other and laughed at this strange turn of affairs.

They had always known there was something weak at the root of Jasper, though his position, fortune, and desperate daring had made him their leader. It was not the first time he had thrown away his own advantage, and they, as it were, had taken it up and carried it after him.

"Why, he drew the second straw," they whispered to each other, "and as the villain Tonio cheated, the prize is rightly his. What is he doing? Leaving her free to join that lover of hers, whom he shut up for weeks to keep him out of her way? Leonard, what think you?"

Leonard, the older man, Jasper's grim and envious lieutenant, stepped back and joined the group. He had busied himself for a few minutes, with hands which could be tender, in settling the Vicar's pillows and giving him a few drops of cordial. The old man lay with closed eyes, breathing more evenly, but now almost unconscious of what went on around him.

The five men had no fear of his hearing them, as they talked matters over in low tones among themselves. Ralph, John, Giles, and Lance, all strong fellows of fair birth and a certain education, had no doubt or varying opinion as to what ought to be done in Jasper Tilney's interest. Leonard agreed with them. He saw the difficulties better; he also knew how to surmount them. He thought of several improvements on their first rough plan. The five were still in deep conference when the inner door opened again, and Mistress Roden came back, followed by Dame Kate in

tiful girl beautifully dressed, the lady of a castle prepared to receive Royalty.

Margaret's hair in its rich color and quantity, wildly streaming before, was now gathered into a gold net; round her lovely throat she wore the pearls her grandfather had given her on Christmas Day. Her gown was of white satin and white fur, laced with silver; her long and heavy girdle was of silver, set with diamonds and pearls. Holding herself very erect, she looked like a young princess about to receive her lieges.

The party of adventurers,

who had never seen anything so stately, so exquisite, SO cold and strange, stared at her in silence. Lancelot, the youngest and the gentlest, caught his breath. Leonard's stern mouth relaxed, and he rubbed his hands together.

Margaret walked up to the bed and leaned over Sir Thomas, laying her hand softly on his forehead. He smiled faintly and his eyelids trembled. "Dear Sir Vicar," she said, "I have not a black garment in the world, or I would not deck myself so, when I should be mourning for my grandfather. Yet he would have told me,you know it-to wear my best for the King and Queen. I am going now to wait upon them; these gentlemen from King's Hall will follow me, and Dame Kate will stay here with you. I will come back soon, and Lord Marlowe with me; we will ask for your blessing Sir Thomas, on our betrothal. Live, live till then!"

Standing again upright, she turned to Leonard, and as she moved, her white gown trailed in the blood on the floor, where it had dropped heavily from Jasper's wound. She did not notice it; almost it seemed as if she had forgotten all that had happened before, the very existence of Antonio, the story of the three straws. She showed no surprise that Jasper and Antonio and several of the men were

1

gone. For a moment, as she looked silently at Leonard, standing square and martial before her, so stony a look came into her lovely wild eyes, so colorless was her face, that he half expected her to fall senseless at his feet.

He spoke, with a rough laugh of admiration. Master Leonard had not even the manners, such as they were, of his birth and time. "By the Lord, fair lady, you might be dressed for a wedding!" he said.

"My own wedding, perhaps," she answered him quietly. "Lord Marlowe is in the castle, and the Queen, my godmother, what could be more fitting?"

"Ay, mistress, we saw him, your fine Lord, a few minutes since. I'm bound to say he looked a happier man than when we had him caged in our garret and fed him with what we could spare. A very handsome lady, too, is the Queen. There he knelt beside her, like the best courtier of them all and something more, holding her gracious hand to his mouth like a starved man who wanted to eat it, and she in no hurry to draw it away. There sat King Henry, save his poor half-fledged Grace! Had I been him, I would soon have stopped their cooing and courting."

Leonard hardly knew if she heard him, as he grumbled on. His companions chuckled, except Lance, who frowned, his young heart suddenly touched by the tragic, helpless beauty of Margaret. It seemed that if she heard, she did not choose to understand; not an eyelash moved, not a tinge of color came, as the words fell on her ears. "Let us go," she said, and stepped towards the door.

The men followed her closely; one or two of them muttered to each other that the pearls were worth more than the maiden who wore them. Leonard turned back as soon as she had passed the door, and with a twist of his hand

pulled the embroidered silk coverlet off the sick man's bed.

"I have more use for this than you, father," he said, and shut the door after him without noticing Dame Kate's cry.

Margaret walked on down the stairs, looking straight before her, noticing nothing. She passed the door of a lower room, where two or three of her maidens, having run back to their duty, were waiting huddled with terrified faces. Some horror was happening, they scarcely knew what; they had seen Jasper Tilney, wounded, and men dragging one they thought to be Antonio. They would have clung to their mistress's skirts, had not something in her face, and the fierce looks of the men, kept them back. Leonard, indeed, with a great roll under his arm, pushed them all with one hand into the room, and clanged the door upon them and their idle embroidery frames.

At the foot of the stairs, in a dark place by the door that opened into the small court, there was a slight scuffle, a smothered scream. Two of the men slipped out and ran in quest of horses, to bring them to the place Leonard had appointed. He and the others turned the opposite way, carrying among them a figure swathed and muffled from head to feet in long folds of creamcolored silk embroidered with red

roses.

"Listen, pretty mistress," Leonard growled in his prisoner's ear. "Be still, and we do not hurt you. Scream or struggle, you are gagged and bound. What is that you say? 'Harry, Harry'? Nay, my lass, his Lordship is not thinking of you. Be content; we'll find you a better bridegroom. You are his by lot, and King's Hall will give you up to no Harry, so long as his Fellowship are there to stand by him."

The willows by the Ruddy saw strange sights that afternoon, when the mist, stealing again over the marshy

meadows, had veiled the yellow wintry

sun.

The small river-door in the castle wall, by which Antonio had escaped when he went to call help from King's Hall against Lady Marlowe, was cautiously opened again. Three men carried out a woman, who lay in their hands as if dead. Keeping as far as possible in the shadow of the buildings, they brought her across the sluice and the weir. They laid her down by the willows, in a place where a bank of earth hid her, gorgeously wrapped as she was, from the ramparts and any high windows of the castle.

The rooks cawed and flapped among their new nests, high above in the tall trees, and flew, swaying and floating in the air, over the meadows and back again. The castle was full of the clamor of the Lancastrian troops, and from the town the loud joy-bells kept ringing, while in the hall Queen Margaret looked down smiling into her servant's eyes and said: "But where is Sir William Roden's sweet granddaughter? Where is the young Margaret we held at the font? Nay, my Lord, we heard rumors-"

The willows by the Ruddy saw more men creeping up through the mist from the bridge, leading horses with them, and then Jasper Tilney's Fellowship mounted, and the strong Leonard carried his fainting prisoner slung across Macmillan's Magazine.

his saddle, and so galloped away with her southward, to the house of him who had drawn the second straw.

The willows by the Ruddy saw even more that day. Under their very branches, where they grew close to the water and hung over it, a dead man was washed by. His white face rose out of the muddy stream, as the grass on the bank caught his hair. The willows and the water knew him well. It was not twenty-four hours since he had dashed into the stream at this very place to save an old woman from drowning,-for his own ends, like everything else he did in his short life. The river had not drowned him, though the cold water now had his young body, strong and beautiful, born under the Italian sun, to play with as it would. His life-blood had ebbed from many wounds with which the Fellowship carried out their leader's threatening.

The boy might have died triumphantly, for there was a smile on his pale lips. He might have died with two thoughts in his unshriven soul,that the old master, whose life he vainly begged from a worse creature than himself, had loved and trusted him to the end,-and that, fairly or foully, he had snatched one moment's wild joy in the hour of defeat and death, he had kissed his lady.

For the last ten or fifteen years the Dublin school of writers has given its friends many little flutters of pleasurable excitement. To quote from some of its English critics, it has given us a poet "equal to Keats"; "a book of perfect lyrics," according to an admirer of the period; a book of essays which LIVING AGE. VOL. XXVII. 1444

was popular enough for the Punch parodist; some stories, some translations from the Irish; and, last, some little plays, which all seem to unite in praising and-for the present, at leastforgetting. Ten or fifteen years is a large bite out of even the most generous youth. As the Syracusan idylist

has it: "We all wax gray from the temples downward: a man must do somewhat while his knees are yet nimble." It is high time the Dublin school did somewhat for its friends.

Comparisons are odious, especially when one's friends suffer by them; but one cannot help thinking of some contemporary young men elsewhere whose beards were fresh on their chins about the same time. Those still youthful giants, Mr. Barrie and Mr. Kipling, were also definitely emerging ten or fifteen years ago. The Dublin school once looked like having a voice as distinct and persistent as theirs; a quite different voice, but still an authentic one. That voice was Mr. Yeats's, who practically stood alone for Dublin in 1889:

Away with us he's going The solemn-eyed

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hill-side;

Nor the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast; Nor see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. . . .

It was near enough to simple earth, and the peace and poetry of it, for favorable augury. In literature, in poetry above all, the simpler the early note, the nearer earth the rhymer goes, the safer seems prophesy about him. And in Mr. Yeats's first two books one found so large an amount of work as good and well-sustained as "The Stolen Child," so many pieces of even greater merit-the "Michael Dwyer Fairy Song," the "Lake Isle of Innisfree," for example that there was little violence to judgment in admitting him to a place in English poetry beside Keats. 1889 and 1902 dated these books. As one sure of himself, he seemed to take time. Then, just as his friends were expecting another book of lyrics to be due, the unexpected happened. An

other book of lyrics-the "book of perfect lyrics," to which the admirer referred-did appear; but it was not by Mr. Yeats. For him and his readers there then entered the most unexpected thing of all; for the very next year (1895) he suddenly "collected" his little sheaves of published verse into one volume, practically ceased to write lyrics in his early simpler vein, and turned his attention to prose.

What was the new voice like?

Dark head by the fire-side brooding,
Sad upon your ears
Whirlwinds of the earth intruding

Sound in wrath and tears . . .

Keep the secret sense celestial
Of the starry birth,

Though about you call the bestial
Voices of the earth . . .

Such was its dominant note: material beauty of every kind but a snare for souls; spiritual "beauty" all. There was much in this little book of fifty "Songs by the Way" (back "to God who is our home") to justify high praise, though to call it a book of “perfect lyrics" was to give way to enthusiasm. It was a real thing, however; fatally real. It put back the clock and re-charged the electric Dublin air with thoughts and spiritual questionings. Its author, suddenly finding himself the central figure among the younger pagans just then rallying round Mr. Yeats, was not long without seeing the fatality of it. Artist, literary man, spiritual agonist, "A. E." had suffered much, as young men of genius always suffer, subjectively. An Eastern legend tells of a thirsty traveller who finds by a well in the desert a bowl from which he drinks. The water tastes bitter from the bowl, yet the water of the well itself is sweet; for the vessel had retained the bitter flavor of mortality. "A. E." had drunk deeply of Eastern wisdom, but had not yet been to the well. And so there was to be no con

tinuation, no development, in this direction either. His "Earth Breath" (Lane, 1897) was a palinode, an apologia to Mother Earth and her "voices," to whom he felt he had scarcely done the wider justice. That effort exhausted him. The "Divine Vision" (Macmillan) of last year is hardly worthy of mention; and the "Mask of Apollo" (in prose) of this does not count, as he himself sadly avows. So much for the poets.

And what of prose, the appeal of which is to the reason and intelligence; which, unlike the vehicle of the imagination, admits of so little license without unclassing itself, or, at least, weakening its appeal?

Here it becomes necessary to distinguish. On the one hand were the men of exact scholarship: Professors Mahaffy, Tyrrell, Bury (then at Dublin), and Dowden. These distinguished men are, so to speak, world scholars. They might as well-or even better-have been born to Oxford or Cambridge as to Dublin. Scholarship, criticism, scarcely becomes localized more than once in a century, unless it be of the sterling variety, as at Tübingen. It belongs to world progress; its business is not with mushroom-school growths, so often springing up in a night and ending in smoke; and it is slow to recognize them. From the University, excepting its Chair of Literature, the Dublin school has scarcely yet won favorable recognition.

On the other hand there was what is called the "Celtic school" about which one may say that there is no such body. A "Celtic spirit," perhaps: but not a school. Most of the so-called "Celts" might just as well have been bornlike Mr. Kipling-in Bombay, so diversified are their activities and abidingplaces. Dublin claims but a small portion of their fame. Even the "Celtic spirit" that evaporating mystery for the puzzled journalist-declines defini

tion. It is more profitable to ask: Had Dublin at this time produced a single book of prose attracting, by some distinctive or daring note of originality like "Plain Tales" or "Auld Licht Idylls," a large English audience? The answer is, of course, in the negative.

Yet any one seeking, a decade ago, for an almost violently original note in Dublin's prose literature to place beside its poetry could have found it only in a now almost forgotten little book called "Two Essays on the Remnant." This book was a revelation in the way of style even to readers of the passing generation of Arnold, Newman, Ruskin and Pater. It was rapidly running into editions when "O. S." in Punch and the Oxford humorists took it in hand and made great play with the notion of a "remnant" (Isaiah's "remnant," Matthew Arnold's "remnant") of chosen people going off into the wilderness and leaving cities, "and sorrow barracadoed ever more within the walls of cities," to take care of themselves. Yet when the worst was said this little book admittedly contained one of the best eulogies of Wordsworth ever penned. "John Eglinton" the author called himself. Six years elapsed before he was heard of again, lending a sort of reluctant hand to a certain section of Irish idealists by allowing them to print his next book in Kilkenny. Some of the essays in "Pebbles from a Brook" would not have hurt the reputation of Schopenhauer, but Goliath the Philistine was none the worse for them. There seemed to be only one objection to the publication of such a book in a place like Kilkenny. There were no readers there. In Dublin there were few enough. In London or Oxford there would have been some. "Kilkenny" wrote its epitaph.

Thus, up to 1897, a Dublin school had made three distinct bids for attention. The first was by Mr. Yeats's wonderful lyrics, with their note of