de. wkb. dro. kwyebc. yp. cy. kwsklvo. k. zksb. Ro. yxvi. ryzoc. drkd. cdobx. wybkvsed. Mkfoxnser. gsvv. dso. ez. dro, osqrd. dryecken.

yp. kxswk. wsk. kqksxcd. dro. wkxszevkdsyxc. yp. docyby. wsy.Dro. Qenqoyx."

Which, if deciphered properly, will give the following killing epigram: -"Il piccolo does not wish to mar the amours of so amiable a pair. He only hopes that stern moralist, Cavendish, will tie up the eight thousand of anima mia against the manipulation of tesoro mio.-The Gudgeon."

A year and a half saw me through the greater part of the world. I went to North and South America ; did the overland route through Siberia to China; visited the Great Salt Lake; ran through Australia, paying a flying visit to Papua; wrote books, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical and the Ethnological Societies; communicated papers which were read with much applause, and nearly obtained a gold medal. Small men, I suppose, have light hearts, and I overcame the fickleness of my love. Moreover, I had the satisfaction of learning that Porti was unkind to his wife, and that, but for the prudence of Cavendish, who really was not a bad fellow, and had looked after the settlements, she would be starving. All this I learned, and as I flew free as a bird through the world at large, how often did I congratulate myself on my aptitude for ciphers.

At length I returned to my own place. I had to prepare a paper for the Ethnological Society; and, avoiding society, was working at it in my garden, near the river, when Lord and Lady Fletcher came to call on me. I received them without emotion; and as Lord Fletcher was examining some weapons I had imported from the Andes, I towered over Lady Fletcher with the selfcomplacency of a traveller.

What a traveller you have been since we last met," she continued ; "and what a charming book!"

And you," I replied " you still are suffering, though I see from your colour that you are better."

"So much better. The doctors promise me that in a month I shall be able to leave my chair."

Thus we went on talking, avoiding the past, and thinking of the future, till it was time for me to leave.

Somehow or other my pony would trot every day to Toxteth Park.

Nearly a month passed in this pleasant manner. Lord and Lady Fletcher rode with me through the woods, and Marian was dragged quietly in her chair. We cantered forward or stopped as fancy prompted us. One day fancy prompted Lord and Lady Fletcher to canter

forward, and me to stop. They had to pay a visit, and the boy who drove the chair had run home for Miss Mildmay's drawing-book. She could not remain alone in the wood, and I stayed to protect her.

There is something in woods when the sun shines through the leaves, and the grass is very green, and when the air is still-something very different from the sensation of the man taken from a walk at Quito to be plunged into a well in Greenland. The sensation produced on me a silence, to which Marian responded in the same

tone.

Her hand was hanging over the chair. Of a sudden an impulse pressed me to go forward, take that hand, and say

"Marian, can you be my wife?" Again she responded in the same tone. Ere long Lord and Lady Fletcher cantered back, and saw me propelling the chair homeward. Lady Fletcher instinctively guessed what had occurred, and telegraphed the knowledge to her husband, for they cantered on smiling, and left me propelling the chair, while the boy led my pony, and carried the drawing-book, which that day was not put into requisition.

"I will come to-morrow and speak to Lady Julia," I said, as I took an affectionate farewell.

The next morning I was again early at Toxteth Park. Lady Julia received me in a little room all alone, and kissed me. There were few explanations to be given.

"I have a charming surprise for you, Willie," said Lady Julia. They had always called me Willie during my affair with Miss Shooter.

She took me into the drawingroom, where Marian was lying on a sofa.

"There, Willie, the doctors say she may walk to-day for the first time, and she will not let any one help her but yourself."

I ran to the sofa. I placed my arm round her waist, and took her hand again. She placed her feet on the ground, and rose-rose-a head taller than myself.

P.S.-A year later.

I am the happy father of a little boy, of exactly the same length, breadth, and weight as myself at the same age.

Query.-Will he grow?

My wife has received a letter of congratulation from the Marchesa Porti, who asks if I still continue the study of ciphers. She is living on £120 a-year, half the income of her £8000. The Marchese draws the remaining half of it at his present country residence, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Buenos Ayres.

P.S. again. My wife has confided to me a secret. The mysterious founder of my family, the first Dottrell, was the grandson of Sir Geoffrey Hudson. She learnt it from some unpublished journals or papers of Lord Toxteth's.

WE are said to live in a peculiarly prosaic age, but as the same accusation is brought against itself by every generation of men, those who think for themselves may be pardoned if they disbelieve it. The elements of the poetic in thought and the heroic in action lie everywhere around us; but it requires the trained eye and the sympathetic heart to discover them, except on those rare occasions when the actors move in the highest places of the world, and their deeds and their sorrows are equally imperial. Could we but truly know the events that happen every day in our own country, our own town, our own village, our own street-nay, our own houses we might discover love strong as death, hate fierce as hell, all-devouring ambition, unreasoning jealousy, wild despair, heavenly patience, sublime self-sacrifice, and all the great or tender passions that toss our poor human hearts about like waifs on a stormy sea. Every newspaper that we take up contains a tragedy, if we did but know how to read it-a tragedy spoiled, perhaps, in the telling, but a tragedy still. We need not look back to ancient history and mythology for heroes and heroines, for the gods and goddesses of crime and suffering. There are Medeas and Clytemnestras in Whitechapel and the Canongate as well as in Greece, and fools as great as Anthony in every city of the world, who would peril fame, fortune, and life for a living Cleopatra. A man may appear to be dull and sordid, yet his heart may be heaving with suppressed agonies, as we might ascertain if we could unlock by any magic key the secret chambers of his conscience, and lay them bare to the world and to himself. The tragedy of Maximilian of Austria -the saddest of our time, as far as we know—is not perhaps sadder in

itself than thousands of others that have been played upon a smaller stage, and to a meaner audience; yet it has such great and noble accessories as to command the world's attention, and to vie in interest and terror with any tragedy ever imagined. The dramatis persona-the heroes and the heroines

the good men and the bad-the scheming fools and the more greatly scheming villains-are all of the highest rank; and in all that they do, and in all that they suffer, excite either our admiration, our sympathy, or our abhorrence. The heavy hand of Fate seems to lie upon them all; and as the stately pageant is evolved from its beginning to its ending, the onlookers sit spell-bound expecting the catastrophe. And when the catastrophe comes, it is hard to say whether our wrath or our grief is most excited. Neither Euripides nor Shakespeare could desire a grander story for the exercise of his genius. As noble and princely a gentleman as Hamlet has been vilely done to deathas innocent and lovely a lady as Ophelia has met a sadder fate than death in its most tragic forms; and the foremost man of all our timehe whom fortune has seemed to make her darling, and to crown with every blessing that his heart or his ambition could crave-has been made to feel that his very wisest scheme has been his most illstarred, and to prove that a highly intellectual and able monarch may fall into errors as tragical as the veriest dolt that ever inherited a throne which he was incompetent to win.

We must go far back in contemporary history if we would trace the beginning of the tragedy of Maximilian. It was fourteen years ago, when he had scarcely ripened into manhood, and when the noble lady destined to share his glory and

his grief had just entered upon her teens, that the first step was taken by the Emperor Napoleon towards the accomplishment of a project that had long held possession of his mind. That step had no relation to the Archduke Maximilian, or to the condition of Mexico, though it led to both by a chain of events which not even the Emperor foresaw, and which would at that time have seemed the wildest freak of fancy to imagine. A French army occupied Rome, and upheld the Pope as a temporal sovereign against the wishes of the Italian people, who had for many years plotted and schemed and prayed for the deliverance of their country from priestcraft and tyranny, and for the union of its various states under one constitutional monarch. The Pope, in his kingly capacity, was one of the greatest impediments in their way; and the Emperor of the French, who was not in the first instance responsible, was made to bear all the odium attached to the presence of the French in Rome, and held up to the execration of the Italians as the enemy and oppressor of their country. Though he was a Frenchman by birth, position, and education, he was at least half an Italian by race and blood; and, thinking that he owed something to the land of his ancestors, he seems to have conceived the idea that if the Pope could be removed from Rome with the approval of all the Roman Catholic powers, a troublesome problem would be solved, and that the glory of the solution would be all his own. Early in 1853, while the Imperial purple was yet new upon his shoulders, he astonished the world by suddenly making a claim on the part of France to the protectorate of the sepulchre of Christ and the holy places of Palestine. The world sought for an explanation of the mystery, and found none better than that afforded by the Emperor's supposed intention of removing the Pope from Rome

to Jerusalem, and seating him in the latter city, with Imperial revenues, as much as ever the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church, but no longer a European king. The assumption of this protectorate, whatever may have been its real motives, immediately brought the Emperor of Russia into the field, who claimed, as head of the Greek Church, the custody of the Holy Sepulchre, and of all the sacred places of Judea. The results of this collision of interest, though Napoleon III. very speedily deemed it politic to withdraw his pretensions, were the passage of the Pruth by a Russian army, and the sharp struggle known as the Crimean war, in which France and Great Britain found themselves arrayed together in support of the independence of the Turkish Empire against the invading hosts of the Czar. The opportunity had long been waited for, and Nicholas, eager for the European share of the "sick man's" inheritance, and encouraged by the fat apathy of manufacturing England, and by what he supposed the indifference of the English popular party to foreign politics, their impatience of taxation, and their hostility to war, flattered himself that the hour had come for the final blow that was to banish the Turkish Empire into Asia, and seat the Russians at Constantinople. How grievously he miscalculated, and what pangs it cost that proud spirit to be foiled in an attempt which, had it succeeded, would have made Nicholas even a greater than Peter in the love and admiration of the Russians, if not in the page of history, there is no need to recall. It is sufficient to state that Austria, deeply interested in the conflict, held coldly and unwisely aloof, willing to make France and England her friends, but afraid to be ungrateful to Russia; and that Sardinia, not interested at all, declared herself on the side of the allies, and sent into the Crimea a gallant Italian army forty thousand

strong. This, though for Sardinia a costly undertaking, was a masterstroke of policy. It raised her at one bound from the second or third to the first rank among European powers, and foreshadowed the coming time when the name of Sardinia should be merged in that of Italy, and when the day-dream of the Italians should shape itself into a palpable reality. But the end was not yet.

Whatever may have been at this time the purpose of the Emperor of the French with regard to the Pope, it was clear that the project of settling him in Jerusalem, abandoned in the past, had to be abandoned in the future, unless he were prepared for a second war with Russia, and without the aid of Great Britain, not altogether satisfied with the Crimea, and what had come of it. Yet, if he had to endure the Pope as a present evil, he could still promote the great cause of Italian unity, and prove to the Italians-some of whom had plotted against his life with a woeful and ungrateful miscomprehension of the whole scope and tendency of his policy-that he was their truest friend, and able to serve them more effectually than any sovereign of Europe, or all the European sovereigns combined. With this view (for no other can be suggested) he declared war in the spring of 1859 against the Emperor of Austria. Europe was alike alarmed and astonished alarmed lest the embers of strife again rekindled should raise a conflagration over the whole Continent; and astonished at the audacity that fixed a quarrel upon a peaceful sovereign without adequate pretext, apparently in the very wantonness of pride and power. But success, that in our age is held to justify all things, justified the aggression; and the bloody battle-fields of Magenta and Solferino proved to the delighted army of France that its Emperor, who had been accused of being a

carpet-knight because he had not led his own hosts in the Crimea, was not a rose-water and dilettante general, or a mere theorist in the art of war, but a practical soldier who could snatch the laurels of the field from the thickest of the fight. If France, as the result of the war, gained a little rectification of frontier in Nice and Savoy, Sardinia gained the richer prize of Lombardy, while the downfall of all the petty Dukes and Kings who misgoverned the rest of Italy was assured, and seen by all men as a fact shining through the haze of a not very remote future. How these results were brought abouthow General Garibaldi, hero and filibuster, made an end of the Kingdom of Naples as easily as the prick of a spear might make an end of an inflated balloon, and how the valour of Victor Emmanuel, the craft of Cavour, the cowardice of the petty sovereigns, the sympathy of Europe, and, in one phrase, the "force of events, brought about the "unification of Italy, Rome alone excepted-it is no part of our purpose to narrate, though it is necessary to tell them off as links in the great chain of events which brought the Archduke Maximilian to the foreground of contemporary history, and placed him in the high and unhappy position where he lived and died.

,,

For a short time after these services to to Italy the Emperor rested upon his renown, not perhaps, if we knew all, without some feeling of compunction that he had borne too hard upon unfortunate Austria, and that he owed the Hapsburgs a good turn for the troubles he had brought upon them. But the Italian question, though advanced several degrees nearer towards a solution, was not yet settled. The Pope still blocked the way. The Emperor was probably of opinion, after his long experience of so troublesome a customer, that the best thing to do with the obstinate Pontiff was to