ess correctly in his first hundred
efforts. Indeed, I should not be astonished if some of his shots
missed the mark by centuries of time as well as oceans of space. One
hesitates to use lightly the word Elizabethan; but at present I do not
recall any other modern work that suggests it more strongly than some
of the lines I quote below:

"So wanton are all emblems that the cloak
Which folds a king will kiss a crooked nail
As quickly as a beggar's gabardine
Will do like office."

* * * * *

"Thou art so like to substance that I'd think
Myself a shadow ere thyself a dream."

* * * * *

"Not so much beauty, sire,
As would make full the pocket of thine eye."

* * * * *

"A vein
That spilt its tender blue upon her eyelid,
As though the cunning hand that dyed her eyes
Had slipped for joy of its own work."

* * * * *

"What am I who doth rail against the fate
That binds mankind? The atom of an atom,
Particle of this particle the earth,
That with its million kindred worlds doth spin
Like motes within the universal light.
What if I sin--am lost--do crack my life
Against the gateless walls of Fate's decree?
Is the world fouler for a gnat's corpse? Nay,
The ocean, is it shallower for the drop
It leaves upon a blade of grass?"

* * * * *

"There is a boy in Essex, they do say,
Can crack an ox's ribs in one arm-crotch."

All these passages are taken from the tragedy of "Athelwold," written
by Miss Amelie Rives, the author of a novel entitled "The Quick and
the Dead."

FOOTNOTES:

[20] I confess I should have felt myself on still firmer ground in
making the above comparison if I had been able to select "Peter
Ibbetson" instead of "Trilby" as the American favourite. It is
distinctly the finest, the most characteristic, and the most
convincing of Mr. Du Maurier's novels, though it is easy to see why it
did not enjoy such a "boom" as its successor. In "Peter Ibbetson" our
moral sense does not feel outraged by the fact of the sympathy we have
to extend to a man-slayer; we are made to feel that a man may kill his
fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath without
losing his fundamental goodne