man, who will some day, I hope, become | Bell's excessive tenderness of heart. She Colonel and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Force.

Werther, amid all this turmoil, was beginning to forget his sorrows. We had a busy time of it. He and Bell had been so occupied with the horses in getting them over that they had talked almost frankly to each other; and now there occurred some continuation of the excitement in the difficulties that beset us. For, after we had driven into the crowded streets, we found that the large hotels in Liverpool have no mews attached to them; and in our endeavours to secure in one place entertainment for both man and beast, some considerable portion of our time was consumed. At length we found stabling in Hatton Garden; and then we were thrown on the wide world of Liverpool to look after our own sustenance.

"Mademoiselle," said the Lieutenant rather avoiding the direct look of her eyes, however if you would prefer to wait, and go to a theatre to-night

"Oh no, thank you," said Bell, quite hurriedly as if she were anxious not to have her own wishes consulted; “I would much rather go on as far as we can today."

The Lieutenant said nothing - how could he? He was but six and twenty, or thereabouts, and had not yet discovered a key to the Rosamond's maze of a woman's wishes.

had po sessed herself with some wild idea that she had cruelly wronged our Lieutenant. She strove to make up for this imaginary injury by a show of courtesy and kindness that was embarrassing to the whole of us. The fact is, the girl had never been trained in the accomplishments of city life. She regarded a proposal of marriage as something of consequence. There was a defect, too, in her pulsation: her heart - that ought to have gone regularly through the multiplication table in the course of its beating, and never changed from twice one to twelve times twelve-made frantic plunges here and there, and slurred over whole columns of figures in order to send an anxious and tender flush up to her forehead and face. A girl who was so little mistress of herself, that on a winter's evening, when we happened to talk of the summer-time and of half-forgotten walks near Ambleside and Coniston tears might suddenly be seen to well up in her blue eyes, was scarcely fit to take her place in a modern drawing-room. At this present moment her anxiety, and a sort of odd self-accusation, were really spoiling our holiday: but we did not bear her much malice.

It was on this evening that we were destined to make our first acquaintance with the alarming method of making roads which prevails between Liverpool and Preston. It is hard to say by what process of fiendish ingenuity these petrified sweetbreads have been placed so as to occasion the greatest possible trouble to horses' hoofs, wheels, and human ears; and it is just as hard to say why such roads

So we went to a restaurant fronting a dull square, and dined. We were the only guests. Perhaps it was luncheon; perhaps it was dinner-we had pretty well forgotten the difference by this time, and were satisfied if we could get something-although they may wear long in the to eat, anywhere, thrice a day.

neighbourhood of a city inviting constant But it was only too apparent that the traffic - should be continued out into pleasant relations with which we had country districts where a cart is met with started had been seriously altered. There about once in every five miles. These was a distressing politeness prevailing roads do not conduce to talking. One throughout this repast, and Bell had so far thinks of the unfortunate horses, and of forgotten her ancient ways as to become the effect on springs and wheels. Espequite timid and nervously formal in her cially in the quiet of a summer evening, talk. As for my Lady, she forgot to say the frightful rumbling over the wedged-in sharp things. Indeed, she never does stones seems strangely discordant. And care for a good brisk quarrel, unless there yet when one gets clear of the suburban are people present ready to enjoy the slums and the smoke of Liverpool, a very spectacle. Fighting for the mere sake of respectable appearance of real country life fighting is a blunder; but fighting in the becomes visible. When you get out to presence of a circle of noble dames and Walton Nurseries and on towards Aintree knights becomes a courtly tournament. Station and Maghull, the landscape looks All our old amusements were departing fairly green, and the grass is of a nature we were like four people met in a Lon- to support animal life. There is nothing don drawing-room; and, of course, we very striking in the scenery, it is true. had not bargained for this sort of thing Even the consciousness that away beyond. on setting out. It had all arisen from the flats on the left the sea is washing over VOL. XXVI. 1202

LIVING AGE.

the great sandbanks and on to the level shore, does not help much; for who can pretend to hear the whispering of the faroff tide amid the monotonous rattling over these abominable Lancashire stones? We kept our teeth well shut, and went on. We crossed the small river of Alt. We whisked through Maghull village. The twilight was gathering fast as we got on to Aughton, and in the dusk-lit up by the yellow stars of the street lamps. we drove into Ormskirk. The sun had gone down red in the west we were again assured as to the morrow.

cannot understand these young people. On our
way from the Fairy Glen back to Bettws-y-Coed,
Bell told me something of what had occurred;
but I really could not get from her any proper
She was much
reason for her having acted so.
distressed, of course. I forbore to press her lest
we should have a scene, and I would not hurt
dear to me as one of my own children. But
the girl's feelings for the world, for she is as
she could give no explanation. If she had said
that Count von Rosen had been too precipitate, I

could have understood it. She said she had known him a very short time; and that she could not judge of a proposition coming so unexpectedly; and that she could not consent to But what was the good of another bright his leaving his country and his profession for morning to this melancholy Uhlan? Mis- her sake. These are only such objections as fortune seemed to have marked us for its every girl uses when she really means that she own. We drove into the yard of what does not wish to marry. I asked her why. She was apparently the biggest inn in the had no objection to urge against Lieutenant von Rosen personally-as how could she? - for he place; and while the women were sent into the inn, the Lieutenant and I hap-ities and accomplishments considerably above is a most gentlemanly young man, with abilpened to remain a little while to look after the average. Perhaps, living down in the counthe horses. Imagine our astonishment, try for the greater part of the year, I am not therefore (after the animals had been competent to judge; but I think at least he comtaken out and our luggage uncarted), to pares very favourably with the gentlemen whom find there was no accommodation for us I am in the habit of seeing. I asked her if she inside the building. meant to marry Arthur. She would not an"Confounded house!" growled the swer. She said something about his being an Lieutenant, in German; "thou hast be- old friend-as if that had anything in the trayed me!" world to do with it. At first I thought that she had merely said No for the pleasure of accepting afterwards; and I knew that in that case the Lieutenant, who is a shrewd young man, and has plenty of courage, would soon make another seriousness in her decision; and yet she will not trial. But I was amazed to find so much of say that she means to marry Arthur. Perhaps she is waiting to have an explanation with him first. In that case, I fear Count von Rosen's chances are very small indeed; for I know how Arthur has wantonly traded on Bell's great generosity before. Perhaps I may be mistaken; but she would not admit that her decision could be altered. I must say it is most unfortunate. Just as we were getting on so nicely and enjoying ourselves so much and just as we were getting near to the Lake-country that Bell so this unhappy event, for which Bell can give no much delights in everything is spoiled by adequate reason whatever. It is a great pity that one who shall be nameless - but who looks pretty fairly after his own comfort-did not absolutely forbid Arthur to come vexing us in this way by driving over to our route. If Dr. Ashburton had had any proper control over the boy, he would have kept him to his studies in the Temple instead of allowing him to risk the breaking of his neck by driving wildly about the country in a dogcart.]

So there was nothing for it but to leave the phaeton where it was, and issue forth in quest of a house in which to hide our heads. It was an odd place when we found it. A group of women regarded us with a frightened stare. In vain we invited them to speak. At length another woman little less alarmed than the others, apparently-made her appearance, and signified that we might, if we chose, go into a small parlour smelling consumedly of gin and coarse tobacco. After all, we found the place was not so bad as it looked. Another chamber was prepared Our luggage was brought round. Ham and beer were provided for our final meal, with some tea in a shaky tea-pot. There was nothing romantic in this dingy hostelry, or in this dingy little town; but

for us.

were we not about to reach a more

favoured country- the beautiful and en-
chanted land of which Bell had been
dreaming so long?

"Kennst du es wohl? Dahin, dahin,
Möcht' ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn!"

[Note by Queen Titania. -I confess that I

From Macmillan's Magazine. ALFONSO THE WISE, KING OF CASTILE.

BY MARY WARD.

of its best life every guarantee for the future. The conquest of Seville followed, and Ferdinand the Saint expelled its inhabitants, and repeopled its streets with orthodox. Fresh annexations were made year by year, and the choice for the annexed populations lay between exile and the Church's penalties for heresy. At the accession of Alfonso X., Christian Spain might have fairly thought that fifty more years at the most would see the last infidel sail dipping into the Mediterranean distance. We hear no more of the ancient glitter and prestige which in the days of the Cid made a Spanish knight think it no disgrace to fight for a time in the ranks of the nation's enemies. The moral effect of Islam was gone. The original impulse of conquest and fanaticism, which had vibrated so long in the Spanish Morisma, was dead, and it seemed impossible that a thing so lifeless could long be suffered to hamper the vigorous growth of Christian Spain. But success fertilized the native seed of Spanish indolence, and weak kings and over-powerful nobles distracted Christian effort; and, as all know, it was not till three hundred years after the battle of Tolosa that Spain drove out the last miserable remnant of a powerless people. The Alhambra became a palace of the kings of Castile; but even then the disappearance of Islam was only a political and a religious disappearance. Still in the streets of Saragossa, where once the great dynasty of the Beni-Houds held Christian Aragon in check, you come upon groups which would not be out of keeping in Dmascus; and in the language which every peasant talks the commonest words betray, half-pathetically, an Arabic origin.

THE thirteenth century was for the Christian states of Spain a time of rapid political growth. The famous battle of the Navas or plains of Tolosa, in 1210, had struck a blow at Moorish dominion in the south of the peninsula from which it never recovered. Valencia, the Cid's lost conquest, was regained on the one hand, and Leon was permanently united to Castile on the other. The campaign of victory which the energy and vigour of Alfonso VIII., sovereign of Castile alone, had begun, was carried on triumphantly by the political sagacity of Ferdinand the Saint, owner of Leon also; sagacity, which for the first time in Christian Spain made a Christian king the master and not the slave of political opportunity. The battle of 1210 opened southern Spain to the Christians. Andalusia was conquered in 1236, and Ferdinand the Saint entered Cordova. The mosque of Cordova became the cathedral of a Christian bishop; and ranged in the strange pulpit, covered with arabesques, and lately echoing to the voice of the mufti, a Christian choir sang Te Deum. Cordova had been at once the seat of Mohammedan Empire in the West, the treasury of Arabic science, and the philosophical centre from which alone Europe drew that imperfect knowledge of Aristotle, by which every department of medieval thought was for so long shaped and tested; and the fall of Cordova was the fall of Mohammedan Spain. It had been no ordinary capital. Mohammedanism, in the outset so rude, so fervent, so physically irresistible, had in Spain striven to place its empire on a fresh basis, and to Within these gradually extending put forth other and wider claims to do- boundaries, the Spanish mind had been minion than the sword and the Koran. rapidly and healthily developing. Cordova was the home of philosophers, tween the dates of the Poem of the Cid, botanists, astronomers, at a time when and of the accession of Alfonso X., a period France, according to modern theory, had of almost exactly one hundred years, the only just begun to exist. Her savants, literature of the country had passed ont men of the young Arab faith and race, of its infancy, had lost its purely objective found themselves, strangely enough, in the character, and contented itself no more position of apostles of antiquity, handing with outsides. The Poem of the Cid was on the civilization of Greece to the schools simple, because nothing else than simpliof Paris. Unthanked and unowned, Cor-city was then attainable. Life, complex dova was at one time the sun and centre as it may seem at first sight to have been, of European culture; and though in the was really simple; that is, ruled by a sinthirteenth century other towns had sur-gle dominant impulse. The pressure was passed it in splendour and military importance, the old ineffable tradition clung round it still. When it fell into the hands of the Christians, Islam must have seemed to have lost its raison d'être, and to have resigned with this symbol and memento

Be

intense, but it was in one direction - the direction of unwavering hostility to the infidel invaders. Circumstances threw the country and its literature into the heroic stage. But towards the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries,

we reach the fifteenth century, and attempt to penetrate into the literary life of the court of John II.; that of Arabic literature, brought to bear by the conquest of Cordova, and chiefly to be traced in the court and writings of Alfonso X.; and that of the Trouvères, soon to be lost sight of in the overmastering enchantment of Italy and Dante.

Our subject obliges us to concern ourselves chiefly with the second of these. The age of the Cantares de Gesta was over: in the fourteenth century the Divina Commedia was to change the whole mind and course of Spanish literature, and the gap between is filled with the figure of Alfonso X., surrounded by "wise men from the East."

"King Alfonso was a man of great sense," writes the Jesuit historian Mariana, “but more fit for a scholar than a king; for whilst he studied the heavens and the stars, he lost the earth and his kingdom." Mariana's account of him throughout is marked with a certain distrust and vague dislike, which one may suppose explained, either by the popular traditions of Alfonso's unsoundness in theological matters, or by the natural con

hope and moderate tranquillity began for Spain. She found time for other works than rough epics and monkish legends of St. Mary the Egyptian, and worthless rhymes on the Adoration of the Magi; bound up with these we find a rhyming history of Apollonius, prince of Tyre sure sign of leisure and security in author and audience. Presently, from the monastery of San Milano, Gonzalez Berceo, the first named Spanish poet, began to pour legend after legend, and poem after poem. There is an exquisite little passage in the opening of one of his longest poems, the Miracles of the Virgin, which accurately mark the transition time through which the literature is passing. He is describing the Virgin under the allegory of a garden. The introduction of allegory of itself of course marks the second period of a literature but independently of this, the piece is so detailed, so purposely suggestive, so full of a subdued and finely finished colour and music, that one is tempted to believe, for the moment, either that the Poem of the Cid must be much earlier than 1150, or that some later hand has been at work here. But compare it with other passages from Berceo, and the genuineness of both matter and form appears at once. In the "La-tempt of the practical man for failure. ment which the Virgin Maria made on the day of her Son's Passion," the poet puts into the mouth of the Virgin lines whose grave, unembarrassed flow and restrained tenderness produce that effect of simplicity without crudeness after which the best of modern art is perpetually striving. Between this and the best passage from the scene of the Cortes, in the Poem of the Cid, the gulf is immense. Berceo is by no means a great poet; you may wade through twenty or thirty pages of Sanchez' edition without finding a line worth noticing still somewhere in the old monk's dull and unequally developed nature there lay hidden capacities which the date of his birth denied to the older author, naturally the more richly gifted of the two. For a man writes not only according to the soul within him, but according to the pressure of intelligence around him, and his thoughts will be such as his age allows him, his method of expression such as his age will understand.

:

So far the development of the national genius was undisturbed. In the thirteenth century, however, three foreign influences at least were at work on Spain: that of the Troubadours driven southward by the storm of the Albigensian crusade, a long-lived influence, whose extent and force can hardly be rightly estimated till

And that Alfonso's political career was a failure cannot be denied. He was proclaimed at Seville, his father's conquest, under the happiest of auspices. The Guadalquivir, so long a Moorish river, flowed along its whole course through Christian territory. Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Valencia: in the contemplation of such a line of conquests, how distant must have seemed the day when Alphonso VI. entered Toledo in triumph, and how amply avenged the long exile in the Asturias! Alfonso, already skilled in war and distinguished for his learning, ascended his father's throne with all the prestige which belongs to the son not only of a conqueror, but of a saint. It was a moment of natural enthusiasm for the throne, justified by the high character, both for military and literary attainment, borne by the new occupant of it. Yet in the very first year of his reign we find Alfonso debasing the coin at Seville, and by the act sowing the seeds of that universal mutiny and discontent which overwhelmed and humiliated his old age. This proceeding, often repeated throughout his reign, has been treated by all his historians as the gravest blot upon his career. Was it a piece of thirteenth-century political economy, the result of a sort of theoretical alchemy, or merely an unwise expedient for the relief

side of Richard of Cornwall, yet by no means wishing to offend the author of the Siete Partidas, offered him a tithe of the ecclesiastical revenues usually applied to

of practical necessity? It is impossible to determine. That the people never forgot it, and that they revenged themselves by leaving the king in great measure to fight his own quarrel with his undutiful son and the repairing and restoring of churches, rebellious nobles, is very evident. Against provided he would relinquish all claim to the effect of so practical a wrong his repu- the Empire. Alfonso, always needy, felt tation for learning never made head: the keenly the attractions of the offer, but villager, unable to make his little hoard could bring himself neither to reject it, nor of gold go as far as he had calculated, was to accept the condition upon which it hung. not likely, in the face of such an evil, to During the whole of his transactions contake much interest in the astronomical nected with the unlucky election of 1256, merits of the author of it. The enthusi- there is not a trace of decision or of digasm for Alfonso as a savant belongs to a nity. We find him in 1275, three years later date in Spain. During his lifetime after the election of Rudolph of Hapsit was reserved for foreign countries, un- burg, undertaking a winter journey to troubled by the king, to recognize and re- France, for the purpose of meeting the ward the efforts of the philosopher. To Pope at Belcaire, and pleading his rights. such recognition we owe the famous inci- He sets forth his claim to the Empire with dent which connects his name with gen- all the arguments he can muster, in the eral European history. Four years after presence of Pope and Cardinals, but in his accession, in 1256, three out of the vain. The Pope thoroughly understands seven Electors of Germany - Trêves, that Rudolph is not a man to be trifled Saxony, and Brandenburg-meeting in- with, and stands firm; "but," says Mariside the walls of Frankfort, elected Alfon-ana, "being a meek man, and understandso X. emperor; while the Archbishops of ing how to appease generous spirits, he Mentz and Cologne, and the Count Pala- embraced and kissed the furious monarch,' tine, finding the gates of the city closed and so pacified him." against them, encamped outside, and pro- In the autumn of 1276 Alfonso returned claimed Richard of Cornwall. As to the to Castile, master indeed of a tithe of the casting vote of Ottocar, king of Bohemia, ecclesiastical revenues, but emperor no opinions are divided: whether he regis- longer even in his own eyes. He found tered it on the side of Alfonso or not the the kingdom in confusion; his eldest son fact remains the same, that Alfonso never dead; the Moors, aided by reinforcements became emperor; that if the imperial func- from Africa, marching northwards; and tions were discharged at all between 1256 his second son Sancho claiming the sucand 1272, they were discharged by Rich- cession against his brother's children. ard of Cornwall, and that the election of The Moors were easily repulsed. but from Rudolph of Hapsburg, in 1272, removed this year until his death Alfonso's life was the crown of Charlemagne for ever out of a succession of troubles and humiliations. his reach. Alfonso owed his election to To win back Sancho he took the succession several causes, not all complimentary to from Ferdinand's children, and so offended him; but there seems no reason to doubt Philip III. of France, their grandfather, the profession of the Electors, that they and ran the risk of a French invasion. In were principally influenced in their choice 1280 he once more debased the coinage, by the wide-spread reports of his learning. and by this act of short-sighted folly deIf it was so, learning never earned a more stroyed his last hold upon the sympathies. worthless guerdon. For twenty years Al- of Spain. Sancho, who considered his fonso hankered after the proffered yet un- father only as an obstacle in his path, took attainable prize. Had he been a popular advantage of every mistake, made friends and secure ruler, we may well believe that with Granada, and secured Castile by he would have put forth all the resources large promises of a better order of things. of Castile to claim it. But he was dis- When, in 1281, Alfonso suminoned a Cortes tracted on the one side by the perpetual at Toledo, Sancho summoned a counter revolts of Granada, a rising kingdom, one at Valladolid, in which his father was which the genius of a Moorish soldier of publicly deposed. Alfonso, forsaken by fortune had built up upon the ruins of the Church and State alike, made one last desolder Mohammedan states, and on the | perate effort to recover his ancient suother by the discontent of his poorer sub-premacy. To this period of his life bejects, the mutiny of his nobles, and the longs the famous and touching letter quotschemes of his second son, Sancho. Nor ed in Ticknor's well-known book. It is was this all. The Pope, enlisted on the addressed to Alonzo Perez de Guzman, at