Helena is really to face and help to crush Jasper. And the most probable solution of this is that she does again assume male clothing, and keep Jasper occupied in Staple Inn by personating her twin brother Neville whom she so nearly resembles, while Neville escapes.

But, as the book stands, she-like Grewgious and Tartar-is excluded from being Datchery by the sequence of events. Datchery appears at Cloisterham in Chapter xviii, while Grewgious, Tartar, Helena, and Neville - everybody but the stupid and disagreeable Bazzard-are all still at Staple Inn in Chapter xxi. Dr. Jackson points out that this is just as fatal to the Helena theory as to the Tartar or the Grewgious theory. So with singular and interesting boldness he deals with his text as Dr. Cheyne might do with a Psalm retaining any Pre-exilic traces He rearranges his chapters.

Now it is obvious that a theory which requires a teration of the text to begin with, starts with a very heavy handicap against it, especially since we know that Dickens revised the proofs to the end of Chapter xxi. Dr. Jackson shows too from the MS. (the Higher Criticism again) that the first half of Chapter xviii (the Datchery chapter) was written after Chapter xix ("Shadow on the Sundial"), and then transposed by Dickens. This makes an accidental transposition of the chapters after Dickens' death almost an impossibility.

But furthermore-if Dickens, as we ought to assume, played fair with his readers-Helena is barred from being Datchery for the same reason as Edwin. Helena knew where Jasper's rooms were perfectly well, but Datchery did not; for to explain Datchery's 'Indeed,' with a second look of some interest," when Deputy points out the room over the archway,

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as only meaning that he "regards them now in a new light" (to which Deputy has contributed nothing whatever) is obviously special pleading of the kind of which the critics of Edwin Drood have furnished such an astonishing variety.

In short, most people will agree with Mr. Chesterton that the objection is not so much to the impossibility as that this assumption would not be melodrama but farce. "One might," he says, "as easily imagine Edith Dombey dressing up as Major Bagstock!"

Thus no satisfactory solution of the mystery has ever been propounded, and I submit that it never can be; because every theory not only involves improbabilities, but is impossible to reconcile with the existing text. If the MS. of the remaining chapters were suddenly discovered to be in existence, we should know what Dickens intended, but we should still not have a satisfactory solution, because he himself-perhaps owing to some uncertainty in his original idea, perhaps to a variation of it in the course of writing has in some way or other barred every conceivable outlet. It must always remain "The Mystery" of Edwin Drood. And it is not an unreasonable surmise that the hopeless task of finding a satisfactory solution may have precipitated the final attack of apoplexy while he was at work on it which brought the curtain so sorrowfully down.

Perhaps I may add here a few of the astonishing "Cathedralia" in the book, which would have made the late Mr. Mackenzie Walcott's hair stand on end. They scarcely affect the evidence, however, except as proving Dickens' amazing inaccuracy in matters not lending themselves to his particular gifts.

Jasper, a lay choral-clerk, is also called "a lay Precentor," and even "the Precentor." Mr. Crisparkle's

Minor Canonry must have been in private patronage, since he was "promoted by a patron grateful for a welltaught son." At service in the Cathedral, "the sacristan locks the ironbarred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel," the sanctuary at Cloisterham thus being the nave. Jasper "leads" the choir-boys in the procession to service. (This, by the way, is silently corrected by Charles Collins in the picture on the cover.) Jasper's "pathetic supplication to have his heart inclined to keep this law" is offered up, strange to say, "at

The Church Quarterly Review.

Vespers." But the best of all is that when the Princess Puffer wants to see and hear Jasper in the Anthem, she has to go to the Cathedral at seven o'clock. That would have been waking sleepy Cloisterham up with a vengeance! Still as the celebrated match of Dingley Dell v. All Muggleton clearly proves that Dickens had never played cricket in his life, and yet remains the most famous report of a match on record, so the impossible doings at Cloisterham have an interest never to be found in the lifelike and accurate Barchester.

G. E. Jeans.

De

The closest analogy in the history of English literature to the career of William De Morgan, whose gentle, humorous spirit passed into the Great Beyond on January 17 last, is the case of Samuel Richardson, the Aldersgate printer. But Richardson was barely fifty years of age when Pamela, his first romance, was published. Morgan had reached the age of sixtyseven when he burst upon a world satiated with sex problems and halfbaked antinomian doctrines, with Joseph Vance. An unsuccessful painter, a moderately good designer in stained-glass windows, and the rediscoverer of the lost process of lustre -these were the three stages of his career until he came to his own as a novelist. As the designer and producer of tile-pictures he achieved considerable success, though his artistic temperament prevented him from securing the full financial reward of his work. But it gave him entrance to the famous Chelsea æsthetic set whom we know as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he became an unobtrusive but welcome intimate of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Ros

setti, Burne Jones, and Ford Madox Brown. Ill-health caused his withdrawal to Florence for the winter months, and in the later period of his life the city on the Arno was his permanent residence, broken only by brief summer trips to England. De Morgan had, therefore, slipped out of the artistic world altogether when he suddenly reappeared in the unexpected guise of a writer of romance. Only eight years elapsed between the appearance of his first and last novels, and he passed away at the age of seventy-seven.

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George Gissing, in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, gives a definition of Art as 'an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life." Whatever may be thought of its general application, this definition exactly fits the literary art of William De Morgan. No young man could have written his books. The attitude of whimsical detachment and of placid tolerance towards the riddles of existence which characterizes all his work is only possible to one who had lived and suffered. No trace is found of fierce revolt or intolerable resentment

against life's disillusions. He learned resignation, perhaps in a hard school; but it is the cheerful resignation without repinings, and as he looks back upon life from the vantage-point of late middle age he finds it good. Life never lost its savor or its thrilling mystery for him, and it is this quality of his work as well as the play of his flickering humor that commends his books to this generation in spite of their inordinate length.

Though all his novels bear the imprint of the twentieth century upon their title-pages, their atmosphere is that of the early eighties. The only illustrator who could have done justice to his characters would have been Du Maurier. In some of his novels we meet with taxi-cabs and tube railways, but the people who use them belong to the more leisurely Victorian age. They bear the hallmark of that era in their placidity, in their very slang, and in their whole attitude to life. Sitting on the brink of the twentieth century volcano De Morgan turned his eyes to the comfortable years, never to return, when, if wars took place, they were fought out in far-off corners of Africa or Asia, and served only to season the morning newspaper, too remote to disturb the serenity of British ease. In effect he excels as the portrayer of comfortable middle-class interiors. He has an irresistible way of hitting off the distinctive features of the Englishman en famille, and more particularly of the Englishwoman. Most of all is he effective in the delineation of the British matron-when that pillar of Society wore lace caps and moved about the world with a conscious dignity-"Like Convocation coming downstairs," De Morgan describes her movements in Alice-for-Short. All the little foibles of the estimable middleaged lady, her complacent evaluation of her own exceeding righteous

ness, her incorrigible habit of putting her husband or her children in the wrong, and her ready assumption of the air of resigned martyrdom if her will or prejudices are crossed-De Morgan brings out these characteristics with a genial if gently malicious chuckle. Equally penetrating are his descriptions of the ways that are dark and the tricks that are vain of the jerry-builder. Joseph Vance's father, that delightful rascal, is the classic instance of this skill, but in several of the other novels-notably in When Ghost Meets Ghost-the reader is brought into contact with examples of the mental workings of the small builder and his crafty devices for scamping jobs. De Morgan's business experiences in the production of decorative tiles doubtless gave him plenty of opportunities to make studies at first hand in this genre.

Like Dickens, whom he consciously followed as a literary prototype, De Morgan was a Cockney, frank and unashamed. Born and bred in Gower Street, he had all the true Londoner's affection for the big city, and he displays little knowledge of life outside the Metropolitan cab radius. His mother was deeply interested in the improvement of the lot of slum children, and this accounts for the sympathetic knowledge of the conditions of child-life in the inner ring of London which is found in nearly all the De Morgan stories. In particular it explains the novelist's realization of the havoc wrought by alcoholic drink upon the little ones of the city slum. As a rule one does not look for wholehearted condemnation of the liquor traffic in the possessor of the artistic temperament; and it may be conceded that De Morgan does not consciously assume the rôle of temperance advocate. But no temperance tract could portray the ravages worked in the lives of the children of the poor by

addiction to drink more dramatically than the opening chapters of Alice-forShort and It Never Could Happen Again. In When Ghost Meets Ghost also the public-house plays a mischievous part in the criminal activities of the returned Botany Bay convict. In fact no reader of these novels can escape a vivid impression of the close association of the drinking habit with the worst terrors of the abyss of poverty.

In his attitude to organized Christianity De Morgan displays a strong animus against all shams and merely traditional prejudices. The successful novelist in It Never Can Happen Again is a confessed agnostic, and he freely employs the weapon of raillery against the unreasoning and traditional religiosity of his wife and motherin-law who "neither of them knew anything of theology or divinity or exegesis, except that the Bible was the Word of God, and contained everything necessary to Salvation as well as to the fostering of all our little particular prejudices." But for selfdenying and sincere professors of Christianity such as the two clergymen in the same book he has nothing but the highest respect.

One of the main charms of De Morgan's style is his eccentric habit of incorporating is his narrative little scraps of vernacular conversation in oratio obliqua. These scraps crop up unexpectedly like bits of granite on a moorland, and carry on the narrative in the language of one of the humbler characters of the book-the slum child, the charwoman, or the cabman. The result is at first reading a trifle The London Quarterly Review.

In

A word must be added about the length of the novels. William De Morgan is as unconscionably long in reaching the climax of his story as the Merry Monarch was in the act of dying. In one of his books a novelist tells his neighbor at a dinner party that the average novel contains 100,000 words. These were certainly not the limits observed by De Morgan. deed a story is told-probably of the ben trovato class-that once De Morgan was discovered by a friend busily scoring his manuscript with a blue pencil. Asked what he was doing he replied, "Just cutting out a hundred thousand words from my new novel to oblige my publisher!" He loved to turn aside from his story to comment with leisurely humor upon the ways of things, and frequently these prolix philosophizings are the most precious thing in the book. He preferreed to develop his theme without hurry and to leave little or nothing to the imagination. Hence he is anathema to those headlong folk who demand that in an age of motor-cars and aeroplanes a story shall press along heedless of speed limits. It is not likely that William De Morgan's vogue will survive his death by many years; but in these days of strife and passion not a few will turn for mental refreshment to the homely humor and Victorian sentimentality of these stories of a day when men hung the trumpet in the hall and studied war no

more.

Nance was a tomboy, or whatever may be the equivalent of this type in the doggy world, and she looked it.

Arthur Page Grubb.

An ungainly body, clad in a rough coat of silver and gray on a foundation of brown, carried a head that ap

peared ill-shaped because of the unusual width of skull. Over her forehead continually straggled a tangle of hairs that mixed with others growing stiffly above her snout, and through this cover were to be seen two pearly eyes that were wondrously bright and intelligent. She had a trick, too, of tossing her head in a manner suggestive of nothing so much as a girl throwing back the curls from face and shoulders, and it seemed to emphasize the tomboy in Nance. But she had sterling qualities, of which her broad skull and quick eyes gave more than a hint. If ungainly, her little body was untiring and as supple as a whip-lash, and her legs were as finely tempered steel springs. She had, too, a rare turn of speed, and it was the combination of these gifts with her remarkable intelligence that in later days made her the most noted dog in Craven.

Her puppyhood was unpromising. Indeed, for one born on a farm, where is lack neither of shelter nor food, her earliest hours were doubly perilous, for, in addition to the prospect of a watery grave in a bucket, her existence, and that of the whole litter, was threatened by negligent nursing. Fate had given the little family a mother not only herself young, but of all dogs that ever worked on a farm the most irresponsible. It was quite in keeping with her reputation that Lucy should bring her children to birth in the exposed hollow trunk of a tree and then forget the blind, sprawling, whimpering puppies for hours together. It was going hard with the weaklings when fate again took a hand in their welfare, this time in the person of young Zub.

It had become evident to the farm folk, to whom matters of birth and reproduction are commonplaces of daily life, that Lucy's new duties had come upon her, and it was plainly

evident, too, before the third day had run, that she was neglecting them. It was then that young Zub, or Zubdil, as he was indifferently called, either name serving to distinguish him from Owd Zub, his father, actively bestirred himself. Hitherto he had done no more than keep his eyes and ears open as he moved about the farm buildings, but neither soft whimper nor the sound of tender noses nuzzling against a warm body had rewarded him. His first deliberate efforts were to watch Lucy's comings and goings, in the hope of tracing her hidingplace. But the mother dog, a poacher at heart and with all a four-footed poacher's cunning, had easily beaten him at this game. When he recognized this, angry at the thought that somewhere a small family was suffering, he soundly cuffed her about the ears in the hope that she would bolt for her hiding-place and her blind charges. But the graceless one, howling, raced no farther than to her kennel, and from its depths kept one watchful eye open for further developments.

"Drat thee," cried Zubdil, as his experiment went wrong, "but I'll find 'em yet." He turned and slowly entered the kitchen, where Owd Zub was quietly chuckling to himself.

"Shoo's bested thee, reight an' all, this time," he said. "Doesn't thy books tell thee owt?"

It was a thrust he was fond of making. Zubdil's strongly developed taste for reading was something beyond the old farmer's understanding. He would have given but occasional heed to it had not the younger man taken up works on scientific farming and breeding, and also studied these subjects in a course of postal lessons with the Agricultural Department at the Northern University. New ideas thus acquired often clashed with the father's ingrained conservative meth

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