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Nothing is further from my thoughts," says Scrope, lifting his head and showing his beautiful face, undisfigured, indeed, by tears, but paled and altered by anger and pain. "Good God!" (looking at her fiercely) "a man would be a fool to cry about you; would you ever cease laughing and jeering at him ?"

"Stop raving at me," cries Lenore, whose patience is fast oozing out, "I have done nothing: you have been a fool, and you must pay for it; perhaps" (speaking very slowly, as if the words were not sweet to her lips), "I wish to be quite fair-perhaps at Dinan-I helped you to be so-a little."

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He does not speak.

"Charlie! look here!" (speaking with a soothing, sisterly tone), 'you know, and I know, and Jemima knows, and I am afraid Paul knows, that sixty times a day you are on the verge of making a fool of yourself; is not it better that you should go, before you tumble over the verge ?"

"All right," answers he, impatiently, shaking off her hand: “I am going having gained that point, I think the least you might do is to leave me alone."

"But-but you will come to the ball to-night?"

No" (very curtly).

"You must, it will look so odd!"

"Odd it may look, then at the present moment" (laughing disagreeably), “my whole life looks oddly enough, I can tell you.'

"But supposing I give you one dance! a quadrille ?" (unable, woman-like, to let well alone, and kneeling down on the floor beside him).

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"I would not walk through a quadrille with you" (speaking very loftily) "if you were to go down on your knees to me!"

"As I am doing at the present moment," replies Lenore, laughing; "a valse then ?"

"Are you serious? Do you mean it ?" (catching hold of her two hands, while his eyes light up)" or are you only making a fool of me, as you have been doing without intermission for the last six months?"

"One never knows what may happen," replies the girl, oracularly, already rather repenting her concession; "perhaps the fag endthe very fag end of a galop, if you will not expect to take me into tea afterwards."

"Do not!" cry I, dropping my pen, and hurrying from my lurkingplace. "Lenore; for the first time in your life, take advice! let this poor boy go to-night !”

As I had surmised, they had forgotten my existence. Both look at me with the partial fondness with which it is usually an interloper's fate to be regarded,

"Meddlesome Matty!" cries my sister, with her usual amenity, "who asked your opinion?"

"Miss Jemima," says Scrope, reproachfully, "I thought you were my friend !"

"So I am," I say, smiling and turning to him, "if she dances with you once, twice, a dozen times to-night, how much the better will you be to-morrow? You will have set us all by the ears, while you I pause.

Neither speaks.

"It is useless disguising from ourselves," continue I, with my usual excellent common sense, "that Paul will be displeased."

"Let him be displeased then, if he can be so irrational!" cries Lenore, cheeks on fire, and eyes burning; "but no! what am I talking about? Paul has perfect confidence in me: if I were to dance all night with Charlie Scrope, or Charlie anybody else, he would not mind, he would understand."

"Time will show," reply I, mystically, walking to the door.

I will give you four dances, four round ones-there!" says Lenore, with a brilliant smile, and a triumphant glance at me as I leave the room; " Vogue la galere!"

Byron and Shelley

THE comparison of two characters, intellects, and careers, which present at once shining similarities and salient contrasts, is in all cases one of the most fascinating of studies; and when they happen to belong to men of towering genius and seductive interest, curiosity can scarcely be better employed than in pursuing the comparison to its furthest limit. Two such men we possess in Byron and Shelley. They resemble those stars which move in distinct and separate orbits, but which anon approach so close to each other as nearly to touch, and then break away on their own more specially allotted paths, till they seem to shine in almost different quarters of the heavens.

The similarity or contrast smites us at every step. To mention their names is to conjure up the idea of two poets whose fame is firmly and equally established for all time, yet only one of whom enjoyed notoriety during his life-time. Hardly any more obscure lot ever fell to the most wretched versifier than, ere the Mediterranean waves closed over him, was the fate of the other. Contemporaneous popularity and neglect are accidents whose causes it is often difficult to trace; but in this instance a very simple law accounts for the different reception accorded to the one poet and to the other. The present generation likes to flatter itself that it is owing to its superior discrimination and sensibility that the Shelley who, fifty years ago, wasted his sweetness on the desert air, now enriches the aroma of every refined household. That may safely be pronounced a mistake-just as safely as it may be affirmed that Byron would be far more popular with a certain set of people were he still living amongst us. Byron was a man of the world during the early portion of his career, and a man of the world in London; and he was a lord to the end of his career, and even after he had left it. There was everything to make him quickly notorious, as apart from famous, among such a people as our own; and once be notorious, it is not so easy again to become obscure. In Byron's case, the notoriety which sprang from being a well-known member of society, he himself changed into honest and enduring fame by the works which he wrote after he had shown his contempt for society by quitting it. 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' is a splendid work, but neither at the time of its publication nor since, has it received from the world at large its due share of appreciation -not at the time, because Byron individually was as yet but slightly known; and not since, because the world at large cares little for

satire, and because its merits have been overshadowed by the writer's riper productions. The enthusiasm which, on the contrary, was awakened by the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold' was quite out of proportion to its merits. "I awoke one morning, and found myself famous," says Byron. "Notorious" he should have written; and he was quite shrewd enough to be aware that, had he been plain George Gordon, and still an absentee in Portugal or Albania, the London world would not have been quite so quick to discover his merits. In truth, though there is much freshness and some splendour in those first two cantos, the great bulk of it is not much better than first-rate schoolboy's composition; and had Byron written nothing more or nothing higher, Fame would have ultimately ascribed to him a very different position in the poetical hierarchy from that first bestowed by notoriety. Neither would his tales-wonders of fire, fervour, terseness, and variety as they are-have made enduring that popularity which at the time rose to absolute passion. It was not until he had, with unutterable scorn, turned his back upon the fashionable and critical fribbles of London and of his country, that he penned those immortal works which raise him to that height of true fame beyond which no human head can ever hope to ascend. But had he, an unknown man, and, as we have said, plain George Gordon, living in Venice, Ravenna, or Bologna, away from his native land, commenced his career even by publishing the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold,' 'Manfred,' or 'Don Juan,' there is no reason to suppose that his notoriety during life would have been any wider than that of the author of Prometheus Unbound,' 'Alastor,' and 'Epipsychidion.' Indeed it would probably have been less, for Shelley had made himself somewhat known to the gapers of this earth by his first wife drowning herself, by his second being the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and by a Chancery suit concerning the children of the first union. Even these incidents, however, were not sufficient to advertise Shelley's works, in the face of his total abstention from London circles, and, in fact, of his complete isolation from the whole of mankind. "My greatest content," he writes to his wife in 1821, "would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and your child to a solitary island in the sea; would build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. I would read no reviews, and talk with no authors. So on this plan I would be alone, and would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from contagion, should be kept fit for no baser object." This is pretty much what he did do. Had he done so entirely, the overflowings of his mind might very possibly have been devoted to oblivion. As it was, he consorted with Byron, and a few other authors of minor note, and that circumstance introduced the overflowings of his mind-or hastened their

introduction-to future generations. The present generation has no earthly merit in connection with Shelley save the accident of being one of those future generations so spoken of. No true admirer of Shelley can be grateful for the gratuitous buffooneries of Mr. Hogg, the egotistical spasms of Mr. Rossetti, or the turgid incoherencies of Mr. Swinburne. Any one sentence of Mrs. Shelley's, written within a few years of her husband's death, is worth more than all the perverse or perfervid conjecturings of those gentlemen. It is open to them to increase Shelley's notoriety at the present moment, just as they may increase that of anybody who may happen to be living amongst us; for notoriety is a bubble which almost anybody's breath can blow a little higher, but which always needs somebody's breath to prevent it from sinking. Fame is beyond the reach of such puny efforts, and finds its own atmosphere, in which to remain fixed and floating without any extraneous support. That is the common lot of Byron and Shelley now, after that various fortune during life for which we have been accounting. Do not let us deceive ourselves. There might well be one amongst us the equal of Shelley, without reviewers and the public being at all aware of it; and there may well be more than one amongst us nearly as notorious as Byron, with even less desert than he had when he first became so.

Both Byron and Shelley were of what is called "gentle birth," and thereby obtained the triple opportunity of the highest education, of acquiring naturally a certain air and tone of superiority, and of surveying the world from a sort of altitude. Such a position has, for a poet, both advantages and drawbacks; but whilst the former are with difficulty shaken off, the latter may easily be guarded against. Overstrained or too technical an education has a strong tendency to quell the rising fires of young genius; but it has hitherto been the excellence of the best English training to be truly broad and liberal, and to enlarge the mind rather than to fit it to a certain mould. Byron was an indifferent scholar, in the accurate sense of the word, to the last. Shelley's greater erudition was acquired after he had left college, and arose from his keenness in the pursuit of metaphysical ideas rather than from a love of learning; and it may be doubted whether the Greek studies of the latter did not rather injure than assist his muse, whilst nothing is more clear than that Byron, who is the most classical of all our English poets, had imbibed just so much of the writers of the old world-namely, their spirit and aroma-as is good for any one who has abundant thought and a vigorous style of his own. The main point of difference between the two, as far as collegiate life was concerned, is that Byron hated the University, and the University hated Shelley. It would have been strange if either had been in harmony with such an institution. It was left for a colder and more formal son of the Muses to be made a D.C.L. by the