"Let me go?" exclaimed Adèle, her face suddenly growing white.

"Yes," he answered, turning on her, his breast heaving: "we cannot go on like this,- one of us must leave the Folles-Farces. There is a limit to what a man's heart can bear; and since you mean to break mine, since there is no limit to your contempt, your disdain, and your ill-usage, I must protect myself, I must snap the chain in two. God knows I would give you all,- the theatre, my heart, my life, if you would but accept them,- God knows I have offered you both my heart and my life, again and again, and you would not take them—»

"You have offered me your heart?" said Adèle, with a strange. sound in her voice.

"Yes," he cried in exaltation: "every night, in the song I sing to you, the song I wrote to you, the song I cannot sing because every word, every note, breaks my heart when you will not look at me or care for me. But why should you?-you, so beautiful, so young-"

He could not go on.

Adèle drew a long, shuddering breath; her face was white. She choked as she tried to speak. Finally she said, "I did not know I did not know I was so much to you." And after a pause she added, "I have promised to marry Brébant."

Tavernier gave a cry, and then covered his ghastly face with his hands. Brébant looked at them both from under the dark, delicate lines of his eyebrows, pulled at his mustache, and said, "Fichtre!"

Nobody seemed able to speak, and there was a long silence. All at once Adèle started, and turned and looked at Brébant. He met her look steadily, but without budging a hair's-breadth from his attitude of profound, concentrated attention. Then the blood surged back to her face again, and she cried, in excited but clear and resolute tones, "But as Brébant does not love me - I release him."

When we wake from a dream, the eye still sees distinct before it the mental image which was the last impressed on the retina of our imagination, and which somehow seems the one which woke us out of sleep. And as Paul Patureau returned to his senses and found the real court-room again before him, and heard the tread of the real Monsieur Doblay echoing behind

him on the tribune, there hung for an instant clearly outlined in his vision the miniature actors of the supposititious theatre created by his drowsy fancy as they disposed themselves before their flight, Tavernier catching Adèle to his breast; Mueller and Gervais and Rébus and Jolifroy and all the rest grouped about in various attitudes of astonishment and delight, or perhaps envy; Brébant slowly vouchsafing the magistrate a glance whose faint suggestion of relief was to Paul Patureau the subtlest touch of it all. How willing Paul would have been to delay them just a moment longer, to hear what Tavernier was saying to Adèle, or himself to have saluted the bride! But he saw them go without a pang, for this once he recollected the plot of his operetta. He had at last dreamed successfully.

And now he had nothing left to do but write his libretto, get it accepted by some popular composer, and produced. Lucky Paul Patureau!

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

(1819-1886)

OHN G. WHITTIER, in his introduction to Whipple's 'American Literature,' says of him that "with the possible exception of Lowell and Matthew Arnold, he was the ablest critical essayist of his time." A later generation may not wholly accept this estimate of Mr. Whipple's work; but putting comparisons aside, he can never fail of recognition as an able man of letters, whose taste was sound and whose scholarship was thorough and extensive. He was not a writer of great originality; but his work is valuable, by reason of a quality of faithfulness in it to certain high ideals of literature and of life.

E. P. WHIPPLE

He was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, March 8th, 1819; was educated at the English High School at Salem; and began at the age of fourteen to write for the newspapers. For several years he was engaged in a broker's office in Boston. In 1837 he was made superintendent of the reading-room of the Merchants' Exchange; a position which he held until 1860, when he resigned it to devote himself entirely to literary work. During the period of his superintendency he was gradually gaining a reputation as a man of letters. In 1843 he wrote a critical essay on Macaulay, which at once brought him into prominence, and gained for him the gratitude of Macaulay himself. In the same year he delivered a series of lectures on the lives of certain authors; these lectures being published afterwards in book form. He was literary editor of the Boston Globe from 1872 to 1873. In 1878 he edited, with James T. Fields, the 'Family Library of British Poetry.' His writings include - Essays and Reviews' in two volumes (1848-49); Literature and Life' (1849); Character and Characteristic Men' (1866); Literature of the Age of Elizabeth' (1869); Success and its Conditions' (1871); 'American Literature' (1887); Recollections of Eminent Men (1887); and Outlooks on Society, Literature, and Politics' (1888). The three last-named works were posthumous, Mr. Whipple having died in 1886.

Essays on literature and on men of letters form the body of his writings; although he sometimes wanders into other fields, treating financial, political, and social topics with skill and discrimination. He is at his best, however, in his critical essays on literature, especially of the literature of the Elizabethan period. His insight into the dramatists of that time is especially keen, witnessing to a genuine sympathy with their spirit. His estimates of modern writers,— of Dickens, of Thackeray, of Bryant, of Wordsworth, of Hawthorne, and others, while not always unerring, are on the whole just and catholic. Sometimes he throws vivid light upon the personality of an author in a single sentence; as when he writes of Hawthorne, "He had spiritual insight, but it did not penetrate to the sources of spiritual joy." His characterizations are never lacking in that chief of all merits, suggestiveness; the faculty of reproducing the mystery which is the background to all great men, and which must be taken account of in the criticism of their work. It is in this quality of suggestiveness that the value of Mr. Whipple's writings largely lies.

DOMESTIC SERVICE

From Outlooks on Society, Literature, and Politics.' Copyright 1888, by Ticknor & Co.

WR

E LIVE under a republican form of government, where the rights of the citizen are supposed to be jealously guarded by law. Leaving out some limitations on the right of voting, which will readily occur to every reader, the statement is correct. The political rights of the individual are on the whole well secured and maintained; but these are not sufficient to confer social happiness. Political rights enable a man to have a voice in deciding what persons shall rule over him, and make and execute the laws of the country. But his political well-being may be relatively perfect while his social well-being is constantly vexed and tormented by certain peculiarities in the organization, or rather disorganization, of his household. He votes at certain times and at certain places once, twice, or thrice a year, and the annual expenditure of time in exercising this august privilege of the freeman is hardly an hour; but-taking man and wife as one- as soon as he proudly leaves the polls and enters his own house, he is no longer an independent citizen of a "great and glorious country," but an abject serf, utterly dependent on the

caprices of his domestics, or as they are ironically named, his "help." He finds his wife the victim of an intolerable tyranny, which presses on her every day and almost every hour; exerting her energies in often vain attempts to put down an insurrection in the kitchen, or to conciliate the insurgents. He may have been during the day threatened by a strike of the laborers in his workshop, and have used all the resources of his patience, intelligence, and character in so adjusting matters that his men, being reasonable beings, agree to a compromise between labor and capital which does injustice to both. When he arrives at his house he encounters a conflict in which sullen stupidity, or vociferous stupidity, each insensible to reason, is engaged in battle with the "lady of the house." This last conflict is too much for him; he commonly succumbs with the meekness of a galley-slave, and with a rueful countenance tries to eat his half-done potatoes and overdone beefsteak with the solemn composure of a martyr at the stake.

It is important here to note that this is not a question of equality. The nominal master and mistress of the house may be just and humane, considerate of the rights of others, and sensitive not to wound their feelings: but they have to submit to the mortifying fact that the object of their help is to render them helpless; that a despotism is established in their house; and that their tyrants are their hired servants. There is more or less resistance going on for a time, but the autocracy of the kitchen is firmly established in the end. Frequent changes of help do little good. One spirit seems to animate the whole class. The new-comers announce, in true monarchical fashion, "The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen!" Those who are dismissed find comfort, as they depart, in hearing this triumphant strain from the lips of their successors. They glow with the thought that the household from which they are expelled will still be taught to know that domestic life is indeed a "fitful fever"; that the art of "slaughtering a giant with pins" is not yet extinct in the world; and that the process of converting homes into hells is as well understood by the incoming as by the outgoing denizens of the house.

There is a story going the round of the newspapers to this effect: that a wife, after reading the report of Queen Victoria's speech, told her husband she was now a convert to woman suffrage, as the Queen had made as good a speech as a king. Her

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