existence. Much as there is of them, there is more of happiness, of beauty, of goodness, and of ruth. There is more gold in the pattern than black; and nowhere is the one divorced from the other. The sun has not ceased to shine, nor the stars to give light. Rivers run and roses bloom, and that life, in the most untoward circumstances, is worth living, is proved by the fact that men cling to it; labour and sorrow that they may cling to it; cling to it in old age, in misfortune, in pain and disease; and have always so clung, even when faith held out to them visions of Elysian fields beyond its threshold. An old woman, confined to her chair with paralysis for fourteen years, entirely deaf, and a pensioner on another's bounty, when asked if she wished to die, repudiated the suggestion indignantly, and added angrily that young people always thought they were the only ones who enjoyed life.

From the eye of these melancholy reporters of life are entirely concealed the secret wells of vitality, of amusement, of interest, that spring in every human breast, even in such as this poor old derelict; yet these fountains of obscure joys kept her contented to see it out; courageous to bear what would seem to the more fortunate intolerable ills.

It is a sense of all this that our modern literature lacks. A sense that life, just mere life, in all its

manifestations, in its humblest, sorrowfulest forms, is interesting; humorous through its contrasts, and on the whole enjoyable. Like Stevenson's child, we need to think that

"The world is so full of a number of things

I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

III

COMMON OR GARDEN BOOKS

WH

HEN one begins to look — in each special manifestation of our contemporary literature for the underlying causes of the manifestation, below certain surface-reasons, such as fashion, or the possession of new liberties, and the like, there seems everywhere to be, as the fundamental cause of these tendencies, a new conception of his own place in nature, forced upon man by the discoveries of Sci

ence.

Robbed of the sense of his unique importance and value, of his dominating place in the scheme of the universe; forced to admit that the sun does not shine solely to give him warmth and light, that animate life was not brought into being only to feed and nurture his orgulous existence, he begins, like the guest at the scriptural banquet, to "take with shame a lower place," and to look about him with dawning interest at his fellows at the feast. Heretofore, wrapped in the thick vesture of his conviction that he was the only invited guest at nature's table, that all that swarming life surrounding him

had importance only as his food or as his servants, convinced that he alone was destined to immortality, and therefore alone a matter of interest, he had never turned his mind to serious study of his environment. But a profound readjustment has been taking place, jarring us out of our smug self-satisfaction, forcing upon us a new humility. Not alone have we been reluctantly obliged to admit our humble and doubtful pedigree, but-studying our fellow creatures we have been brought to see that our gifts are not so supereminent as we had heretofore supposed, nor our importance in the scheme of life so all-pervading as we fondly imagined. The ants and bees we find have perfected a social polity beside which our highest social achievements are but heterogeneous and confused. The albatross, the porpoise, and the wild goose make our most splendid endeavours at speed in locomotion but halt and feeble. The wasps and the spiders, the molluscs and diatoms, outdo our most skilful manufactures, and in grace, strength, speed, skill, we have to acknowledge a thousand rivals and superiors among those whom we used contemptuously to class as the lower orders of life.

Out of this new humility, this new knowledge, has grown up a new literature. No longer do the sentimental adventures of imaginary Clarences and

Matildas absorb all our efforts and all our pens. We have begun earnestly to record the love-affairs of wolves and dogs, of bees, and of carnations. Stevenson wrote one of the most penetrating and brilliant of his essays, "The Character of Dogs," to show us their chivalry, their vanity, their strange stringent code of etiquette, their ambitions, their religion, their weaknesses, and their heroism. Maeterlinck has sublimated still further in "The Intelligence of the Flowers," and we hang breathlessly upon the record of the courage, the ingenuities, the passionate strivings, of these silent lovers of the fields, of the pools, and of the gardens,-lovers beside whose ardour and amorous persistency the rope-ladders and Gretna elopements of the past are but clumsy and indifferent contrivances. To die for the beloved is, in their existence, no figure of speech; in their world they are all of the tribe of Azra, "who when they love they perish."

And not only has the Belgian shown us loves more passionate, more romantic, and more uncalculating than those of Romeo and Juliet, of Anthony and Cleopatra, of Pyramus and Thisbe, but he has revealed to us maternal affections and self-sacrifices even more instinctive than ours. A thousand ingenious adaptations and mechanical devices have been perfected by these humble parents to ensure the