"Now, then!" Denton shouted, as they burst into the apartment together. "The time has come! the time has come! They are calling you, Peace! You wouldn't let me give them, and the Lord had to take them, but they have reconciled Him to you; He will accept you for their sake!" Old Hughes had entered from his room, and stood looking on with frowning brows, but with more vexation than apprehension. "Be done with that arrant nonsense!" he commanded. "What stuff are you talking?" Denton's wife shrank into the farthest corner, with the cat still in her arms. Peace stood in the middle of the room staring at him. He did not heed Hughes except to thrust him aside as he launched himself towards the girl. Ray slipped between them, and Denton regarded him with dull wavering eyes like a drunken man's. "Oh, you're here still, are you?" he said; a cunning gleam came into his eyes, and he dropped his voice from its impassioned pitch. He kept his right hand in his coat pocket, and Ray watched that hand too solely. Denton flashed past him, and with his left swept away the hands which Peace mechanically lifted to her face, and held them in his grip. Ray sprang upon him, and pinioned his right wrist. "Hold him fast!" Hughes added his grip to Ray's. "He's got something in his pocket, there! Run to the window, Jenny, and call for help!" "No, no, Jenny, don't!" Peace entreated. "Don't call out. Ansel won't hurt me! I know he'll listen to me; won't you, Ansel? Oh, what is it you want to do?" "Here!" cried Denton. "Take it! In an instant you will be with them! The sin will be remitted." He struggled to reach her lips with the hand which he had got out of his pocket. Old Hughes panted out: "Open his fist! Tear it open. If I had a knife-" "Oh, don't hurt him!" Peace implored. "He isn't hurting me." Denton suddenly released her wrists, and she sank senseless. Ray threw himself on his knees beside her, and stretched his arms out over her. Denton did not look at them; he stood a moment listening; then with a formless cry he whirled into the next room. The door shut crashing behind him, and then there came the noise of a heavy fall within. The rush of a train made itself loudly heard in the silence. A keen bitter odor in the air rapt Ray far away to an hour of childhood when a storm had stripped the blossoms from a peach-tree by the house, and he noted with a child's accidental observance the acrid scent which rose from them. 66 That is Prussic acid," Hughes whispered, and he moved feebly towards the door and pushed it open. Denton lay on the floor with his head towards the threshold, and the old man stood looking down into his dead face. "It must have been that which he had in his hand." [TO BE CONTINUED.] D A HEAVENLY BIRTHDAY. BY LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. OST thou keep count and say, in thy far place, Conqueror of life, and death, and time, and space- While round me mocking memories jeer and lower, Thou dost not whisper that those heights are cold Thou sittest comforted and healed with light, BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. SI turn from one to another of the which a detective critic like Sainte-Beuve A old dramatists, and see how little is dogs his hero or his victim, as the case known about their personal history, I find a question continually coming back, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, which I shall endeavor to fan away by a little discussion. This question is whether we gain or lose by our ignorance of the personal details of their history. Would it make any difference in our enjoyment of what they wrote, if we had the means of knowing that one of them was a good son, or the other a bad husband? that one was a punctual paymaster, and that the other never paid his washer-woman for the lustration of the legendary single shirt without which he could not face a neglectful world, or hasten to the theatre with the manuscript of the new play for which posterity was to be more thankful than the manager? Is it a love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of the living? The law is more scrupulous than we in maintaining the inviolability of private letters. Are we to profit by every indiscretion, by every breach of confidence? Of course in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside. And yet how much do we really know even of men who profess to admit us to every corner of their nature-of Montaigne? of Rousseau? As in the box under the table at which the automaton chess-player sat, there is always a closet within that which is so frankly opened to us, and into this the enigma himself absconds while we are staring at nothing in the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the author is off his guard, that we make our discoveries. In a man's works we read between the lines, not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense interest in watching the process by VOL. LXXXV.-No. 508.-56 may be, with tireless sympathy or vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, and constructing out of the life a comment on the works, or, again, from the works divining the character. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias with which the inquisition is conducted, and, after assisting at this process in the case of Châteaubriand, for example, are we sure that we know the man better, or only what was morbid in the man, which, perhaps, it was not profitable for us to know? But is it not after the discreditable particulars which excite a correspondingly discreditable curiosity that we are eager, and these that we read with greatest zest? So it should seem if we judged by the fact that biography, and especially that of men of letters, tends more and more towards these indecent exposures. Those of the person are punished by the law of all civilized countries, and shall we be more lenient to those of the soul? The concern of the biographer should be with the mind, and not with the body of his victim. We are willing to be taken into the parlor and the library, but may fairly refuse to be dragged down to the kitchen or to look into the pantry. Boswell's Life of Johnson does not come under this condemnation, being mainly a record of the great doctor's opinions, and, since done with his own consent, is almost to be called autobiographical. There are certain memoirs after reading which one blushes as if he had not only been peeping through a key-hole, but had been caught in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in Shakespeare's saying, "The evil that men do lives after them," but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise good men, for it is only in this kind of evil that others will seek excuse for what they are tempted to do, or palliation for what they have already done. I like to believe, and to think I see reason for believing, that it is the good that is in men which is immortal, and beneficently immortal, and that the sooner the perishable husk in which it was enveloped is suffered to perish and crumble away, the sooner we shall know them * Copyright, 1892, by Charles Eliot Norton. as they really were. I remember how Longfellow used to laugh in his kindly way when he told the story of the French visitor who asked him for some révélations intimes of his domestic life to be published in a Paris newspaper. No man would have lost less by the most staring light that could have been admitted to those sacred retreats, but he shrank instinctively from being an accomplice to its admission. I am not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable identification of the Dark Lady to whom twenty five of Shakespeare's sonnets are address ed, much as I should commend the research and acuteness that rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than suspected that these sonnets had an address within the bills of mortality, for no such redblooded flame as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of the Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied so long as she was nameless, she moved about in a world not realized, sacred in her inaccessibility, a fainter image of that image of her which had been mirrored in the poet's eyes, and this vulgarization of her into flesh and blood seems to pull down the sonnets from heaven's sweetest air to the turbid level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no longer an object for the upward, but for the furtive and sidelong glance. A gentleman once told me that being compelled to part with some family portraits, he requested a dealer to price that of a collateral ancestress by Gainsborough. He thought the sum offered surprisingly small, and said so. "I beg your pardon for asking the question," said the dealer, "but business is business. You are not, I understand, a direct descendant of this lady. Was her name ever connected with any scandal? If so, I could double my offer.” Somewhere in our inhuman nature there must be an appetite for these unsavory personalities, but they are degrading in a double sense-degrading to him whose secret is betrayed, and to him who consents to share in the illicit knowledge of it. These things are none of our business, and yet it is remarkable how scrupulously exact even those most neglect ful in their own affairs are in attending to the business of other people. I think, on the whole, that it is fortunate for us that our judgment of what the old dramatists did should be so little disturbed by any misinformation as to what they were, for to be imperfectly informed is to be misinformed, and even to look through contemporary eyes is to look through very crooked glass. Sometimes we may draw a pretty infallible inference as to a man's temperament, though not as to his character, from his writings. And this, I think, is the case with Chapman, of whom I speak to night. George Chapman was born at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, in 1559 probably, though Anthony Wood makes him two years older, and died in London on the 12th of May, 1634. He was buried in the church-yard of St. Giles in the Fields, where the monument put up over him by Inigo Jones is still standing. He was five years older than Shakespeare, whom he survived for nearly twenty years, and fifteen years older than Ben Jonson, who outlived him three years. There is good ground for believing that he studied at both universities, though he took a degree at neither. While there he is said to have devoted himself to the classics, and to have despised philosophy. This contempt, however, seems to me somewhat doubtful, for he is certainly the most obtrusively metaphysical of all our dramatists. After leaving the university, he is supposed to have travelled, which is as convenient a way as any other to fill up the gap of sixteen years between 1578, when he ended his academic studies, and 1594, when we first have notice of him in London, during which period he vanishes altogether. Whether he travelled in France and Italy or not, he seems to have become in some way familiar with the languages of those countries, and there is some reason for thinking that he understood German also. We have two glimpses of him during his life in London. In 1605 he, with Jonson and Marston, produced a play called Eastward Ho! Some "injurious reflections" on the Scottish nation in it angered King James, and the authors were imprisoned for a few days in the Fleet. Again, in 1606, the French ambassador, Beaumont, writes to his master: "I caused certain players to be forbid from acting The History of the Duke of Biron; when, however, they saw that the whole court had left town, they persisted in acting it; nay, they brought upon the stage the Queen of France and Madame de Verneuil. The former having first accosted the latter with very hard words, gave her a box on the ear. At my suit three of them were arrested; but the principal person, the author, escaped.” This was Chapman's tragedy, and in neither of the editions printed two years later does the objectionable passage appear. It is curious that this interesting illustration of the history of the English stage should have been unearthed from the French archives by Von Raumer in his History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chapman was a man of grave character and regular life. We may, perhaps, infer from some passages in his plays that he heartily hated Puritans. There are other passages that might lead one to suspect him of a leaning towards Catholicism, or at least regretted the schism of the Reformation. The scene of these plays is laid in France, to be sure, in the time of Henry IV., but not to mention that Chapman's characters are almost always the mere mouth-pieces of his own thought, there is a fervor in the speeches to which I have alluded which gives to them an air of personal conviction. In Biron's Tragedy there is a eulogy of Philip II. and his policy very well worth reading by those who like to keep their minds judicially steady, for it displays no little historical insight. It certainly shows courage and independence to have written such a vindication only eighteen years after the Armada, and when national prejudice against Spain was so strong, Chapman's friendships are the strongest testimonials we have of his character. Prince Henry, whose untimely death may have changed the course of English history, and with it that of our own, was his patron. So was Carr, Earl of Somerset, whom he did not desert in ill fortune. Inigo Jones was certainly his intimate friend; and he is said to have been, though it seems doubtful, on terms of friendly intercourse with Bacon. In dedicating his Biron's Conspiracy to Sir Thomas. Walsingham, he speaks as to an old friend. With his fellow-poets he appears to have been generally on good terms. His long life covered the whole of the Elizabethan age of literature, and before he died he might have read the earlier poems of Milton. He wrote seven comedies and eight tragedies that have come down to us, and probably others that have perished. Near ly all his comedies are formless and coarse, but with what seems to me a kind of stiff and wilful coarseness, as if he were trying to make his personages speak in what he supposed to be their proper dialect, in which he himself was unpractised, having never learned it in those haunts familiar to most of his fellow-poets, where it was vernacular. His characters seem, indeed, types, and he frankly proclaims himself an idealist in the dedication of The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois to Sir Thomas Howard, where he says, "And for the authentical truth of either person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a Poem whose subject is not truth, but things like truth?" Of his comedies, All Fools is by general consent the best. It is less lumpish than the others, and is, on the whole, lively and amusing. In his comedies he indulges himself freely in all that depreciation of woman which had been so long traditional with the sex which has the greatest share in making then what they are. But he thought he was being comic, and there is, on the whole, no more depressing sight than a naturally grave man under that delusion. His notion of love, too, is coarse and animal, or rather the notion he thinks proper to express through his characters. And yet in his comedies there are two passages-one in praise of love, and the other of woman- certainly among the best of their kind. The first is a speech of Valerio in All Fools: "I tell thee love is Nature's second sun Causing a spring of virtues where he shines; As to enjoy one joy, think both one thought, And now let me read to you a passage in praise of women from The Gentleman Usher. It is not great poetry, but it has fine touches of discrimination both in feeling and expression: "Let no man value at a little price A virtuous woman's counsel; her winged spirit O what a treasure is a virtuous wife, "But a true wife both sense and soul delights, "Nay, we must now have nothing brought on stages Of his tragedies, the general judgment has pronounced Biron's Conspiracy and Biron's Tragedy to be the finest, though they have less genuine poetical ecstasy than his d'Ambois. The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, is almost wholly from his hand, as all its editors agree, and as is plain from internal evidence, for Chapman has some marked peculiarities of thought and style which are unmistakable. Because Shirley had some obscure share in it, it is printed with his works, and omitted by the latest editor of Chapman. Yet it is far more characteristic of him than Alphonsus, or Cæsar and Pompey. The character of Chabot has a nobility less prompt to vaunt itself, less conscious of itself, less obstreperous, I am tempted to say, than is common with Chapman. There is one passage in the play which I will quote, because of the plain allusion in it to the then comparatively recent fate of Lord Bacon. I am not sure whether it has been before remarked or not. The Lord Chancellor of France is impeached of the same crimes with Bacon. He is accused also of treacherous cruelty to Chabot, as Bacon was reproached for ingratitude to Essex. He is sentenced like him to degradation of rank, to a heavy fine, and to imprisonment at the King's pleasure. Consider your own places and the helms My ambition now is punished, and my pride For my abuse of justice; but no stings My pride look'd at, would buy my poor life's Forever banish me the Court, and let Me waste my life far-off in some mean village." After the Chancellor's sentence, his secretary says: "I could have wished him fall on softer ground For his good parts." Bacon's monument, in St. Michael's Church at St. Alban's, was erected by his secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys. Bacon did not appear at his trial; but there are several striking parallels between his letters of confession and the speech you have just heard. Another posthumously published tragedy of Chapman's, the Revenge for Honor, I shall notice here, as my time will allow me to make no extracts from it. It is, in conception, the most original of them all, and the plot seems to be of his own invention. It has great improbabilities, but as the story is oriental, we find it easier to forgive them. It is, on the whole, a very striking play, and with more variety of character in it than is common with Chapman. In general he seems to have been led to the choice of his heroes (and these sustain nearly the whole weight of the play in which they figure) by some half-conscious sympathy of temperament. They are impetuous, have an overweening selfconfidence, and an orotund way of expressing it that fitted them perfectly to |