text, "vanitas vanitatum." Among his lesser characters we have Mrs. Creed in "Pendennis," who, in addition to being pew-opener, was landlady of Miss Fotheringay, the daughter of Captain Costigan. According to her own account, she watched over that young lady's doings with the vigilance of a Cerberus rather than an ordinary chaperon. Thus it was that Doctor Portman and the major, anxious as they were to win Pen from his infatuation for the fair actress, could find nothing to object to in her behavior. "Whenever he came," Mrs. Creed informed them, "she always have me or one of the children with her. And Mrs. Creed, marm, says she, if you please, marm, you'll on no account leave the room when that young gentleman's here. And many's the time I've seen him a-lookin' as if he wished I was away, poor young man." From the same novel we have Madame Frisby, the dressmaker, who lets apartments to Mr. Smirke, the curate, and encourages his affection for the widow, Helen Pendennis. No one in all Clavering we are told, read so many novels, from which, doubtless, her sentimental views of life were mainly derived. The history of Mr. and Mrs. Sedley after the crash is associated with their landlady, Mrs. Clapp, at Brompton. The old lady, we are told, was occupied and amused with the doings of the Irish maid, Betty Flanagan, "her bonnets, her ribbons, her sauciness, her idleness, her reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her consumption of tea and sugar, and so forth," almost as much as she had been with the doings of her own household in former days. Mrs. Sedley was always a great person for her landlady when she descended and passed many hours with her in the basement or ornamental kitchen. But this was in comparatively halcyon days. The question of rent was even looming in the background, and gradually the pleasant intercourse between the landlady and lodger ceased. Mrs. Clapp, in her nether realm, "grumbles in secret to her husband about the rent, and urges the good fellow to rebel against

his old friend and patron and present lodger." Finally, one day Jos's carriage arrives and carries off old Sedley and his daughter to return no more. Amelia had always been kind, and when she was going away, the landlady bitterly reproached herself for ever having used a rough expression to her. There was genuine regret for their departure. "They would never have such lodgers again, that was clear;" and the author tells us that after-life proved the truth of this melancholy prophecy, and that Mrs. Clapp revenged herself for the deterioration of mankind by levying the most savage contributions upon the tea-caddies and legs of mutton of her locataires. "Most of them scolded and grumbled, some of them did not pay, none of them stayed." Then we have Mrs. James Gann, in "A Shabby Genteel Story," who lets lodgings at Margate; Mrs. Brandon, the "little sister," in the "Adventures of Philip;" and Mrs. Ridley, in the "Newcomes," of whom, did space permit, much might be said. Thackeray's finest portrait in the way of landladies, however, is that of Miss Honeyman, the aunt of Clive Newcome. A woman of a thousand virtues, cheerful, frugal, honest, laborious, charitable

such is the character of the little, brisk old lady in Steyne Gardens, whose superior manners and prosperity won her the title of Duchess from the neighboring tradespeople. We can imagine her to ourselves with her "large cap, bristling with ribbons, with her best chestnut front, and her best black silk gown and gold watch," as she stands prepared for the interview with Lady Anne Newcome. Mine hostess of the inn has been not infrequently portrayed in poetry and prose from the days of Mistress Nell of the Boar's Head onwards.

Suffice it in conclusion to give one or two examples of the sisterhood drawn from the pages of Sir Walter Scott. What a wonderful picture is that of the wild inn at Aberfoyle, and of its no less wild landlady. Jean MacAlpine, on the night when Frank Osbaldistone and the others arrive there. Reluctant to receive her guests, she appears before

several words to add or substract one or the other does not this prove most clearly that those thoughts are wider and deeper than our speech, and are not subjected to it? Bacon overthrew this folly of mistaking words for thought when he said that words are the money of fools, but only the counters of wise men.

We must, then, always remember that however needful writing may be to tell of what cannot be learned otherwise, it is but a hurtful hindrance when it takes the place of the direct knowledge of the senses. As the awakening of the renaissance taught men that words were but counters, and that no knowledge could be reached by dealing with words alone; so the awakening of this century has begun to teach us that the senses cannot grow and feed the mind when the fetters of writing are allowed to hold them back from the living touch of nature. Nay, more. As there is no growth of the mind in one way but at the cost of its fulness in another, so this trust in writing has plainly deadened the memory of the senses, which is always more ready in those who do not read, and it has even deadened the senses themselves. We must thus face our losses while we rejoice in our gains, that we may understand a little of the mind and the powers of man before writing. How keen and full his feeling for nature was is shown in the earliest writings of every race, before the mind had learned to trust to the crippled words of others, instead of the living touch, and while still the sense and feeling was alive to all nature. The greatest natural poetry, as all confess, is that of the Homeric poems and the early songs and epics of each land; before they are fettered by written example, and deadened by dwelling on words instead of things. It is this poetry before writing which touches our minds most widely, and lays hold of them with truest grasp. That, let us remember, is the touch of the mind of man before writing; and his words which we cherish and wonder at, which thrill us and overwhelm our feelings, these words are the language of

man before writing. That mind, that language, is what we have bartered away for another growth, and for a new order of things, which though it may be more needful for us is assuredly not more precious. And when the flagging thought has by the bonds of writing lost all life, and become a mere carcass, senseless and corrupt, then it is that from the man before writing fresh life is to be sought. In Greek history when epic poetry decayed, the lyric taken fresh from unwritten life rose in its place; when that too died in the grasp of writing, the dramatic form was borrowed from the unwritten chorus of the vintage feast; and that in turn, killed by over-writing, gave place to the bucolics taken from the speech and life of the unlettered. It is the man who is in touch with things, and not with deadening words; it is the man who learns from the breadth of nature and not from the weak and broken transcript of it in the words of others; it is the man, before writing, who is the master of thought and sight, and the unfailing source from which literature may draw its health and life. And in our own days this resort to the fresh wit and character of the man whose mind is not deadened by literary models has been ever the mainspring of new life. After the Ayrshire ploughman and the recluse of Grasmere, the strongest man for a time was he who drew from unlettered life in England; then peasant life in France gave the new vigor; and, when the Dorset rustic became out of date, Central African savages, Indian wolf-men, and Australian bushrangers have been the desperate resorts of our literature in its search for the needful ground of manin-nature. That ground is being steadily cut away by the growing trust in the power of mere words, and by the habit of learning at second-hand through the minds of others, which is the bane of the modern system, in place of feeding the mind through the senses and forming it by direct touch with the realities of matter, thought, and action.

Now, as it is with the literature of imagination, so it is with the literature

of history. No subject is in need of such continual touch with the actual facts of the life and works of man. The histories which were words-mere words-are dead or dying; it is history which draws from the living fount of the art, the skill, the enterprise, the very life of the people, that is a power amongst us. Look even to the most brilliant of literatures, and compare the view of the Greeks which belongs to the time of Pope and Bentley, with that which we now have in realizing the Parthenon, Olympia, and the wealth of scenes of life on sculptures and on vases. History-and the realization of the past, which is the true spirit of history is more dependent on the knowledge of the actual objects and surroundings of man than it is on any account in words. The more we understand this, the more we shall see that history does not begin with written records; that it can be read with more certainty from the solid facts which we can see and grasp than it can from the always imperfect and partial statements which have been written for us, often by men who know far less of the matter than we do at present.

When we look at the brilliant work of the Mycenaean age of Greece, we there see the expression of the mind in closest touch with nature. The bounding charge of the bull, who, tossing aside the hunters, dashes onward in its free career, is full of the grandest life. The story of the hunt seems to be that two hunters have lain in wait to catch wild cattle, by a net fastened to two trees. The cow has fallen into the snare and rolled over helplessly on her back, the front legs in her struggle have gone through the net and are entangled, while the hind legs, caught at the haunch in the curve of the net, cannot regain a footing. The bull has then charged down on the hunters; one that he has tossed is falling with arms outstretched to reach the ground; the other he has just gored on his horn, and is in the act of tossing in his headlong charge. The furious vigor of the scene has probably never been outdone, while in the composition, by indicating the

past course of action-the snaring of the cow, her entanglement, the tossing of one hunter, and the goring of the other before the present instant of tossing him, all put before us in one moment of action-we see the highest skill of design. The man who did this fed his soul on nature, and gave consummate thought and observation to his labor. The other half of the composition shows another bull, scared by the attack and fleeing from the scene. In both of these bulls the blank effect of leaving the whole length of the animal as a smooth surface has been brokenin the first by the falling man, in the second by the palm-tree. This work in relief is embossed on a massy cup of gold found in a tomb at Vapheio in Greece, most likely made about 1200 B.C. With this was a second cup of like work showing the milder way of leading cattle by means of tame decoys. In front is a cow, secured by a man who grasps a rope fastened to her hind leg, and next is another tame cow conversing with a bull, who is still defiant and dangerous. The stark, half-wild, march of the first cow is nobly given; and, though not so bold as the other composition, it is yet a work of which any master in sculpture or painting might covet the energy and expression. Perhaps some will say that because these works are found on Greek soil therefore they are altogether an excep tion. But, set them by the side of any later work in the literary age of Greece. Not a single piece of the same small size can be said to exceed their artistic skill and nobleness; and though large sculptures on ten or twenty times the scale may be more elaborated. it is questionable if any-even the struggles of the centaurs and Lapiths-appeal more truly to nature and to the glory of action. And look at another race far lower among men before letters-the

cave

men of France and England. Their keen sense of animal form and action led them to unerring expression in their outlines of the mammoth, the reindeer, the horse, and other types. which they laboriously carved on the bones which lay in their rude dwellings.

Not only does this masterly power of remembering and leproducing the forms and attitudes of animals show a high ability in the artist, but it points to a far wider appreciation among his fellows. Such work is not habitually done, even by a genius, unless those around him have a keen feeling for the beauty and the truth of it. An artist does not produce cups of Vapheio for a patron who cannot value their quality. The general character of the best class of a people is reflected in the art which is produced to meet their demands and their wishes, even when it results in unlimited portraits of aldermen and babies.

Turning next to more decorative art, the discs of gold which were fastened on to the dresses of the wealthy Mycenæans show a fine sense of ornament. The cuttle fish, with its arms each coiled round into a spiral, is displayed with the restful formality that belongs to decoration as opposed to the activity of motion. In other cases the ornament is wholly geometrical-of spirals coiled in groups, with the free ends looped round in the spaces between the coils. How closely this is akin to the decoration of the bronze age in northern Europe I need hardly remind you. Another link is shown in the wavy band winding around the bosses on one of the gold discs, which will bring to mind the interlacing bandwork of northern art. The effect of bosses was also often used, as in the splendid headband from Mycenæ, where the smooth, bright surfaces are set off by delicate loop patterns around them. And groups of bosses alternate with rosettes in orderly disorder on the great headdress of sheet gold. In every branch of work, whether minute labor of the goldsmith, or delicate carving in rooms, or massive columns, we see the same great faculty of design, the same knowledge of the value of effects, the same free and vigorous fancy. Yet these true artists probably never read or wrote a word in their lives. We see the vigor, the freedom, the skill of his art reflecting the same great qualities that we know in his

mind and perception, as shown by those earliest poems that have fixed for us some aspects of his thought and feelings.

There is another view of an unlettered civilization which we can study better from another field. The details of the possessions and products or daily life are scarcely at all preserved to us from the prehistoric age of Greece. The scanty remains of the towns and palaces have covered hardly anything but stone carvings; and the tombs have contained but few things that belonged to the living. Hence we are almost limited to the insight that we gain from the artistic expression; and, great as that is, it shows us but little of the material civilization. The most complete picture of an unlettered civilization that is preserved to us is transmitted by the figure of the various objects of daily life which were taken by the Egyptians as symbols in their writing. The actual carvings and drawings belong to the earliest stages of the figured expression of ideas, the force and simplicity of many of the emblems startling us by their directness. As no other system of writing went before this, so it is plain that the drawing of an object to show a thought proves that the object must be older than the use of it in writing; and thus in the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the earliest known age we have handed down to us the picture of the civilization which went before, and led up to, the use of writing. First we notice the weapons. The large flint knife grasped by the back is one of the simplest and earliest of tools, both for hunting and for other work. The throw stick carved in wood, with the peculiar bends which aid its flight, has also come from the primitive ages; like the emblem for strength, where the outstretched arm grasps a bone, the very rudest means of attack. In these we see some of the beginnings of the arts of life embalmed to our view; but other objects show the later stages side by side with these. The emblem of a follower or personal retainer gives a picture of the wild hunting life on the desert. We now turn to the pictures of