LIFE IN LONDON.

III. A STORY FOR CHRISTMAS.

T is true, every word of it. I set it down for Christmas because the peculiar grace of the season seems appropriate to the incident. It is a story of modern heroism. Poets are apt to look upon the age of chivalry as a past and almost forgotten time. With their imaginary history of great deeds they mix Scandinavian myths and Teutonic folk-lore. For nobler themes I commend them to the modern history of coal-getting, to the newspaper records of the late gales on our unprotected coasts, to the biographies of inventors and travellers, to the everyday life of London, to the "simple annals of the poor." Though he is "born in sin and shapen in iniquity," there is more in man of the angel than the devil. His instincts are good, his impulses noble; given the choice of vice or virtue in the abstract, my belief is that he would invariably be found on the side of virtue. Some of the noblest acts of heroism occur among the lowest stratum of society. The poor is the poor man's friend. Missionaries in the wilds of East London could give you some startling illustrations of the truth of the proverb.

But this exordium on modern heroism is neither here nor there. It is always difficult to commence a story. When you have started an introduction and are fairly launched into theorising and moralising, it is far more difficult to stop than to go on. If you are courageous you will suddenly pull up the moment this thought crosses your mind, and go straight into your subject. Thus :

I called upon a journalist and dramatic writer the other day in St. John's Wood, on my way to town.

"If you will wait ten minutes," he said, "I will drive you as far as Bond Street; I am going to take the baby to B's, the oculist.” "Why?" I asked, "is anything the matter?"

"No, nothing very particular."

At this juncture the baby came romping into the room.

She was

a pretty, dark-eyed child, and had a long story to tell about Guy

Fawkes at the Zoo.

"Now you will go to Bertha and have

"Yes," said her father. your things put on for a drive."

The little one scampered away, and my friend proceeded to answer my question.

"You have noticed," he said, "that I have a sort of cast in my eye-some people call it a squint.”

"Your eyes are peculiar," I said; "but you see well.” “Yes, I have very good sight. That is not the point. Baby's eyes (or one of them, at all events) show symptoms of the defect you notice in mine. Her mother, as you know, is abroad, and I am sending the child's portrait to her as a Christmas present. The photographs give evidence of the peculiarity you notice in my eyes; the child will squint, I fear, if something cannot be done to check the disposition of the eye in that direction."

"I notice a defect, now you draw my attention to the child's expression; but it is very slight."

"It will grow; it may be hereditary; I am going to submit her to examination; a squint in a man is a matter of no moment; but in a woman the drawback is serious."

We drove to the oculist's, my friend, grandmama, and baby. On our way we looked in at a morning rehearsal of a piece in which my friend was interested. The transition from the London streets to the dirty daylight of the theatre and back again to the prim, proper door of the fashionable oculist left a curious impression on my mind. My friend and his child entered the house. I preferred to wait outside and keep grandmama company. We sat there for an hour, watching the people go to and fro in the wet. All sorts of men and women went in and out of the oculist's house, in all kinds of spectacles; we speculated freely upon their condition; we felt a deep interest in a graceful young lady who was led by her father; there was one face which almost appalled us- -it was blue, like the lover's in "Poor Miss Finch." On the other side of the way was a Court millinery establishment; a wedding party came there to try on bonnets; for a time they entertained us mightily, but our mirth was destroyed by a funeral which crept past us in the rain and sleet, for we knew how some one else would presently meet the same procession trotting home, the mutes a little the worse for drink, the coachmen cracking their whips gaily.

By-and-by the oculist's door opened, and father and child came out. "Take her home, grandma," said my friend, tenderly lifting the little one into the brougham.

"What does he say?" asked grandma anxiously.

"No harm at present-she is all right."

Grandma and baby went joyfully home; Pater and myself strolled down Regent Street under a reeking umbrella.

"That the disorder is hereditary; by examining my eye he could tell exactly what would be required in baby's case."

"And what is required?"

"An operation."

"A serious one?"

"It will be necessary to cut one of the muscles of the eye."

"You did not say so to grandma."

"No; she is very nervous; it is not worth while frightening her, and she has an idea that the eye must be taken out and put in again, or some such nonsense of that kind."

"You seem a little downhearted, nevertheless," I said.

"Do I?"

"Yes. Now tell me all about it; you are concealing something from me."

"I will tell you what passed, certainly. I said to Bif he could tell what was the matter with baby by examining my eyes, he might try his operation on me first, and if I liked it and it was quite satisfactory, then baby could be treated afterwards."

"If you liked it !" I said.

"It will not matter if he spoils me, but it would break my wife's heart if he were unsuccessful with baby. It would also be a lasting sorrow to me, and, moreover, I don't know what your English oculists can do; if I were in New York, look you, I should know better what I was about."

"That is the way with you Americans," I said. "You think nothing great can be done outside New York-you are mistaken."

"I don't know," said my friend, laconically. "B

eyes are wrong."

"You are an odd fellow."

"With odd eyes."

"What did the oculist think of your suggestion ?"

says both my

"Seemed a little surprised, but it is just like my luck; if I were to go with a fellow to have his arm amputated, the operator would swear something was the matter with my leg and have it off. I am to go to B's on Monday at one."

"What for?"

"The operation on my eyes.”

This conversation was on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday I thought a great deal of my friend. On Monday I called and asked him to let me accompany him.

"No," he said firmly. "I will not hear of it; don't think you

could stand it. Bwill call for me."

said he should give me chloroform; no, H

It did not occur to me even then that the operation was anything more than an ordinary one, though delicate and perhaps painful; but on Sunday night a sort of instinct prompted me to send a note to Ivy Lodge to say that I should call at twelve. My messenger returned. He could not open the lodge gates. On Monday a rush of business letters carried me early into the City, and only on Tuesday did I learn what had taken place. My friend had undergone the most supreme of all the wonderful operations on the eye. The oculist had taken out both his eyes and replaced them, after cutting the particular muscle or sinew which had not worked perfectly. My friend H- was present during the operation. Going home afterwards, he had to lead the American journalist up the garden path. Grandma saw them coming.

"Ah, poor Stephen !" she said. "I thought he was not well this morning; he ate no breakfast, and he has been taking spirits somewhere; spirits never agree with him."

My friend staggered into the house under the stigma of spirits, kissed the baby, covered up his eyes, went to bed, and lay broad awake nearly all night, fighting off the lingering influences of chloroform.

During the last few weeks he has been going about London with bloodshot eyes, but tolerably well, thank goodness. Brother clubmen ask him how he is; they hear he has been ill. He tells them he has been poorly-"Cold in his head; eyes been a little out of order; all right now, thank you!"

If this is not an incident of self-denial and true nobility of nature worthy of narration at the Christmas hearth, I know nothing of human life.

TENNYSON'S LAST
LAST IDYLL.

A STUDY.

BY THE REV. DR. LEARY, D.C.L.

HE verdict formed by the critics on the first appearance of Mr. Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette" was not in the mass favourable to this last of the Arthurian Idylls.

Some blamed it, because it was Tennysonian; others, tired of Idylls, because it was another Idyll; and others, not tired of the Idylls, because it was unequal in their eyes to those other songs which have already sung, in lays that will outlast all modern poetry :— The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof the world holds record.

The most prejudiced, however, of Tennyson's critics will scarcely venture to deny him the gift of that most accurate measurement of his own powers which has enabled him to prove precisely what he could, and what he could not, achieve in that art wherein he has displayed a perfection of matured skill and of exquisite taste in the elaboration of language and legend, given to none of his contemporaries, and to few of his predecessors.

In the Idylls, and in the Idylls alone, Tennyson found precisely the sphere most congenial to his taste, the most suited to the mould of his plastic genius, and from the first publication of the Idylls the Laureate may date the registering of his name in the highest class of our poets. Is it, then, to be wondered at that a poet should go on adding to a legendary epic which was received with passionate acclamations by the nation it enchanted, and that lifted him at once to the highest pinnacle of the temple of fame? But, on artistic grounds alone, the extension of the Arthurian epic which came before us in the earliest Idyll is amply justified by the scenes and characters superadded at each successive stage of its graduated development. An epic lacking a full and varied presentation of the greatest phenomena of our human nature on a grand scale, with its diversities of temper, lineaments, functions, and fancies, lacks that element which alone can round it to perfection.

The superadded characters and situations given us in the "Holy Grail," the "Last Tournament," and "Gareth and Lynette," though