feels that, if it be not in
mortals to command the weather her husband prophesies for August, yet
he does better--he deserves it. And, after all, a prophecy in some
measure depends for its success on the mind which receives it.
Back in the forties--I quote from a small privately-printed volume by
Sir Richard Tangye--when the potato blight first appeared in England,
an old farmer in the Duchy found this warning in his favourite
almanack, at the head of the page for August:--

"And potentates shall tremble and quail."

Now, 'to quail' in Cornwall still carries its old meaning,
'to shrink,' 'to wither.' The farmer dug his potatoes with all
speed, and next year the almanack was richer by a score of
subscribers.

Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, "O that I were
lying under the olives!" "O to be out of England now that February's
here!"--for indeed this is the time to take the South express and be
quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon the Mediterranean
shore before the carnivals and regattas sweep it like a mistral.
Nor need you be an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson
dilates in that famous little essay in "_Virginibus Puerisque_"
(or, as the young American lady preferred to call it, "Virginis
Pueribusque."):--

"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a
spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of
flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden;
and something significant or monumental in the grouping,
something in the harmony of faint colour that is always
characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come
home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction
with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more
beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the
infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour
is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it
was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like
'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at
the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken
up with little momentary silverings and shadows."

English poets, too, have been at their best on the Riviera: from
Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little
landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visi