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the man who cut Mr. Sargent's Titian from its frame yesterday, and they have got back the picture itself. As I telegraphed you last night, they had a clue, and so adroitly did they follow it up that they laid hands on the thief within twelve hours after the robbery had been discovered. The theft was committed by a single man, an employee of the low curiosity-shop where the picture was discovered two years ago. He bribed the concierge of Mr. Sargent's apartments yesterday morning, and the painting was cut from its frame only an hour or two before the owner returned. The rascal has made a full confession, in which he acknowledges that his motive was to hold the Mary Magdalen to ransom and to strike the American owner for a hundred thousand francs. Luckily, a sharp-eyed detective remarked the uneasiness of the concierge when Mr. Sargent announced his loss. Under pressure, the concierge supplied a description of the thief, and the police ran him down at once. Mr. Sargent has sent ten thousand franes to the HôtelDieu to endow a special bed for the detective department of the police.

"So, you see, Mr. Sam Sargent is in far too good a humor this morning to be very angry with me," said Charley, when he had finished. "The Mary Magdalen recovered? In Paris?" Paul was stupefied with amazement. "Then what was it I saw in your room yesterday "

Charley stared at him blankly. Gradually a light seemed to dawn on his mind, and the hard lines of his face thawed out. Finally the whole situation burst upon him at once, and he fell back on the sofa, where he rolled helplessly in uncontrollable merriment.

"Why, you don't mean to say you thought that was the original ?" he gasped, as soon as he could recover his breath.

"I certainly did," said Paul, gravely. The humor of the affair had not yet dawned upon him.

"Oh, this will be the death of me!" said Charley, in the intervals of his merriment. "Here is an unlooked-for testimonial to the merits of my medium. I shall publish it, Paul, I certainly shall; and then I'll take a big studio and turn out old masters by the gross." obliged to stop, choking with laughter.

"I do not understand," said Kitty.

He was

Why, it's this way," continued Charley, who had temporarily regained command of his voice. "As I told you, I bribed the concierge and made a copy of Sargent's Mary Magdalen. As I always do, I primed my own canvas, and I used my famous medium; and really it made a very respectable old master indeed. It would pass muster anywhere: wouldn't it, Paul?" There was a fresh explosion of laughter, and then the young fellow resumed:

"I kept it as shady as I could, for I intended it as a weddingpresent for you two, but Master Paul, here, must go hunting after a mare's nest and find one with an addled egg in it. When he got pitching into me about the theft, and so forth, I supposed he was referring to the underhand way in which I secured my copy,-and for which my conscience has pricked me more than once, İ can assure you; but I've written the whole story to Sargent, and I'm sure he'll say it's

all right. But Paul actually thought I had gone in with a crape mask and an ink-eraser and cut the picture out of the frame! Oh, I shall die of this, I know I shall !"

"And did you think my brother capable" began Kitty, indignantly.

"Oh, don't, Kit. Don't scold him," said Charley. "The poor fellow has had the worst of it all through."

Stuyvesant looked from one to the other in silence.

"Tell me, Paul," Charley continued, "how did you ever get on the track of the Mary Magdalen at all? Did you find it by accident?"

"No," said Paul. His mind was still whirling with the astonishing developments of the morning, and he could not force his ideas out of the beaten track. "No," he said; "I learned that you had been paying money at different times to a man named Zalinski, who turned out to be

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"A pawnbroker," interrupted Charley. "One by one my most cherished secrets shrivel up under the eagle eye of my future brotherin-law. I have dealt with Zalinski; I buy most of my curios and studio-properties from him. I got that guillotine-knife that hangs in your sitting-room from Zalinski, and the bowie-knife too. I have even left him a standing order to let me know whenever he comes across anything that may appeal to my outlandish taste; but I don't tell people of it. For one thing, it looks shady to deal at a pawn-shop; and for another, if the rest of the boys got on to my racket, Zalinski's prices would go up, and there wouldn't be so much left for me."

Charley," said Paul, advancing with outstretched hand, "I have made a great fool of myself, and my doubt of you was an outrage. Can you forgive me?"

"With all my heart, old boy, especially as you've given me the best laugh I've had for years."

"And you, Kitty ?" said he, turning to Miss Vaughn.

"I don't know. I'll consider it. You've no business to be so suspicious," she answered, putting her hands behind her.

"I'll try and be less so in the future," he answered, humbly.

"And you'd better look out and walk the matrimonial chalk-line without wobbling, Miss Kitty," said her brother, "for you'll have a husband that could give Vidocq long odds and beat him."

"I think, on the whole, as you are penitent, I'll forgive you," said Kitty, gravely, wholly ignoring her brother's irreverent observation. "Now I'm going out to Yonkers with Charley to kiss Gladys Tennant. You can come if you want."

"You can come, but you can't kiss," interjected Charley. "I'd like it of all things," said Paul, eagerly.

"You'll see how nice she is to talk to when you know who she is," said young Vaughn, mischievously, "and when you get back you can sit down and write a nice long chapter on the fallacies of circumstantial evidence, as exemplified in the personal experience of the author."

THE END.

CRITICAL

THE BROWNING CRAZE.

RITICAL surprise has been more than once expressed, of late, that in an age so militant against the development of the poetic spirit, a single man should find himself (and that, too, at an advanced period of his life) surrounded, not to say besieged, by hosts of ardent admirers. Everybody has now heard of the "Browning Craze," and it is quite probable that many had heard of it while Mr. Robert Browning himself was hardly more to them than a meaningless name. And yet to the majority of literary men and women in England and America this cult has long been a familiar one. Not until perhaps a decade ago did it begin to assume its present spacious proportions. I remember meeting devout Browningites at least twenty years ago, when almost a boy. And as boys will, when their thoughts turn toward the letters of their time and land, I soon felt an ambitious craving to graduate into a Browningite myself.

Such a worship then possessed so fascinating an element of rarity! It was so attractive a rôle for one to give a compassionate lifting of the brows and say, "No, really?" when somebody declared himself quite unable to understand the obscure author of "Sordello." You knew perfectly well that any number of his lines were Hindostanee to you, and yet you made use of your patronizing pity and your "No, really?" all the same. There is safety in the assertion that Mr. Browning has driven more pedantic youngsters to unblushing falsehood than any other writer in the language. All sorts of roads lead to fame, and his, oddly indeed, has been the very oblique one of an unpopularity which bore superficial signs that it was preferred and courted. But a deeper glance assures the unbiassed observer that this is by no means fact. Almost every poem of the many which he has written bears evidence that the attitudinarian has been at work, that the conscious trickster has again and again superseded the conscientious artist, and that the notoriety we too often give caprice and whimsicality has been aimed after with a studied zeal. It is in this way that Mr. Browning incessantly betrays what might be called the frivolity inseparable from his temperament. Take, for example, in "Men and Women," his most coherent collec tion of dramatic and lyrical poetry, the profusion of rank affectations mingled with their hardy opposites. Indeed, this one book, which is by far the most serene, lucid, and endurable that he has ever given to the world, contains much that art cannot fail to find hideous, even repulsive. Scarcely a poem is exempt from some shocking flaw. In “A Lover's Quarrel," which possesses good human touches, if the verse does jerk like a sled on a road filmed meagrely with snow, we read such rhymed crudity as

See the eye, by a fly's foot blurred

Ear, when a straw is heard

Scratch the brain's coat of curd!

VOL. XLI.-6

But effects of unpardonable bathos like this abound in "Men and Women." The present essay would exceed all allowable scope if half of them were quoted. Poems which have received rapturous praise fairly teem with them. In "The Statue and the Bust" (a piece of work so often declared faultless) there are obscurities of construction for which a school-boy would be rated by his teacher. "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha" racks and tortures the most ordinary ear. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (another object of devout veneration) has little about it that is metrically slipshod, but affects an impartial reader, after finishing it, as a lyric literally torn from an unwilling talent; its very rhymes have a forced, factitious queerness, and its abrupt ending seems to exclaim, "Look at my wonderful suggestiveness of allegory!" And we look, if our eyes are not bloodshot with the "Browning Craze," only to conclude that the entire poem is on such mystical stilts as to transcend the reach of all sensible interpretation. 66 Popularity," which endeavors to laud the superiority of genius over mere facile aptitude, ends with two stanzas regarding "Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes," which few living men of taste would have cared to print at all, and none except their creator would have cared to offer his public as poetry. "Old Pictures in Florence" repeatedly massacres what should be a mellifluous anapæstic measure, and leaves you as tired of its eccentric attitudinizing as if you had been button-holed by some loquacious rhapsodist in one of the Arno-fronting

streets.

But it would be idle, on the other hand, to deny "Men and Women" both poems and passages of poems glowing with merit. We find there "Evelyn Hope," a bit of passion worth careful heed, though overrated by its lovers because so massively self-satisfied in its transcendentalism. We find "Bishop Blougram's Apology," a brilliant study of a narrow, glib, specious-tongued prelate, and interesting if on no other ground than its dramatic exposition of a meretricious moralist. We find the tender and pathetic "Andrea del Sarto," whose sole objection is the mannered and inharmonious blank verse which Mr. Browning always employs. We find the fervid little "Love among the Ruins," and wish its author, so often insolent in his defiance of art, had chosen to sing many more times like that for the delight of folk unborn. We find "Saul," burning with eloquence and yet perfectly intelligible, notwithstanding its cloying pietism. We find "In a

Balcony," perhaps the best piece of drama Mr. Browning has ever written. We find "The Last Ride Together," an ardent episode of love-making, but lyrically spoiled by its far-fetched subtleties of simile and illustration. We find "Any Wife to Any Husband," which to read over ten times very patiently and studiously is to convince us that it is fine-and what more of critical irony could be heaped on a poem than that? We find "Two in the Campagna," which begins exquisitely and gets labored and befogged toward the end. We find "A Grammarian's Funeral," which makes the blood beat quicker, in parts, and in parts lamentably cools it. We find "A Toccata of Galuppi's," which gives us a laugh or two as excellent Italian comedy. And lastly we find "Fra Lippo Lippi," winsome, sweet, and a poem which Tenny

son might have told to us in verse as enchanting as that in which he has embalmed "Tithonus."

It has been the writer's deliberate purpose to deal first with "Men and Women," for this book, in its entirety, faults and virtues both included, will most probably mark the uncrumbling corner-stone of Mr. Browning's future fame. Before this he had written a very sane and splendid poem called "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." It is so fine a piece of work, indeed, that I can easily. imagine his worshippers despising it. It is no nut to crack; it shows what an artist its parent might have been. Published originally in the same volume, if I mistake not, was "My Last Duchess," a brief 1 enough thing, which has attained an extraordinary reputation for no apparent cause. It has the chute de phrase of a cruel man speaking heartlessly about a wife whom his neglect killed. But, except for the mild shudder it awakens, it is in no sense noteworthy, and the verse drags and hobbles with so much sluggishness that no one save the "professional reader" (a great friend of Mr. Browning's, because elocution helps the latter's frequent disjointed and staccato technics) can ever succeed in rendering it rightly. Among the earlier "Dramatic Lyrics" must be remembered "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," one of the few English poems that have achieved a deserving popularity among the masses. It is a child's poem, and therefore its occasional bizarre falsetto may be pardoned. Not so "The Flight of the Duchess," however, in which a charming and most spiritual tale is told somewhat after the style of an Ingoldsby Legend or a Bab Ballad. It is filled with such rhymes as "tintacks" and " syntax," "stir-up" and "syrup," "news of her" and "Lucifer," and many others equally unsuited to a history at once so serious and so exalted. Here we are confronted with that deliberated oddity which might be termed Mr. Browning's most irritating fault, as it certainly is his least honest one. We see that he has planned all these fire-cracker surprises of diction; they bear slight resemblance to that "rough power" by which his artistic laziness has so often been misnamed. For there is a certain class of critics (and, I regret to add, a large one) who only need the evidence of an author's bad rhymes, haphazard rhythms, and defective constructions, in order to discover that he fairly bristles with "rough power." Le mot juste, the polished and accurate utterance, is in severe disrepute with these persons. It has been they who for years have flung their gibes at the unrivalled perfection of Lord Tennyson's verse. Apparently, as they love to put it, the latter had not power because it was not "rough." He was mincing because he never slurred a line; he lacked the higher kind of emotion because he had patiently chiselled his work into a dignity above the frenzies of Byron or the hysteria of Shelley. I sometimes wonder, for my own part, if those cavillers who ring such wearisome changes on this one theme have ever considered how much great power is often at the root of poetical grace. Even if Tennyson were only felicitous (and he is that besides being a very noble poet as well) he would have accomplished much. All the remarkable poets who ever lived have had as much grace as grandeur. Grace is frequently inseparable from grandeur, but when it is not it is never weakness; it is

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