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"She was in love with him, but it was not desire alone that had fired her and made her pace up and down Andrew's sick chamber. Thousands of men with the blackest hair, the most piercing eyes, might have passed before her, and she would have remained unmoved. Neither was it love as some select souls understand it." At midnight she catches sight of him. He is with a woman, and his arm is round her waist. Miriam softly opens the window, and, catching a full view of him, sees beyond a doubt it is Montgomery, who, reeling a little, disappears into the gloom. Miriam follows the pair, "her whole existence absorbed in one single burning point," until they disappear into a house. Broken, humiliated, without anchor or rudder, hating her life, and with a sense of bitter, intolerable wrong, the figure of Miriam would be almost too poignant were it not for the relief presented by one or two men and women with whom she is brought into touch. Photographs, or rather sketches instinct with life, almost flashed on to the canvas, abound in this strange, wonderful, most moving book. There is little Miss Tippit, to whom Miriam has been most rude and unkind, the little prim old maid who always wore a very tight-fitting black gown, and could never sanction any natural instinct unless she could give it the form of duty, who is an angel of goodness when Miriam becomes ill and delirious. There is Mrs. Joll, a "rude, stout, hard person, fond of her beer, who could use strong language at times, who had nevertheless learnt the one thing needful, and who instantly offered to sit up with Andrew when concussion of the brain followed his fall. When Miriam asks her how she can leave her business-which was to stand in the shop all day long, winter and summer, with a woollen shawl round her neck and over her shoulders, she tells her, "That's nothing to you, miss." She then proceeds to suggest that Andrew "Ain't very strong, I don't mean in his constitution, but here," and she tapped her head; and when Miriam is silent adds: "Ah! well, as I said about Joll's brother when I was a-nussing of him-he was rather a bad lot-it's nothing to me when people are ill what they are. Besides, there ain't so much difference 'twixt any of

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I have quoted above the last pages of Miriam's Schooling. They indicate that the deep waters had passed over Miriam's soul and that spiritual renovation was already at work. Whilst the living, loving, passionate, impetuous Miriam will remain essentially the same--who is there that ever changes?-we feel that the discipline of sorrow and struggle and despair has been requisite to widen and deepen her nature; and by directing the interior impulses as well as the nobler emotions, give fixity, strength and clearness of purpose to her life.

To the group of portrait-studies given above the description of Pauline in The Revolution in Tanner's Lane may be appropriately added here. There are one or two scenes in imaginative fiction which impress and captivate the imagination by their dramatic quality, whilst at the time revealing the essence of character. Readers of Esmond will recall the great unforgettable scene in which Beatrix Castlewood, that bright, radiant vision, gives us for a moment a glimpse into her hard, cold nature; and as picturesque and unforgettable is the scene in which Pauline dances before Zachariah Coleman.

The plates and dishes were all put in a heap, and the table pushed aside. Pauline retired for a few moments, and presently came back in a short dress of black velvet, which reached about half-way down from the knee to the ankle.

It was trimmed with reds and she had stuck a red artificial flower in her hair, and had a pair of red stockings with dancing slippers probably of her own make. Over her shoulders was a light gauzy shawl. Her father took his station in a corner, motioned to Zachariah to compress himself into another. By dint of some little management and piling up the chairs, an unoccupied space of about twelve feet square was obtained. Pauline began dancing, her father accompanying her with an oboe.

It was a very curious performance. It was nothing like ordinary opera dancing, and equally unlike any movement ever seen at a ball. It was a series of graceful evolutions with the shawl, which was flung now on one shoulder and now on the other, each movement exquisitely resolving itself, with the most perfect ease, into the one following, and designed apparently to show the capacity of a beautiful figure for poetic expression. Wave fell into wave along every line of her body, and occasionally a posture was arrested, to pass away in an instant into some new combination. There was no definite character in the dance beyond mere beauty. It was melody for melody's sake. A remarkable change, too, came over the face of the performer. She looked serious; but it was not a seriousness produced by any strain. It was rather the calm, which is found on the face of the statue of a goddess. In none of her attitudes was there a trace of coquettishness, although some were most attractive. One in particular was so. She held a corner of the shawl high above her with her right hand, and her right foot was advanced so as to show her whole frame extended, excepting the neck; the head being bent downwards and sideways.

Coleman is a working man and a Calvinist of the straightest sect. He lives in those years following the close of the great war against France, and under the influence of a French Republican refugee and his daughter Pauline, his faith becomes gradually weakened. He has married a woman who has neither elasticity of mind, nor warmth of heart, nor nobility of soul. A few months after his marriage Zachariah becomes aware that he has missed the greatest thing in life, and a crushing sense of his own misery and of the cruel injustice of his fate are upon him when he meets Pauline. She shares her father's Radical ideas, and has a passionate sympathy for the poor and hatred of the rich. Caillaud persuades Zachariah to join the Revolutionary Society to which

he belongs, and one day soon after their acquaintanceship he invites him to his rooms.

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Both Caillaud and Coleman take part in the desperate attempt of the Blanketeers, and are involved in one of the murders perpetrated by the revolutionaries. The account of this movement and of the Radicalism preached by such men as Cobbett, Major Cartwright, and Richard Carlile are described in the most forcible and brilliant way, the author's sympathies, it is needless to say, being on the side of the starving men, whose fatal march and tragic fate are known to all historical students of this period. Caillaud is sentenced to death. Zachariah suffers two years' imprisonment, and the larger half of the book records the life of Coleman and a younger Pauline, his daughter. Limitations of space prevent any presentation here of the figure of Pauline, one of those quick, rich, and vigorous natures habituated to perfect frankness of speech and the constant companionship of a thinking mind, such as her father possessed. The picture of Pauline, the child of parents who had passionately loved one another, and surpassingly full of life and motion, is heightened both in moral and artistic beauty by the figure that is accidentally brought into closest proximity with her, that of Mr. Thomas Broad, a young gentleman, the son of a minister, and already 'called," who has an obtuse mental equipment and a distinctly carnal nature. The scene in which he calls upon Pauline and attempts to kiss her, receiving instead the furious epithet of Pig" from the passionate girl, and a scoring on his hand from her scissors, is brought before the mind with wonderful distinctness, force, and conciseness of language. There is a breadth and surpassing richness of colour in the personality of Pauline, and the deep nature of Zachariah, his spiritual recovery and enjoyment of life through his love for his child, and the pathos of their relationship, preserve the beautiful human interest of a story that, as elsewhere, has a profound religious evolution. I can but refer in these closing lines in the briefest way to the remaining novels, Catherine Furze and Clara Hopgood. Unlike and yet like, their respective theme developed through certain phases of character and crises of emotion and passion, they too attain the goal of all Mark Rutherford's books. Catherine Furze, the daughter of a tradesman, bred in a narrow and somewhat stultifying environment, has the temperament that specially attracts her creator. She is a woman of finer moods and more delicate desires than is commonly met with in the class to which she belongs, and her meeting with Cardew, a clergyman of culture, sensibility and strong feelings that are not wholly satisfied in the woman he has married, marks a crisis in her life. Cardew seems to me to belong to a more conventional type than is usual with Mark Rutherford's

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male characters, and there is a something slightly theatrical about him. Nevertheless there is an affinity between their souls, and almost at the moment when their unspoken love has leaped unbidden from one to another Catherine dies of the malady with which she has long been threatened. There are readers who find the death of Catherine a mere evasion of the issues raised. I am not of their number. If I interpret the character of Catherine aright, her path would have been that of self-renunciation had she lived. "Entbehren sollst du sollst entbehren." Is not this clearly conveyed by the return of Cardew to his wife, chastened, purified, and enriched by his experience? The presentative power of Mark Rutherford's genius is shown more decisively in the character of Madge Hopgood in the last book, called Clara Hopgood, than anywhere else, though I have to admit this noble story appeals less to my sympathies than any of its predecessors. Mark Rutherford sets himself a task almost unique in English fiction. He sets himself to depict an intrinsically noble, high-spirited, essentially pure woman, who, scarcely past her earliest youth, deliberately elects to bear her child without the marriage eagerly offered to her by its father. Madge is no casuist or sophist, marshalling argument and conventional propositions this way and that. A divine instinct, a conviction so unalterable and unspeakable as to assume for her a moral law, dominates her with absolute singleness. The passion that has burnt up with flame-like intensity when it drew her momentarily to Frank must not become the justification for breaking a higher moral law. Sincere to the depths of her soul, pure in heart, full of strength and courage, turning neither to the right nor to the left, Madge, young, beautiful, and living, takes her salvation or damnation into her own hands. As this brief essay is an appreciation and not a criticism, it is not the place to point out here that the course chosen by Madge involved the destiny of a human creature, who would have to live in a world governed, not by the individual interpretation of the moral law, but by its general and everlasting application; and that there always remains the tremendous question as to which of our instincts and convictions are divine, and to be followed star-like whithersoever they lead. Of course, the answer of Madge would be that there was no question of ought here, at any rate for her. And so we must leave this thoughtevoking book. If in this essay, falling so far short of worthiness of its great subject, I have said anything that will help to secure. for Mark Rutherford the position he deserves in real literature, or even induce one thoughtful reader to read and ponder his works with the attention and study they merit, I shall in some measure have accomplished my most ardent hope.

FRANCES Low.

MODERNISM IN ISLAM.

THERE is in every gathering of many creeds and races a certain appeal to the imagination. A café in Vienna, where every hat conceals a different nationalist fanaticism, is not without its romance. A Turkish ferry-boat on the Bosphorus, its deck an epitome of the whole ethnography of Asia, sets one dreaming of Charon's bark, where for the first time all the tribes of mankind met on the common road to Hades. The streets of Cairo provide the same fascination with a difference. They tell of the wistful patriotism of the exile, and even their signboards flaunt a polyglot home-sickness. The "Café of Zion" stands side by side with the "Restaurant of Ararat," and across the way the "Bakery of Macedonia" breathes insanitary aspirations after freedom. But it is in the ancient university of El Azhar that the East has gathered its motleyest concourse. There is, to be sure, no contrast of garbs and costumes. The students wear the same decent robes of striped silk, and the same modest turbans of white or green. Arabic, too, is their common tongue, and the thoughts in their carefully disciplined brains are more uniform than those of a crowd of true-born Englishmen or Germans. But they have come from every corner of the Mohamedan world. There are men of Turkish stock from the Crimea and from Turkestan, Tartars of the Caucasus, Afghans, Malays, and Indians, Arabs from Morocco, and Arabised negroes from Uganda or Nigeria. They mingle with the throng of Egyptian peasant students, and only a shade of duskiness or the curve of a nose marks the difference among them. They are all quartered round the great open courtyard of the mosque, squatting in little groups, with a praying mat, an earthen pitcher, and a heap of dried maize cakes for their only property. They sit or kneel through the long hours of daylight, now listening to the lectures of their doctors, now swaying to and fro, hardly pausing to regard the stranger, in their effort to commit the Koran to memory. But under the external sameness a world of jarring politics and strivings lies hidden. Here are the "Mad Mullahs" of to-morrow, who will preach a jehad to Afridi clansmen on the Indian frontier, or rouse the Somalis to arms. Do they compare notes, when the Koran is laid aside at sundown, and discuss the varying ways of Anglo-Indian magistrates and French officials, Dutch governors, and Russian bureaucrats? Do they realise as one problem the secular struggle of East and West? Do they catch a glimpse of the long line of the

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