Once

grew to anxiety, and anxiety to agony-" O mon Dieu; est-il possible? point de lettre." Has his friend forgotten him? Can a letter have gone astray? Did his own letter ever reach her? Would God that it were morning would God that it were night! Thrice unhappy Fabre, without friend, without lover, without current coin of the realm! Fifteen days have passed since he wrote from Lyons, and still no answer. more he puts pen to paper, and writes as a desperate man: "Pity, my dear friend! my only friend! reply with all speed; if you are able to send the two louis d'or, do send them; I have not a sou. If you are unable, it does not matter; I have only fifty-five leagues to travel; but deliver me from my present disquietude; it is terrible . . . adieu! I adore you, I love you more than a thousand lives, more than the universe." And then follows a postscript of an unsentimental kind : "If you have not already sent the two louis, please let it be three instead of two." A little later this letter was

...

followed by a second of like purport. But still no acknowledgment; no reply. May 13th was a black day, for hope had grown strong that it would bring the still expected letter, and it passed like the rest-a miserable disappointment. Once again hope sprang up on the morning of the 14th Fabre had made an error in his reckoning; it was on this afternoon that the carrier would arrive. But once again hope died away in despair: "Point de lettre! O mon Dieu, que je suis à plaindre!" Yet the entry for the day closes without reproaches with the accustomed tender adieu to his beloved.

The date "May 15" is inscribed at the head of the next page. But the page is blank, and the rest of the volume is of virgin paper. Here then the story breaks. off, and we must not quarrel with it in a world which contains so many fragments, so many odds and ends. What was the issue of it all? You, reader, must help me with your conjectures. Did Madame Catan ever receive the later letters of Fabre d'Eglantine? Were they intercepted by guardian or brother? Had she grown weary of his amorous protestations, and doubtful of his prudence and discretion? There were bees, you remember, as well as roses amongst the emblems which represented the virtues of her soul. Can it be that Monsieur D, whose panegyrist she was, had an attraction for the industrious bees? And what of the afflicted lover? Did he after all receive the two louis, with that bonus of a third which he had asked for in his postscript, sent as the recompense for his long waiting? Did he trudge the miles to Carcasonne? And how did he settle the little account of which his polite landlord, he tells us, had reminded him? Pray, reader, make answer to these questions according to your pleasure. I can tell you no more than that Fabre's pupil, M. Audiffret, supposes that his master had been determined to tread the boards as an actor (which he certainly did) by "une intrigue amoureuse.' Was it the intrigue of which our journal tells us? And did some strolling company visit Avignon at this season of popular rejoicing, and as it crossed the bridge of le Pont St Esprit might Fabre, disconsolate and yet hopeful, be seen bringing up the rear? We cannot

tell. Paris.

He was about thirty years old when he came to His plays are now forgotten, though one at least deserves to live. We remember Fabre by the Republican Calendar, with its Germinal, Floréal, Prairéal

-a fanciful nomenclature furnished to Romme by Danton's poetical secretary. In Germinal of the Year Two he was executed, at the age of thirty-nine.

GOETHE.

I. -WILHELM MEISTER.

SIR JOHN SEELEY, who has written of Goethe with an intimate knowledge of his mind, even now rare among our countrymen, has described "Wilhelm Meister" as not the most attractive or the most perfect of its author's works, but as perhaps the most characteristic, and, as it were, the textbook of the Goethean philosophy. Yet he admits that most English readers lay it down bewildered, wondering what Goethe's admirers can see in it so extraordinary; "it still," he says, "remains the book which chiefly justifies the profound distrust and aversion with which Goethe has been and is regarded among those who are Christian either in the dogmatic or in the larger sense.

We all remember Wordsworth's sentence of indignant condemnation. We all remember De Quincey's article in which he employed a heavy flippancy to make the book look more disgraceful and ridiculous as it "travels on its natural road to shame and oblivion." And Mr Lewes's excuse was one of those excuses which seem to accuse: "All that can be said," he wrote, "is that the artist has been content to paint scenes of life without comment"-precisely what Goethe has not done F 1 Sir John Seeley's "Goethe reviewed after Sixty Years" collects and expands the admirable articles of the Contemporary Review, 1884.

in "Wilhelm Meister" for it is full of commentary on the life which it represents. Even Carlyle, its translator, was slow to comprehend the unity or the drift of the tale. "I go on with Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister,'” he wrote in 1823, "a book which I love not, which I am sure will never sell, but which I am determined to print and finish. There are touches of the very highest, most ethereal genius in it; but diluted with floods of insipidity, which even I would not have written for the world."1 It is not, however, for touches here and there that any true student of Goethe values the work. 'There is poetry in the book," wrote Carlyle to another correspondent,2 "and prose, prose for ever. When I read of players and libidinous actresses and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying and enlivening the 'Moral world,' I render it into grammatical English-with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyæna. . . . Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for three. I could sometimes fall down and worship him; at other times I could kick him out of the room."3 It was not until 1828-five years later-that Carlyle could write with entire confidence of Goethe as seen in his "Wilhelm Meister." "Here the ardent high-aspiring youth has grown into the calmest man, yet with increase and not 1 To Miss Welsh, "Early Letters," i. 219.

2 Mr James Johnstone, "Early Letters," i. 223.

See also Carlyle's "Early Letters," i. 269. "Meister himself is perhaps the greatest ganache that ever was created by quill and ink. I am going to write a fierce preface, disclaiming all concern with the literary or the moral merit of the work. .. What a work! Bushels of dust and straw and feathers, with here and there a diamond of the purest water."