ess of the sex, and he
never forgot it. What a commentary on the fair Venetians is his remark,
"I do not admit the possibility for a woman to know love"! In his eyes
she remains a being incapable of any grand and sustained sacrifice of
her instincts to the ennobling mastery of moral responsibility. In all
his dramas, plays and comedies there is but one character of a woman
which is at all magnetic or lovable--that of Angela, the heroine of the
play of the _Deer Ring_. It is a pleasure to meet at last that gentle
and guileless feminine personality after you have wearied of the tinsel
flimsiness, the bubbling frivolity, the sparkling emptiness of the
society-women who so turned the head of the age in which they lived, and
have so scandalously immortalized it.

Goldoni and Gozzi have both given us plays which show us that scandal
and intrigue were the favorite seasoning of the stale stuff of Venetian
life after it had lost its religion and its patriotic ideal. Triviality
for triviality, we prefer Gozzi.

As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage: mirth and folly were the crop.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

H. M. BENSON.

HEINE.

BUCH DER LIEDER.

Pain brings us more than pleasure;
Tears comfort more than wine;
Grief's hands are full of treasure,
And sorrow is divine.

The nightingale that's making
Night happy with his strain,
His little heart is breaking:
He sings to still its pain.

Better than laughing folly,
Gay songs and wassail ale,
Thy tuneful melancholy,
O poet nightingale!

I have no ear for gladness
When thou with song dost make
Such rapture out of sadness--
Such transport of heart-break.

CHARLES QUIET.

THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "MALCOLM."

CHAPTER LXVIII.

THE CREW OF THE BONNIE ANNIE.

Having caught as many fish as he wanted, Malcolm rowed to the other side
of the Scaurnose. There he landed, and left the dinghy in the shelter of
the rocks--the fish covered with long, broad-leaved _tangles_--climbed
the steep cliff and sought Blue Peter. The brown village was quiet as a
churchyard, although the sun was now growing hot. Of the men, some were
not yet returned from the night's fishing, and s