fervour or insanity of enthusiasm that startle in creatures so young, and explain the complacency with which the marriage of reason in France is accomplished-a wiser institution than Anglo-Saxon taste will admit. They are proud of their sex and its mission, which is perhaps the reason why they are not ready to fling themselves at the heads of men, as their sisters beyond the Channel and on the other side of the Atlantic so recklessly do. Then, too, they know that the duty of mating them lies with their parents and not with them, and this conciousness gives them an exquisite force of dignity and reserve. Have no fear about them. Nothing in them will ever give rise to 'door-mat' love literature. They know their value, they are perhaps too assured of it, for many of their pages are filled with magnificent appreciations of woman's rôle and nature. This is the general sentiment on the question of their rights: 'The injustice of the laws which enchain women revolt me, but I do not claim the right to vote. For me, woman is above all a soul, which should steep the world in light and love. Let woman therefore merit to be the soul of our laws and institutions and of our public morals; let her insinuate herself everywhere as the vivifying air, as heat and luminous sunlight; but let her leave to men the struggles of speech and action. It should suffice her happiness and glory to inspire speech and action.' In saluting these high-flown and laudable sentiments from thinkers in their teens, we must allow something for the cant of tradition. It is not to be expected that young minds could escape it. I confess I find a greater ring of sincerity in such arguments as these: Let us stay wisely at home, and let the men fight it out for themselves and for us. It is much more comfortable. Lean on them, since it flatters them. That's the best feminist solution.' Another satirically thinks it will be time enough for the women to interfere in public when the men have reduced themselves to general softening of the brain through tobacco and absinthe. A great deal of sense amongst all these young persons, but no echo of the generosity, the magnanimity, the bewildering passion and indignation that drove George Sand into revolt. Decidedly the modern young girl is not romantic, or ardent, or disinterested. One would prefer a little touch of anarchy now and then, the utterance of a burning word in behalf of abstract justice. It is surely not altogether admirable that fresh youth should be so seemly, so unrash, so incapable of an unwise and unprofitable bargain.

Nationalism is the fashionable political credo of the hour, and of course these thousands of well-brought-up maids of France are fervent nationalists. They abhor everything English, German, and Scandinavian. The Russian alliance compels them to admit that Tolstoy is a writer of grace and wit'! They wipe out the legend of Northern genius in a contemptuous reference to the Knights of the Fog. One girl peeped into Maeterlinck, and was suffocated.

She recalls the anecdote of the exiled Spaniard in London when asked if he had any message for his compatriots: Only my compliments to the sun, for since I am here I haven't seen it.' She kisses her hand back to light with her compliments. Light with her, alas! means the poet Coppée and M. Rostand. All these girls delight in the mediocrity of the trivial and sentimental M. Coppée, whom in a thrill of admiration they describe as 'passionnant,' and Cyrano of Bergerac is the greatest masterpiece since the days. of Hugo. They are judiciously trained in every sort of cant: the cant of the classics, which they profess to adore, without, we may be sure, understanding them, probably having only read what they know of them, as we did in my French school-days, in a volume of well-chosen extracts, Athalie, Esther, and Le Cid being the sole exceptions, those permitted in their dull entirety. In the cant of sentiment, as revealed in all their pretty keepsake phrases about flowers, the beauties of nature, home, the sentimental arts, like music and poetry, and family love (no hint whatever of any other kind of love in all their 600 pages); the cant of religion, betrayed in their dubious enthusiasm for Bossuet, and their conviction that all the modern literature of the whole world is not worth a single page of Lacordaire; and in the cant of propriety, as we see by their constant readiness to blush, not as thoughtless young girls are wont to blush, but with conscious rectitude. For they are dismally penetrated with the sense of their virtue, and would not, as they value their immortal souls, cast a glance of curiosity in the neighbourhood of a newspaper or a new novel. And so they prate with delightful and unlettered priggishness of Ronsard, Vauvenargues, Corneille and Racine (they pretend to dote on Corneille), and the wicked Molière. How is this, one wonders? Have they really read Molière? Lamartine and Chateaubriand are of course their modern deities, and they write very elegantly of Madame de Staël, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. Can it be that they, who maintain proudly that a virtuous maiden cannot frequent the theatre without the certain loss of her immortal soul, have actually read Rolla, the tale of Fantine, Delphine, and such improper classics? Of the modern artistic writers, they cry in a body: Délivrez-nous, Seigneur ; belle tête, mais de cervelle point.'

Their patriotism forbids them to recognise foreign genius, and sothey make merry over the Wagnerian craze. They detest Wagner and seem to regard him as a German Godard, rather inferior to the French article. One actually calls him 'la tintamarre d'outre Rhin,' and says the admiration the brouhaha he mistakes for music excites is only a pose. It is a cacophony worthy of Dante's Hell. Twenty years ago her seniors spoke as sillily. The only music for the sons of France' are the divine strains of Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Gounod. We know that they do not read newspapers, or we

might suspect them of an assiduous study of the Libre Parole and the Intransigeant. And possibly they have been permitted to imbibe the noble patriotism of the organ of the Pères Assompsionistes, La Croix. The Père Bailly, who is now treading unmolested British soil, in a patriotic revolt against the laws of his own land, may be responsible for the perfervid hatred expressed unanimously by these young girls for the unspeakable Saxon. They hate his speech, his tailoring, his person, everything about him and his country. They hate him even more liberally and extensively than they hate the American. For while they gird incessantly at 'American education' and the ineffable ways of fast American girls, the Englishman is never anything but mufle (the equivalent of 'cad,' and, like it, later-day slang) and the Englishwoman grotesque and rude. The English language is abhorred as an impossible tongue 'which makes you pronounce Liverpool when you want to say Manchester.' This is a mild specimen of their hardy satire, but you perceive something of the tone of the amiable Croix and the Christian sentiments of the Assumptionist founder.

And yet, with my good-humoured fault-finding, I would have it understood that on the whole the general impression disengaged from this extravagant collection of universal views for these girls are invited to discourse on the ideal type of the young girl, her instruction and education, perfumes (nearly all renounce the use of perfumes in virtuous disgust at a symbol of vice and luxury), the demimaidens, the habit of shaking hands (generally disapproved as an English and therefore anti-nationalist habit), convent schools, balls, conversation, Knights of the Fog, or Northern literature, women's rights, men of mind, beauties of nature, Parisianism or provincialism, artistic style, the theatre, breeding, woman, progress, professional careers, fashion, fortune, the artistic temperament, the French spirit, music, friendship, dress, books, nobility, governesses, country life, cremation, stupidity, the use of English words in French, decentralisation, diaries, old maids, art, happiness, flowers, bullfights, the spinning-wheel, jewels, women-strikers, olden times, scepticism and disenchantment (at eighteen one is such a proper authority upon both!), social play-acting, death, and the young girl of the future—I say the general impression does honour to the race and sex of the young girl of France. One would wish them a little less assured of what 'well-bred and virtuous girls should do' under all circumstances, with a wider view of virtue and a larger outlook upon life; less complacently conscious of their unimpeachable rectitude of judgment and decision; more given to the wholesome dubiety of inexperience, to the charming dread of the unknown, to dreams of elsewhere and beyond, to flights into the vague, into the warm and tender romance of youthtide, with a little more generosity and understanding of error, of failure, of fall; one would like to see them

more spontaneous and less self-righteous, holding, above all, more nebulous views upon what we are agreed to call woman's virtue. Why, so young, should all these terrible moralists have so clearly made up their minds upon the question of proper and improper literature and the drama, always and inevitably modern? They can, by their training, know nothing about either; therefore, why not a little youthful and innocent curiosity to know what it is all about before pronouncing? Why so ready to swallow everything their elders say on that one single score? It is not natural at twenty. Then, too, why this intransigeance only on the ground of purity? This, of course, is the result of their Catholic training, by which one would think the Christian soul of woman knew no other obligation than that of chastity. As if lying, slandering, bad temper, selfishness, dishonesty, brutality were not sins as great! It is not in the Semaine Religieuse or La Croix that they will acquire generosity in the judgment of their neighbours, and in these precious leaflets doubtless they have learnt that the favourable criticisms of foreign art and literature are paid for.

HANNAH LYNCH,

ON THE

COLLECTING OF OLD SILVER PLATE

THE mania, passion, or interest of collecting in its various forms dates undoubtedly from prehistoric ages. The necessary instincts for that pursuit are--the power of selection, the avidity for possession, the solicitude for preservation, and a strong desire that the results of experience should be handed down intact to posterity.

As civilisation gradually grew, it occurred to wealthy individuals to surround themselves with costly objects, pleasing both to the eye and imagination, the idea being perhaps instigated by seeing and admiring the accumulated votive offerings of gold and silver preserved in the temples. Schliemann, in his work on Troy, points to a very high appreciation and standard of craftsmanship in the precious metals existing 1200 B.C. Of this and the Greek plate that followed but little remains; being so easily converted into money for the purposes of war, its destruction was inevitable. The few specimens of Roman silver that have survived are mostly cast, which gives them the sense of solidity that is so apparent in bronzes of the time. The discovery some years ago of a mirror and other silver articlesof the second century B.C. in the sarcophagus of a woman proves the value attaching to such things for daily use, besides showing how much they must have been cherished, having been selected presumably to accompany her to a future state.

We know that the Romans of the Empire were ardent collectors; but during the dark ages, ruled by Frank and Norman and decimated by Guelph and Ghibelline, life and property were so uncertain that any form of collecting was rendered impossible; and it was reserved for such men as the Medicis and the artists of the Renaissance, under ecclesiastical and comparatively peaceful influence, to once more bring to light and cherish the wonderful forgotten works of the past. From that time to the present day the patronage and knowledge of the art collector have had an important influence on civilisation. In the fifteenth century the artist or craftsman and the purchaser came into close personal contact, for the intermediate dealer of to-day did not exist; the beautiful works created then by the greatest artists of the