I AM not exactly what is called a jaded man of letters, but I dabble in literature, and I now address a defrauded public. Yes, a public defrauded of four of the best novels ever about to be penned. It's a strange story, and I can scarcely command my feelings sufficiently to tell it calmly, but told it must be. I had made up my mind to write a series of novels. If "to play gowf ye maun hae a heid," to write a novel demands some appendage of a like nature; also an ink-pot, several pens, some paper, and above all, peace and quiet. Having made sure of these materials and conditions, "Now," said I, "for currente calamo;" so down I sat before my study table. I must tell you that though I am a stoutish, fresh-coloured, middleaged man, and nothing if not commonplace (as I once overheard a friend remark), I have a good deal of the Maid of Orleans about me. She had "voices"; so have I-two voices, "and everything handsome about me." The one voice says, "Wire in." The other, "You had better take care what you're about." I don't listen to the last. I call him the Represser, and I generally manage to silence him. The other I call "Backer," and I always listen to him, for he knows what's what. I was just putting down in neat writing at the top of my paper the words "Frail Ord'nar," for that's the name of my first-born novel, when Backer called out, "Holloa, old fellow! you don't suppose you can set to work on a novel without the necessary concomitants." "What concomitants?" I asked. "Here am I, the live author

there's my ink, here's my pen, behold my paper!" "But where are the unities?" he asked, in a dry tone. "What are the unities?" said I. "Look up at the ceiling," said he. I looked up, and saw some queer things like bats, all claws and wings, very Kataptustoi indeed. They reminded me somehow of the Eumenides; though, to be sure, I had never seen them.

"Now," continued Backer, "if you don't attend to the unities, they will be down upon you and entangle their claws in your hair.” "Dear me!" I said, "and how am I to keep on good terms with the nasty beasts?" For answer, Backer vouchsafed to enter on a long whispered explanation with me, at the end of which he said aloud, "Macte virtute! I am off for a holiday," and vanished-if a voice can be said to vanish.

Primed with his advice, I was up betimes next morning, and proceeded to my study, where I cleared the four corners of the room and set the writing-table in order. My next act was to open the bath-room door and drag Diogenes out, tub and all, and bump him-no light weight, I can tell you-along the passage into the study. "Whipper-snapper,' -this was the name he chose to call me,- "put me in the corner away from the window. I hate draughts." I obeyed. I was anxious to keep on good terms with the old brute, and had even brought him down a new blanket— for his own had been got B.C. 400, and was nearly worn out. But I was inwardly chafing at the disrespectful way he treated me—me, a middle-aged, florid, stoutish man,

an elder in the Church too, and member of a well-known firm. I controlled myself, however, and went away to fetch no less a person than old Dame Justice. I found her groping about at the end of the passage. She's terribly blind now, poor body! and the oculist isn't born who can cure her cataract. I gave her my arm, and we walked back to the study, her scales clattering and twanging like cymbals in her shaky old hands. I was very respectful to her, addressing her as "Madam," sometimes "Dear madam," and I seated her on a stool in one of the corners as far away from Diogenes as possible. Then I went up-stairs to the sewing-maid's room, and opening the door, called out rather sternly, "Saucy jade, follow me. You'll all have guessed who was sitting there. Fortune, of course, -wheel, short petticoats, trim ankles, and all. I always address her either as saucy or fickle. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, fickle say, Tuesday and Saturday saucy; and the week after I give her three saucies and two fickles.

,,

This is de rigueur. "If I'm jade, I suppose you're jaded," said she, as she tripped after me downstairs. "I shall call you jaded man of let- no, that's too long: let me see-man of letters. We'll take the initials M. O. L., add an e for the sake of euphony-molejaded mole; that's what I'll call you." I felt my face getting very red at this gratuitous insult, but I knew it wouldn't do to give myself away; so I again controlled my temper, and said lightly, "Saucy jades generally take their own way; pray, be no exception to the rule.” "I'll have the corner next old Di," she cried; "we can give each other hints." I felt the net closing round me at these words. I, who the day be

fore had been a free agent, now found myself in iron bands; and the worst was yet to come. I had still the fourth corner to fill. "C 'Ay, there's the rub;" "the rubadub-dub-three men in a tub,” thought I, with an insane hysterical leap from Hamlet to Lear (Edward—not King). Three men in a tub indeed! One's bad enough. But courage.

I had now before me the appalling, bewildering task of finding and capturing the spirit of the age the Zeit Geist, the in-theswim imp. I knew he was somewhere about; but he is such an elusive wretch, to look for him is like looking for your own spectacles, and never finding them till you catch sight of them on your own nose as you pass a mirror. As I was wondering whether or not to go down and search the basement storey thoroughly first, I heard him bawling out"Man, restless, yearning, strives to catch

The Spirit of the Age!
To bottle him or throttle him,
Or put him in a cage.
But no one ever catches me,
So Protean, sly, so changeful I,

Or ever will, I gage;

The Spirit of the Age."

"You're there, you little devil, are you?" said I, peeping over the banisters; but at the first word he was gone like a shot. And then began a hunt which even now makes me hot all over to remember a regular game of hide-and-seek. What a dance he led me!-now flying up the atticstairs, the perspiration streaming down my face,-now stumbling, tumbling down the dark kitchenstairs,-then in the pantry,- -anon in the lumber-room. At last I caught him by the scruff of the neck in the housemaid's pantry. Then the difficulty was to hold

an

Then

him. One moment he was inert mass of protoplasm, the next an amoeba with an insinuating leg or arm put out to deceive. he became a species of hedgehog, and I was obliged to whisk a duster round my fingers, he was so prickly. At length, however, I got complete mastery over him, and carried him safely into the fourth and last corner. There I pinned him in with a heavy table. "Now," said I, "I won't call you Spirit of the Age; it's Dickensy and out of date. I shall call you Modernité-a name invented by a clever young friend of my own, and very suitable, conveying as it does a whiff of that nasty French polish with which our stout old British timbers are being overlaid." "I'll call you anything that happens to come uppermost," said he, impudently. "And now set to work, old Puff-adder-that's the American for a favourable reviewer,-just what you are, you old milk-and-water sop. I've read your critiques-not much bite in them." I could ill brook the insolent tone he was adopting towards me, but I knew that I must keep on good terms with my comitants," so I swallowed down my rising choler and seated myself at my desk.

(( FRAIL ORD'NAR."

con

A TALE OF THE ABLATIVE ABSOLUTE.

PROLOGUE.

Scene.-A Fife village girt by golden sand. In a kailyard stands an old woman in white mutch and checked shawl gazing with blue untroubled eyes seawards. Another old dame in sun-bonnet creeps towards her up the path between rows of cabbages. "Weel, Jenny Herd, hoo's a' wi' ye the day?" says the sun-bonnet. "Ou,

I'm fine the noo," replies the mutch; "but for hoo lang? that's the bit. Hoo are ye yersel', Annie Lonie?" "Ech, wumman! I'm just in my frail ord'nar."

CHAPTER I.

Ay, my good woman, in your frail ord'nar; so am I-so is he so is she-so is everybody. Who among the sons of men will dare to contradict this sad sweeping assertion? The Vox humana crying in the wilderness, "Frailty, thy name is woman," cries, "Frailty, thy name is no less man." We are born in frail ord'nar; in frail ord'nar we die. Frail ord'nar has set her seal on the wistful face of poor Humanity. Here and there above the crowd one may be seen a head and shoulders higher than any man in Israel; but with these avaкTes ȧvdpŵv my tale has naught to do, for "the gross and scope of mine intent" gaze encloses a dense level mass of struggling forms all bearing the sad token that "in frail ord'nar" they live and move and have their being.

I had got thus far, and was feeling quite inspired by the beauty of my own composition, when that nasty rasping voice from the tub called out, "Whippersnapper, it's about time for a squeeze of verjuice, isn't it? I'm your man. Let's hear what you're about with that story." "Oughtn't my wheel to be doing somebody a good or a bad turn about now?" asked Fortune, yawning. I saw she was a very forward young person and would require snubbing, so I didn't answer. "It'll be getting rusty if you don't look sharp," she went on. "If you'll loosen the bandage on my eyes a bit," quavered out old Dame Justice, "I'll see what I can do

for some of your characters." "Thank you, dear madam," answered I, speaking very loud, for she was getting very deaf. "I'm not come to my characters yet; and you know, madam, that you always come in at the very end, to restore the balance,—to see that the villain gets his deserts, the good people their rewards. Take a nap now, there's a dear. I'll call you in plenty of ti

At that moment my face and head were suddenly enveloped in the folds of a fusty old blanket, and before I could articulate, my hands and feet were bound with a rope which that old monster must have secreted in his tub, and I found myself lying on the floor under my own writing-table-a pretty position for a man of my size, age, and respectability. Just suppose any of my friends had happened to call-and it wanted only about half an hour of the time when I should be due at my office, 37 North Blank Street. It was really intolerable. I could hear that minx Fortune tittering, and I knew that Modernité was grinning from ear to ear, and there was that old dog-in-the-blanket sitting wrapped in the new blanket in my writing-chair, with my pen in his hand, busy finishing my cherished, long-projected novel. I could have wept tears of rage-impotent helpless rage. "How dare you?" I cried in a voice thickened by blanket "how dare you ? just as I was getting into the swing of the thing. You'll never carry on the story on the lines I laid downyou don't understand my style, my way." "I know your milky way," he broke in; "you might take command of a pap-boat, if they still use those vessels in the Royal Navy or Nursery, but you're not fit for much else," he sneered. How long I lay fuming and suf

focating I know not, but hours seemed to pass while I lay listening to the scratching of the pen. At last he rose, "The gall I left behind me," said he chuckling, and I heard him wiping his pen on a corner of the new blanket, the old miscreant! Then he twitched the old one off my head, undid the cords, and was back in his tub before I could crawl out from beneath the writing-table.

I took up the MS. It was finished. That battleground, lit with the watch-fires of the eternal verities, and patrolled by the stern figures of Duty, Honour, and Renunciation, which I had sketched out for the play of human passion -how tenderly I had meant to fill it in! weaknesses thrown into the shade, virtues standing out like the muscles in a strong man's arm; Love lord of all; Frail Ord'nar ever en évidence of course, but ever showing potentialities of higher things; the legs and feet of clay calling for kind handling because of their poor brittle substance, and the head of pure gold catching a radiance from afar. Such had been my conception. And now, that old cynic had gone and left the mark of his canine tooth in all the rosy-cheeked apples of life, had poured his bitter absinthe into the vin ordinaire served at the table of "Frail Ord'nar." I will not sadden the reader by transcribing the tale as he wrote it. I only give a few of the mildest passages I came across, and I put them in italics to emphasise my sad chagrin. Milk is the alpha, gall the omega, on man's menu card. Of an old bachelor whom I had meant to depict as a dear cheery-cheeryble sort of fellow, he says: He was an old bachelor who gave good dinners to male friends in the old style. And when the cloth was removed and

the wine going round, it could be seen that his misogyny had not so fine a polish upon it as his mahogany. How jarring is such a sentence! Poverty is a hamper—an empty one. Now if I had written that, I should have added, No empty one, but constantly filled by the hands of kind friends. There is only one instance on record of a cupboard without a skeleton-old Mother Hubbard's; there wasn't even a bone in it. We each of us live in a Fool's Paradise, but the added bliss of making that Paradise a Hell to others is not given to each of us. In the springtime of youth there be many who taste of the cup of brimstone and treacle; thereafter the roads diverge, and there be those who look for treacle and those who look for brimstone—nevermore may the two be quaffed together and for the most part they find brimstone. In the game of Life spades are always trumps, for we can't get into our graves without them. Modern Scepticism would aver that the last trump will be a spade with which the grave of the whole Kosmos is to be dug, and which will flatten down the sod on the top of Eternal Nonentity.

I don't like this kind of writing. It depresses me. It horrifies me. And it was all so unlike what I had meant it to be. I flung the MS. into a drawer. I had no redress. One can't knock about an old man upwards of two thousand years old, especially an old man in a tub. Charlotte Corday might have done it. I couldn't. I could only go off, late as it was, to my office, and hope for better things with my next venture. A night's rest quieted my nerves, and I came down to my study resolved to show a brave and even serene front. The concomitants were all very quiet. Fortune was oiling her

wheel, and took no notice when I entered. Diogenes was dozing, Justice snoring loudly, and Modernité was standing on his head to restore circulation. Now for a good undisturbed spell of work, thought I, and seated myself softly before my materials, and headed my paper thus

PROXIME ACCESSIT; OR, JOCK THE LAIRD'S BROTHER.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

CHAPTER I.

I entered life as proxime accessit, being the twin brother of a rich baronet with entailed estate. Ten minutes earlier would have seen me the heir, but Destiny had resolved that I was never to be the rose-only the next thing to the rose. Gili khush bhui, &c., as the immortal Saadi sings. I was to go through the world secure of some prize, but never of the first-secure of one wing of the chicken, but never the liver wing. I was to love some one else's first love; to marry a widow; and if I live long enough, as the Irishman says, I shall probably be buried next to a greater man than myself. In tracing my history from the cradle to the grave, the reader will note the subtle working out of "Kismet." It has been my fate to dree the weird of proxime accessit all through life. But I must not linger on the threshold of the chamber of Fate. Enter. I follow, being proxime accessit.

"Mafish (nothing) can come from mafish," said my eldest brother one day, emptying the whole contents of a perigord pie on to his plate, and a bottle of Chablis at the same time into his tumbler. He had just been up the Nile, and spoke the language. "Masoup and mafish used both to come up