our own mind, and consequently towards the mind of others, the gospel of lucidity."

Althea's brown eyes had widened out with that curious light. But she merely smiled. All this seemed to her, educated in sceptical indifference to all things, beautiful, but far-fetched and futile: a sort of delightful, unpractical poetry.

"You are like a priest," she said; "come in and hear what your rival, the minister, has to say."

"If he speaks out his convictions, I respect him from the bottom of my heart," answered Baldwin, with his hand on the door, " and that is more than I can say of most of us rationalists, myself frequently included."

The church of drowned men, as Althea called it, was built without an apse, a dreary, lop-headed edifice, more like a gallows than a cross; and its granite pillars and mullions were grown yellow with weather-stain and lichen. Against the dead, dull grey wall, where had once stood the altar, was the pulpit. The minister, a gaunt, rather deformed creature, with the shaven, warped face of a dwarf, spread his bulging black sleeves on the red cushions, folding himself, so to speak, on to the big gilt Bible; and looking, thus vaguely enthroned in the half light, like some strange squatting idol. The apseless church seemed to double the value of the voices which sang the hymns gravely, earnestly, all the pitches welded into a solemn medium, equally unlike the nasal bass chanting of Catholic priests, and that fretting, as with spots of white, of the Anglican choristers' treble. The sermon that followed was immense, argumentative, subtle, yet practical. The point of it was that on the greatest subject of all, God and the salvation of their soul, men and women are silent to one another; discussing all other matters, inquiring into all other interests, but living in isolation of soul about this, brother with brother, father with children, husband with wife.

"Listen; he says the same thing as you," whispered Althea to Baldwin, where they sat in an empty pew by the door.

In the dull moments of the sermon, and they were many and long, the girl opened a volume of Browning which she had brought with her for the purpose, and placed beside the Bible on the pew edge. The place was the end of the speech of Pompilia.

The asceticism, the earnestness of this service, the insistance on God, and our brethren, and our soul; the absence of all mythology and liturgical juggling, of symbolical formulæ and mesmeric passes, like those of Catholicism and the sham Protestantism of to-day, impressed both Althea and Baldwin, and seemed to bring to fuller comprehension the often read words which they were reading. And of the two, perhaps, Baldwin felt the most. In the little bare church, with the minister's voice, between the grave singing of the

hymns, booming out the necessity of spiritual brotherhood, under that wan sea light falling on the grey, lichen-stained walls and arches, he felt suddenly, by the side of this strange, sweet, strangely candid, and virginal grown-up child (the more candid and virginal for Heaven knows what insight into the rottenness of rich and idle society), the value of Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, as he had never felt them before. "Do you remember those last lines of Pompilia's speech, Lady Althea?" he said, as they walked behind the congregation across the little green, treeless graveyard

"Through such souls alone,

God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light,
For us in the dark to rise by: and I rise."

"Yes," answered Althea dreamily; "I was thinking of them also. It would be something rather worth doing, a real thing, don't you think, to be such a soul, even for a minute, to anybody?"

....

They walked a long time in silence, merely looking about, or absorbed in thought, until they had got the pony harnessed once more, and the cart a long way. The storm had cleared off, and the sun was shining behind a thin film of white, raining down in great whitish beams upon the high-lying cornfields and sheep-dotted pastures; the sea lying pale, luminous, impalpable beneath, almost white, but tipped with shining facets where it was enclosed by the long deepblue bar of coast and cloud. Pale, whitish still, but just suffused with blue in the open, where the blue Bass Rock seemed not so much to rise from, as to lie lightly upon, the surface of the water. "You see, Mr. Baldwin," began Althea, keeping her eyes fixed on the reins, as they rolled quickly along; "all that you say is well and good when applied to exceptional people . . . no, let me explain, I mean not merely particularly clever, but also particularly good people the people that God stooping shows His light through, like Caponsacchi. These creatures are privileged, and their privilege, like all others, ought to imply an obligation; they are rather stronger than their fellows, and are therefore bound to lend them some of their strength. But the great majority of people are in quite a different position; they have just intellect and heart enough for their own needs, and they have absolutely no means of coming in contact with any one save their nearest surroundings. If I do my duty, for instance, it affects, at the very most, two or three people; indeed not as many, for my family are out of touch with me and think me scatter-brained the very utmost I can perhaps ever do, is to make Harry see things a little from my point of view, and lead a cleaner life than most boys; but that's merely because the poor little chap is so fond of me, and because we happen to care for the same books and pictures."

Baldwin could not help smiling, as he repeated to himself, "Through

press him with her utter unimportance.

"Well, and don't you see, my dear Lady Althea," he said when she finished speaking, "that in influencing your brother you are influencing the world at large? We are, each of us, separate atoms, if you will; but we are atoms continually pressing upon each other; and the sum total of this pressure, transmitted unconsciously from creature to creature, is the world's movement. Let us suppose that you impress Harry with a sense of the possibility and duty of leading, though a man, a life as pure as is demanded of a woman. Do you not see, that even if Harry never attempt to convert to his ways a single one of his companions, he will influence nevertheless every one of them susceptible of influence, by showing such lads as are capable of clean living, that clean living is possible, is practicable, and is the result of being neither a curate nor a muff? Don't you see that you will have contributed, to the extent of several souls in all probability (for the life of Harry means the life of Harry's children), to the organization of a condition of general moral opinion such that only those who are born vicious need be vicious, while those who are born good may remain good?"

Althea did not answer, but Baldwin could see that her lip quivered a little; she wished to believe, but she feared to do so.

"But look," she said after a long pause; "you cannot deny that even the greatest men can do little, very little, in this world. Think of men like St. Francis, or like Robert Owen: why, all their efforts have been engulfed by the brutality and selfishness of the world. And then tell me, but quite honestly you know, do you think it worth while for a quite unimportant individual to do the most that he or she can in a world where even the very greatest are comparatively powerless ?"

Baldwin nodded. "I see your argument; and, at the first glance, the fact that, as you say, even the greatest men in this world can do little or nothing unless supported by the mass, does seem to diminish sadly, to cast a slur upon, the value of the individual. But look again and ask yourself the reason why the single individual, however great, is so comparatively weak? It is because, in reality, the single individual is so strong: even the meanest, smallest, has an enormous weight and strength; and without this weight and strength of each constituent individual, the crowd would be yielding for ever. It is because all men are strong, that no one man can force them; it is because there is life and power throughout the mass, that the individual exception is virtually powerless. Are we unimportant because we are part of the mass? But the life of the mass is our life, its strength is ours, its quality is our quality. And in this fact, dear Lady Althea, in the fact that we are the mass, and that such as we are,

we, its component atoms, it also is-in this fact that so much of our goodness and happiness is due to others, and so much of their goodness and happiness will depend upon us, lies the reason why we must form opinions and apply them; the reason why we must not live and let live like our friends the fungus people-live honestly and let others live dishonestly."

"Then every individual has a value? I hope it's true," added Althea pensively. "I do hope it's true. You see it takes away that horrid feeling that life is all a sham, men and women merely so many puppets jerking idiotically about. It makes them real, somehow, real like all these things, real like the sea and sky and the grass and trees.”

The cart, as it whirled along, drove before it a swarm of twittering little birds, which settled, little brown bur-like blobs, on the hedgerows and haystacks; rising again on approach of the wheels, a perfect whirl of wings and of twitter, to alight again on the hedgerow or haystack beyond.

VERNON LEE.

FREEDOM OF BEQUEST.

"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus."

THE nineteenth century is accomplishing the gradual extinction of the statutes, conceived in a spirit of oligarchy, which two hundred years ago replaced the usages of feudalism. And as, in the later stages of their history, languages, reaching back across the gulf of time, affect the archaic, so with the spirit of modern legislation. The keynote of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in law as in philosophy, was individualism—that a man may "do what he will with his own." Of this gospel there are yet, in the misappropriated name of Political Economy, some expounders; but their voices, grown weaker year by year, have failed in the face of measures wrung from the statesman's larger sense of public necessity. The Irish Land Acts, the Factory Acts, the Education Acts, the Employers' Liability Act, the Married Women's Property Acts-all these are commonplace evidences of the newly vitalized principle, a principle conflicting with the doctrine of the immediate past, but the basis of the civilization of our Teutonic forefathers and older than ancient Rome. "If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it," is St. Paul's expression of it, and it is summarized for us curter moderns in M. Comte's ugly word "solidarity."

The more primitive a society the more marked the recognition accorded to this truth. But, as the social organization changes, distinctive lines become blurred, and in the scramble to assert individual rights public responsibilities are thrust aside. Out of such a phase our country is beginning to emerge. The ancient ties and traditions of feudalism having disappeared, and public administration having fallen into the hands of empiricism, a society was formed in which the history of Caleb Williams was a possibility, and of which Bishop Butler wrote: "I suppose it may be spoken of as very much the