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to me his best book. How many a hard heart it must have softened! He should have been a happy man with the knowledge that he could do so much for his kind.”

We were glad to escape early from the fatigues of the London season, which our large circle of friends made unusually heavy for my wife, to the banks of the Dee, in the hope that our enlarged house would be ready to receive us. But what building operation is ever finished within the promised time? Our patience was tried beyond endurance, and our opinion of the working man was certainly not heightened by what we saw of the way he either made himself unfit for his work, or dawdled over it at our expense :

"Oct. 18, 1870.-Oh," says the Diary, "that we were away! These workmen fill me with despair. Oh, if the whole work of life were done as the British workman's is! We have them here of all sorts and kinds, and the unanimity in the one great failing is as wonderful as it is depressing. What is education doing for them? What all their privileges, if they do not teach them conscientiousness and self-respect?"

CHAPTER XIV.

THIS was the year of the Franco-German war. All men's minds in England were full of it, and those who, like my wife, had valued friends in France, had their feelings severely tried by the almost daily tidings of the French reverses. Among the numerous passages in her Diary to which these gave rise, I find the following: "Sept. 11.-Am reading Herodotus lately. How events repeat themselves: This love of conquest! War seems to have been just as sad and cruel in the olden time as now. We thought we had tenderer hearts now at least, and shrank from inflicting pain. Read the accounts in the papers, and then see what barbarians men still become in battle, and what anguish and desolation they leave everywhere behind them. The poor peasants, who can heal their wounds? They are starved, unpitied, and unknown. I cannot but hope that peace must be at hand. Beautiful Paris must not be besieged!"

The wish was the prevailing one in England at the time, and it might have been well for the peace of Europe, had this humiliation been spared to France. But this was not to be; and what the citizens of Paris had yet to suffer was from time to time painfully brought home to my wife by letters, pigeon carried, from her friends there, with details of the privations and miseries brought upon them by the siege.

Dante Rossetti was a personal friend, of whom at this time we saw a good deal. Personally he was a favourite with my wife, but she had the courage to maintain an opinion as to his works, which was regarded as inexcusable heresy by many of his admirers in our immediate circle. She expressed it thus: "Nov. 6.-We all went to Dante Rossetti's at Cheyne Walk,

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Chelsea. Such a charming quaint old house, and many fine things in it. Do not admire his models. His colouring is masterly, and generally his compositions. Why are the present painters so much in love with morbid unhealthy-looking women? They have not a bit of the upward spirit look either. They look as though disease and not heaven had got hold of them."

Experience of the exhaustion resulting from her performances of the previous year made her determine, if she acted again, to limit their number. When, therefore, she yielded to the urgent solicitations of her Glasgow admirers to appear once more upon their stage, she consented to do so for four nights only. No audience had been more loyal or more constant in their loyalty, and her coming among them for even these few nights was hailed in the warmest terms. Her single-minded devotion. to her art in its highest phases had always been felt by them and acknowledged, and it drew from the Herald, on the eve of her reappearance, the following graceful recognition :

As we look back on Miss Faucit's brilliant career, we think least of its many triumphs, of the wreaths which she won when there were competitors for the prize of judicious applause. What has, above all, earned her a title to lasting remembrance is the single-mindedness with which she has devoted herself to efforts of the highest scope. . . . She has been happy in her artistic life, because it has not been her doom incessantly to woo the admiration of the public; and now that she seems preparing to quit it, the remembrance must be to her, as it is to those whom it has helped to elevate and refine, a pure and gracious one. . . . Her critics have agreed, that in two lines of character in particular, and these the most delicate and difficult of all, she has been without a rival on the modern British stage. These are, first, the most purely poetic figures among the women of Shakespeare and of the modern poetic drama; and, again, those mixed characters of romantic comedy, which are the most delightful, as they are the most perplexing, problems to psychologists. With the former, some of her earlier triumphs are associated; but her Juliet and her Imogen remain fresh in our minds, ethereal creations of an exquisitely tender sympathy with the sweetest fancies of the past. Of the same type are her Iolanthe and her Pauline. On the other hand, what can we say of her Rosalind, her Portia, and, above all, her Beatrice, except our regret, that it is only the first of those impersonations which she will find time on this occasion to bring before us?

Thereupon follows a passage of fine criticism, showing a just appreciation of the special value of the actor's art, on which we have before insisted, in filling up what the poet has left to