigree. Had he been allowed a voice in the matter he might have preferred a less classical name. All knowledge -certainly all such as is connected with ancient Greece and Rome— was at a discount in the village. The dame's school was considered enough, nay, often superfluous, for the youth of that secluded neighbourhood; and he who had his primer-metaphorically as well as literally-at his fingers' ends was looked upon as a man of decided gifts. Most of the inhabitants signed their names by means of a simple cross, and had never felt any need of the three R's: reading, 'riting or 'rithmetic.

But Giles Dearlove had been educated. He worked on a large and prosperous farm, as did many other stalwart young fellows in the same district-for people were not necessarily drawn Londonwards then as now and he worked well and contentedly. Yet, for all that, he had often been, as a child, companion to the Rector's son-a sickly, but highly-intelligent boy-and Giles had knitted his brows to

some purpose over the books which abounded in the rectory study. The invalid boy was specially fond of teaching Giles the lessons which his own father had but just taught him, and, after the sick lad's death, the Rector-tears brimming in his eyes-put into Giles' hands seven or eight worn volumes. "He wished you to have them," the Rector said, with a husky break in his voice, and Giles bent his head and took the books, precious gifts, not only because of their familiar and admired contents, but because they seemed to him as pledges of that sweet boy-friendship which had existed for several years.

Now he had no friends, no companions even. The old Rector had long since left the place; a young one had come in his stead, a man of stiff starched manners, who would as soon have thought of carrying home to his best parlour a dandelion or ragged robin picked by the dusty roadside as to make friends with a young fellow whose palms were no less hard and brown than mahogany, and who wore a smock-frock o' Sundays. Giles sat with others of his kind in a pew close beneath the pulpit, and lifted his serious eyes enquiringly to the somewhat callow face of its occupant, who preached of destruction and hell-fire in a thin, monotonous, piping voice. The young Rector caught the glance of Giles' eyes sometimes; but, if he thought at all of the matter, he congratulated himself that his sermon had touched up a few of the boorish clodhoppers. He would have been vastly surprised. to hear that this particular clodhopper had read and digested many a pious dictum in the original Latin.

Giles himself often sighed as he went back to his solitary home, unrefreshed by the spiritual food he had swallowed. What was to become of him, he meditated anxiously as he shut the gate of his little garden behind him and stood for a moment looking down the village. Such a lovely village! Yet, must his whole life be spent there, and be as monotonous and insipid as now? Yes, a fair village in truth. The white-washed cottages gleamed under heavy thatched brows; each boasting at least a strip of garden, gay already with Lent lilies, and full of the promise of lilac, and hawthorn, and laburnum, and sweet Nancies, and double paigles, and wall-flowers, when the sweet-briar hedges should perfume the whole of the rambling street, down to the green where waddling geese were seeking the water under shelter of the budding sallows.

Thin blue smoke arose from various chimneys: Sunday's dinner was being prepared. Giles, as he stood at his own threshold, sighed.

How many Sundays would divide his life into insignificant spacesscratches on a slate-in that restful lovely village, where he had neither kith nor kin nor interest to speak of? He pushed the door open; close behind it, on the sanded kitchen floor, lay his dog awaiting him. Cerberus greeted his master with a sort of snarl of pleasure. Giles patted him on the head; then, apparently satisfied, the dog stretched himself out at full length at the man's feet. And Giles, reaching with his hand to the window-sill, took up a thin volume of Virgil, and forgot that no one had lighted the fire, and that neither he nor Cerberus had dined.

But next Sunday things were changed. We all know how they have a trick of changing when we least expect it of them. Giles picked a daffodil, which he allowed to peep out between his coat and the broad open collar of his grey smock 'broidered in white cotton, and he brushed his beaver hat with the greatest care, and walked to church with an alacrity derived not so much from the healthy strength of his limbs as from the cheerfulness of his inner man. He sauntered on the way back, however, but that was because he chose to keep pace with the short steps of a young damsel, a pretty dapper figure in chintz cotton and coloured ribbons, whose acquaintance he had made some days previously. Giles knew that he was envied by other youths as he and his pretty companion met in the churchyard and smiled at each other, and walked the whole way down the village side by side. Nevertheless, when he left her to seek his lonely hearth again, he sighed once more as he had sighed on the previous Sunday. But this time he lighted the kitchen fire and warmed something in a pot, and actually romped with Cerberus, who was not used to such pranks, and who limped off presently, being somewhat rheumatic, to seek a quiet corner in the sunshine. And then Giles took from a cupboard a big book, and unfastened the metal clasp, and read on the fly-leaf the names of his grandparents, with the dates of birth, baptism, marriage, and death. "Giles Dearlove. Martha Trubridge." Next, the curt chronicle of "Ambrose, only child of the above," who married Sarah Miles, and died within a year of his wife's death. Lastly, "Gilesborn 1770."

Yes, that was himself-just his name-no further record. But that quaint surname might in itself prove a kind of mockery of happiness. Whose love could he ever be? Giles stepped into the neighbouring room, and there he gazed at his own face in a scrap of