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the desert or among the mountains far away, wandering where he seldom heard the tongue of his country, and never saw a face he recognised, Agnes never knew.

But after this fashion time went on with them all. Then there came a second heir, another Louis, to the Hall at Winterbourne-and it was very hard to say whether this young gentleman's old aunt or his young aunt, the Honourable Rachel, or the Honourable Anastasia, was most completely out of her wits at this glorious epoch in the history of the House. Another event of the most startling and extraordinary description took place very shortly after the christening of Marian's iniraculous baby. Charlie was one-and-twenty; he was admitted into the firm, and the young man, who was one of the most "rising young men" in his profession,

took to himself a holiday, and went abroad without any one knowing much about it. No harm in that; but when Charlie returned, he brought with him a certain Signora Giulia, a very amazing companion indeed for this taciturn hero, who was afraid of young ladies. He took her down at once to Winterbourne, to present her to his mother and sisters. He had the grace to blush, but really was not half so much ashamed of himself as he ought to have been. For the pretty young Italian turned out to be cousin to Louis and Rachel-a delicate little beauty, extremely proud of the big young lover, who had carried her off from her mother's house six weeks ago and we are grieved to acknowledge that Charlie henceforth showed no fear whatever, scarcely even the proper awe of a dutiful husband in the presence of Mrs Charles Atheling.

CHAPTER XXXV. THE END.

Agnes Atheling was alone in old Miss Bridget's parlour; it was a fervent day of July, and all the country lay in a hush and stillness of exceeding sunshine, which reduced all the common sounds of life, far and near, to a drowsy and languid hum --the midsummer's luxurious voice. The little house was perfectly still. Mrs Atheling was at the Hall, Papa in Oxford, and Hannah, whose sole beatific duty it was to take care of the children, and who envied no one in the world save the new nurse to the new baby, had taken out Bell and Beau. The door was open in the fearless fashion and license of the country. Perhaps Susan was dozing in the kitchen, or on the sunny outside bench by the kitchen door. There was not a sound about the house save the deep dreamy hum of the bees among the roses those roses which clustered thick round the old porch a he wall. Agnes sat by the op w, in a very familiar old making a frock for little was six years old now, an retty things. Agnes w young as she used to

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still was as fresh as a child's. She was changed otherwise: the ease which those only have who are used to the company of people of refinement, had added another charm to her natural grace. As she sat with her work on her knee, in her feminine attitude and occupation, making a meditative pause, bowing her head upon her hand, thinking of something, with those quiet walls of home around her-the open door, the open window, and no one else visible in the serene and peaceful house, she made, in her fair and thoughtful young womanhood, as sweet a type as one could desire of the serene and happy confidence of a quiet English home.

She did not observe any one passing; she was not thinking, perhaps, of any one hereabout who was like to pass-but she heard a step entering at the door. She scarcely looked up, thinking it some member of the family-scarcely moved even en the door of the parlour opened and the step came in. Th looked up-started up-let h drop out of her hands, and, with eagerness in the bronz of the stranger, uttered a wo exclamation. He hastened lding out his hand. "Mr F

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cried Agnes, in extreme surprise and agitation" is it you?"

What he said was some hasty faltering expressions of delight in seeing her, and they gazed at each other with their mutual "interest," glad, yet constrained. "We have tried often to find out where you were," said Agnes-"I mean Louis; he has been very anxious. Have you seen him? When did you come home?" "I have seen no one save you." "But Louis has been very anxious," said Agnes, with a little confusion. "We have all tried to discover where you were. Is it wrong to ask where you have been ?”

But Lionel did not at all attend to her questions. He was less self-possessed than she was; he seemed to have only one idea at the present moment, so far as was visible, and that he simply expressed over again "I am very glad-happy-to see you here, and alone."

"Oh !" said Agnes with a nervous tremor"I-I was asking, Mr Rivers, where you had been?"

This time he began to attend to her. "I have been everywhere," he said, except where pleasure was. I have been on fields of battles-in places of wretchedness. I have come to tell you something you only. Do you remember our conversation once by Badgeley Wood ?"

66 Yes."

"You gave me a talisman, Agnes," said the speaker, growing more excited; "I have carried it all over the world."

"Well," said Agnes as he paused. She looked at him very earnestly, without even a blush at the sound of her own name.

Well-better than well!" cried Lionel; "wondershi invincible divine! I went to fix your spell-I who trusted nothing at the moment when everything had failed me-even

you. I put yonder sublime Friend of yours to the experiment-I dared to do it! I took His name to the sorrowful, as you bade me. I cast out devils with his name, as the sorcerers tried to do. I put all the hope I could have in life upon the trial. Now I come to tell you the issue; it is fit that you should know."

Agnes leaned forward towards him, listening eagerly; she could not quite tell what she expected-a confession of faith.

"I am a man of ambition," said Lionel, turning in a moment from the high and solemn excitement of his former speech, with a sudden smile like a gleam of sunshine. "You remember my projects when I was heir of Winterbourne. You knew them, though I did not tell you; now I have found a cave in a wild mining district among a race of giants. I am Vicar of Botallach, among the Cornish men-have been for four-andtwenty hours-that is the end.”

Agnes had put out her hand to him in the first impulse of joy and congratulation; a second thought, more subtle, made her pause, and blush, and draw back. Lionel was not so foolish as to wait the end of this self-controversy. He left his seat, came to her side, took the hand firmly into his own, which she half gave, and half withdrew-did not blush, but grew pale, with the quiet concern of a man who was about deciding the happiness of his life. "The end, but the beginning too," said Lionel, with a tremor in his voice. Agnes, hear me still-I have something more to say."

66

She did not answer a word; she lifted her eyes to his face with one hurried, agitated, momentary glance. Something more! but the whole tale was in the look. They did not know very well what words followed, and neither do we.

SIR FRANCIS PALGRAVE AND HIS BOOKS.

THERE is, perhaps, no living writer of the English tongue to whom history is so solidly indebted as to Sir Francis Palgrave. Lest this proposition should create too great an access of astonishment, it may be necessary to state at the beginning-though it will come out with sufficient clearness in the end-that we do not include historical literature on this occasion under the term History. We speak of Sir Francis, in his own department, as we would of some geologist or chemist-a Murchison, Buckland, or Owen- whose name lives in every one's memory among the architects of science, although his voice is unknown in the exposition of his discoveries, and his books are not found on drawing room tables or in circulating libraries. The achievements which entitle Palgrave to a similar niche in the temple of Fame may be thus briefly characterised He has carried the torch into the darkest recesses of the dark ages, and cleared up things which the world believed to be buried for ever. He has not only shown them to us, but he has found out how they came to be where they were, and what connection they have with each other. As the geologist has found in Perm, in Australia, in Wales, and in Peeblesshire, the vestiges of the same sedimentary stratum, showing that it formed a continuous lair in the crust of the earth; so has this accomplished inquirer brought together the faint deposits of bygone human systems from the seat of Byzantine empire, from the steppes of Tartary, from our own Hebrides, and shown with convincing simplicity that they were frag ments of the sa nisation, and that they affor truction in the policy whic over the civilised world. oks are rich in historical adjustments; in the mbining of matter

seemed fragmentary and isolated; nor is his hand less firm in breaking up artificial and conventional groupings which have no foundation in the reality of things.

Every critic would predicate of the books in which such services are performed, that they would achieve a wide fame, and appear in the hands of every educated reader. And yet, on the contrary, could we obtain a parliamentary return of every man, woman, or child who has read through those two wondrous quarto volumes on the Saxon commonwealth, published rather more than a quarter of a century ago, we believe the humiliating fact would be found that the schedules would be returned very nearly blank; and that the number who had gone through the course of voluntary education-for there is a sort of education involved in the perusal of that book

would turn out to be small indeed. Let each person who glances over this page realise the matter to himself, by recalling to memory all of his acquaintance who have performed the feat.

Such a practical antithesis is a literary peculiarity of the age which deserves notice. Palgrave is among the most remarkable of a class of writers who have to endure the sic vos non vobis; and his fate is the more conspicuous, that, far from being content with the function of completing his discoveries, and communicating them to the learned, he has all his life been making desperate and untiring efforts to force his way into the ranks of popular authorship. Hence his books have become a sort of waifs and strays which any man may pick up and use as he will. When historical matter is issued to the world in the shape of a r a chronicle, edited by some c archæologist, even althoug introduction and notes, he haust all that is novel an

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able in the collection--still, the historian who makes use of this new and valuable matter tells where he got it, and perhaps mentions the obligations he is under to the learned editor, for such a reference carries with it a character of research. The author who thus opens a book of records, or an ancient chronicle, and there finds matter to his purpose, cannot be called a compiler or plagiarist. But if the archæologist thinks fit to attempt the popular exposition of his own discoveries, appealing in vain to an audience who close his books in despair after the first half-dozen pages, his works become the prey of every writer who can offer a more clear and lively exposition of their valuable contents. Nor is such an appropriation readily detected, if the appropriator should decline to acknowledge the source of his inspiration, for the world is not ready to believe in a robbery on the person of one to whom it has denied the possession of wealth.

It would be difficult to tell how many reputations these books will feed. For long time to come, whoever writes history concerning the ninth and tenth centuries in any part of Europe, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, England, or Scotland, will owe his broad and comprehensive views, his clear and emphatic distinctions, to the quaint hints, the obscure allusions, the eccentric and often inextricable narratives found somewhere among Sir Francis Palgrave's writings. And when the charmed reader peruses the full, flowing, sparkling narrative of the accomplished popular historian, it will be useless to attempt to drag his attention away to the misty and marshy source whence it was derived. Nor will the adaptation of Palgrave's fertile hints be all pure fraud and intentional misappropriation. The thinker cannot always tell who it was that dropped the seeds of his thoughts into his mind. It is not easy to remember precisely what one has read in Palgrave's pages-it would be difficult often to put them into intelligible shape at the moment when they are perused. The influnce they convey is that of a general ring-up of old received doctrines beliefs on the things of past ages.

Whoever will read fifty or a hundred pages of Palgrave, carrying the meaning with him as he reads a difficult task, we admit cannot fail to imbibe new impressions, and to see stale old historical conventionalities in a fresh light.

These qualities appear to us to arise from the completeness with which he has been able to throw himself into the conditions of the past. Intellectually he has lived more in the ninth and tenth centuries than any other Englishman of the nineteenth. Most of us feel our way to the past through the present and its immediate antecedents, so that we can only get a certain dis tance back. We have difficulty and uncertainty in dealing with the Europe in which there is no Germany or France no Switzerland, Holland, England, or Scotland. About Greece, the Alexandrian empire, and Rome, republican or imperial, we know from a separate and artificial centre of view-that of the classic writers, and our own early training in them. But of the history of the world, between the downfall of Rome and the construction of modern nationalities, few of us have notions that are not shaped and coloured from the world we live in, and the late distinct chapters in its history with which we are familiar. It is owing to this natural difficulty in realising obscure times, that, in the romances about Arthur and his Round Table, we read, not the manners of the sixth century, but those of the age of chivalry in which the romancers lived; and that in the Scriptural paintings of Paolo Veronese we see, not the inhabitants of Jerusalem or Athens at the dawn of Christianity, but the motley and picturesque frequenters of Venice in the sixteenth century. that our other historians are blind to the necessity of studying the age about which they write, and that they deliberately paint after the age in which they live; but they generally go back with difficulty and uncertainty, and are sometimes compelled to stop short in the darkness. They find their through the re the Reforma

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for instance, Parope by Folution

caused by the revival of letters and art, and the formation of standing armies, into feudality, chivalry and troubadours-the crusades, trials by ordeal, and papal supremacy. But behind these they generally find nothing but mist, in which some of them see the refracted images of the later and distincter age, while others, more clear-headed and firm of purpose, draw the curtain like Robertson, who begins his History of Scotland in the words, "The first ages of the Scottish history are dark and fabulous. Nations, as well as men, arrive at maturity by degrees, and the events which happened during their infancy or early youth, cannot be recollected, and deserve not to be remembered."

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this reconstruction feudalism was certainly a great element, but whether the relics of the Roman empire were not a still greater, might be a fair question for an intelligent debating society. The gratitude of literature is due to Palgrave for the pious zeal with which he has brought them into view. He shows us our municipal institutions those burgher systems which we have been accustomed to consider so absolutely peculiar to feudal Europe-as the direct descendants of the municipia of Rome. There are cities whose municipal corporations date from the supremacy of Rome. They are living testimonies against the old inveterate legend, that the Roman law was revived in the twelfth century, when a copy of the Pandects was found at the taking of Amalfi. The Roman law never died away in Europe. It had always a vital existence at least in the municipal corporations, and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. From these strongholds it fought throughout Europe a battle with the feudal system a battle which had its fiercest passages of arms in England, where the common lawyers indulged in a hatred almost personal towards the civilians. Yet even in England the principles of the Code and the Pandects made silent conquests. The spirit of the Justinian laws was that of a despotism. But while they counted the emperor sacred and all-powerful, they treated all other men-that is, all other freemen-as equal. If we overlook, then, the source from which they spring-the supereminent power of the emperor-we find in the civil laws a system of equal justice between man and man as perfect as human nature seems capable of concocting. of cocting. Brought in conflict with feudality and its many grades of power and rank its sovereigns, higher and lower nobility, chief vasls and sub-vassals, passing down ny steps to serfdom-the tradial existence and practical enforceof laws constructed on the prinat all men between the sovethe slave are equal, exervious influence on the form of modern society.

Instead of groping his way from the present to the past, Palgrave is like one who had lived in the past, and is disagreeably reminded of later times. Instead of going back from modern nationalities, the governments and institutions constructed out of the feudal system, and the hierarchies derived from the Papacy, he enters on his work as one who lived before these institutions were in their germ. He sees scattered around him the fragments of the old Roman empire-fragments still vital, and often tending to coalesce, and again rule the world from one point. If feudal institutions and modern kingships are beginning faintly to appear, he remembers that there are still Consuls and Patricians-that there is still a Cæsar, real or nominal, who professes to rule the world, and that the Tribune of the people is more than a tradition. Taking up his mental existence, as it were, in the period of the long-protracted dissolution of the Roman empire, he has fondly cherished the h of every relic of that mighty and watched with a con jealousy the origin and pro those innovations in which sent European system grew. He in these works we fin what often overlooked write

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