red-gold. The wild grasses spread sheets of straw-color or lemon yellow. There is a new undertone this winter, which gives everything a fresh value. One evening in June a large tract of the heath caught fire, and after rolling up columns of smoke visible many miles round, it smouldered on dully for days and weeks. A grisly sight enough for the wilderness seemed changed to carbon. But now, when the later fern and grasses have had time to grow, one sees its sombre majesty. Every blade of yellow grass is picked out distinctly on the blackened surface. The blanched moss runs here and there in threads of salted whiteness. The bracken is best of all, for it glows against the dark slopes, pale gold or old gold, and when you come close to it the withered fronds are seen to curl over like delicate pendants or cunning work in filigree. Above it all, on the ridge that crests the heath, stands a scarred group of pines, a far-known landmark. Half a dozen trees in full growth, and as many bleached and sapless stumps beside them. They had been in the thickest of the fire, and their patient resistance was the event of it. Tongues of flame ran up them, pillars of smoke wrapped them from view, but when it was all over they emerged unconquered.

They have long dominated the scene with a gaunt, spectral look, and a curious suggestion of defiance. One has fallen at last, and another, which always had an improbable slant, seems now to defy gravitation at nearly half a right angle. All have been more or less scorched by the fire. Of the satellite stumps some lie shattered, but others are still erect, fantastically mutilated and suggesting nothing so much as the poles to which a wandering tribe might affix its totems, or possibly the remnants of its larder. Indeed, standing there one instinctively has a

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sense of primitive loneliness, for there are no animate things except some young wild duck sporting in the pool below, or perhaps a heron beating its heavy, steady flight above, the long neck profiled in reptilian outline. One looks at the trees, attributing one's feelings to them with an unconscious animism. Has the soul of the wild place passed into them, and do they know it? If so, they might be grimly satisfied to see that the heath remains deaf to the calls of the hour. It has not yielded another inch to spade or plough; but there are one or two rotting gateposts which show mockingly that attempts at cultivation have been made years back, only to be swallowed up again in the wild. For signs of fresh tillage you must look away to the skyline, where some more squares of arable have appeared on the downs. None the less the heath has found a new and sinister enemy. Across an intervening ridge there have been slowly rising into view some strange erections, which look like a caricature of the blasted pines. They have the same mutilated appearance, and slant upwards at the same strange angles. You must go much nearer to see that they are the derricks and the skeleton for a large building meant to house an airship. Rumor has it that of late this building process has slackened; so perhaps the steel rival will vanish after all, and the pines remain unchallenged. They frown on the intruder from their dark stronghold, the vestige of what was once a huge tract of moorland. In this age-long contest between industry and nature, one's sympathies should be, no doubt, with toiling man. If they are not, it must be because toil is not the last word of humanity. There is a kinship, after all, between human nature and the wild, and some deep instinct of the race goes out to these last sanctuaries of freedom.

THE present writer recently received two picture post cards from a friend in Cornwall. They arrived in the afternoon, and, laying all other care aside, he spent the rest of the day in meditation upon them. There is, indeed, matter for much reflection in these pictures. They depict two renderings of the story of St. Christopher painted upon the walls of the Church of Poughill, near Bude. The reason for the repetition of the subject is said to be that in the original picture the artist confused the saint with King Olaf, and represented him with a crown. This was corrected in another painting, that on the south wall of the church, in which he wears a gorgeous jeweled Byzantine halo. (Personally, we think we like these heavy gold plates for heavenly wear almost better than Perugino's rims of light.) The writer has never himself seen these frescoes, is ignorant of their date, and can give no details about them. He can only testify to the deep refreshment and pure delight which these copies give him, and which it seems to be the peculiar property of the old symbolic painting to impart to the spirit of man. There is something in it which at once illuminates and feeds the mind.

The medieval painters loved the world, but they saw it with a supernatural light upon it. In the sixteenth century art became a merely worldly thing. Men painted the world better, but the light that once really was on land and sea had faded from them. On the other hand, religion became merely devout. The jolly legendary saints were supplanted by the severe professionals of the Catholic Reaction. We suppose these pictures may have been

painted in the good day of Hans Memling and Jan Van Eyck. They are full of the twin blessed spirits of fantasy and common sense. St. Christopher, a figure of great dignity and beauty (notably in the first painted picture) has around him the setting of a whole pre-Raphaelite world. The first thing that strikes one about these frescoes is a certain completeness of imagination, that great mark of the Middle Ages. The present writer himself once made a ballad of St. Christopher, and he here confesses with shame that it never occurred to him to give the hermit a lantern. Not to have thought of such an elementary concrete thing argues a sort of blindness. This blindness, this want of common sense, seems to belong peculiarly to our own time. In present-day hotels, for instance, the bed-room candlestick has disappeared, killed by the electric light, though assuredly the need for it is as great as ever. In antiquity, in the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century people had light to go to bed by. But in our own day, in pretentious hostelries with all their pomp and paraphernalia of lifts, telephones, and electricity, again and again one gropes one's way to bed in the dark. You go up dimly-lighted stairs, stumble through passages and corridors in total darkness, endeavor to guess at your room, give up the idea, descend again in search of a concierge or at any rate a match. If you succeed in finding your room without help, again the electric light button has to be groped for. In that beautiful detail of the hermit's lantern held up above the dark flood over which St. Christopher bears his sacred burden, one sees the capacity of the Middle Ages for the

thinking out of things, the common sense informing all their fantasy. The individual medieval artist would probably not himself have thought of all these details. One cannot think of everything, as they say. But they had all been thought out for him. He depended upon, he was supported by, a tradition which was itself an embodied common sense. But where is the common sense, the comfort, the enlightenment of a world without bed-room candlesticks? To this have we come amid all our profusion of mechanical appliances.

This completeness of imagination is again shown in the representation of the stream. It is not merely a pretty stream, a gloomy stream, any stream, some particular stream. This stream is cosmical; it flows from the world's heart. It bears upon it and within it all that move in the waters. There go the ships; and such ships! They are the ships of St. Ursula. Who does not know, by the way, how a fleet of fishing boats at rest in their harbor seems to be a singing choir, to make a harmony? How often a discord is brought in, the beauty and the happiness of such a scene is marred by the presence of a 'destroyer' or some such hideous and hateful monster in the midst of it. But in this cosmic river which flowed from Eden in the beginning, there are no such things. Its ships are ‘noble Christian merchantmen to sail upon the seas,' as Mary Howitt says, or fishing boats that let down their nets for a draught. In both pictures the river teems with fish. But the most delightful detail of all is a mermaid, golden-haired, white-breasted, silverscaled, who in the first picture swims between St. Christopher's legs. In one hand she holds a mirror, with the other she combs her hair. This fancy of the mermaid again is something one would never have thought of. Often, indeed,

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in old ballads and pictures one does come on things which it seems one would never by any possibility have thought of! But neither would the old painters and makers have thought of them by or of themselves. They were a part of the tradition they were there for them. The mermaid no doubt came into this picture from Greece, by way of Byzantium. She belongs to the same world as Proteus rising from the sea, and old Triton with his wreathed horn. The creatures of the Greek mythology as well as the poets and sages of antiquity had a place in the popular imagination, and found their way into Christian pictures.

We are inclined to think that there was in the Middle Ages an imaginative conception of the world, a tradition of its history, if not shared by everybody, at any rate very widely diffused, and, of course, the common property of artists of all sorts. It was as much a part of their outfit as their brushes and colors. There was a mental picture of the great outstanding figures, who were not merely names, but who were realized in their habit as they lived, or, at least, according to the traditional representations of them. In Southern and Eastern Europe, possibly to some extent in Celtic countries, we believe that this still exists. To give an instance which may perhaps be thought trivial: we remember being told by a Russian or Polish barber in the course of his operations, that 'the philosopher Aristotle always shaved his head.' How did the man pick up such a curious little detail about a philosopher of four-and-twenty centuries ago? It may have been gathered from some book or the recollection of some bust seen in a museum. We are bound to admit that we cannot recall anything of the kind ourselves. Neither, though it has been our lot to talk to many barbers on a great variety of subjects, did we ever

come across another who found occasion to mention Aristotle at all. We think it probable that here we hit upon a fragment of an age-long tradition, coming through the Christian centuries, but embracing the mythological creatures, the gods and sages of antiquity, preserved at any rate in part in a pictorial form by the Byzantine icon makers. Peasants of the Western Islands still speak of 'the Greek woman.' From this traditional storehouse the old painters took their materials. The world for them was a great temple of which the walls were frescoed with the creations of the human fancy and the shapes of the illustrious dead.

In the serene atmosphere in which these pictures were painted, we are far from a world of greed and lust and blood. A Director of Propaganda of Liberal and Humane Ideas (if such a functionary existed) would do well to scatter these post cards about by hun

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dreds of thousands. Liberalism, humanism, if you like (it is the same thing), is the sacred cause which poets serve. They diffuse a large unselfish view of things together with which Prussianism cannot live. To-day in these lovely frescoes we can find a parable. The stream through which St. Christopher strides, and in which the mermaid swims, is the worldstream. Black or leaden-gray by night, the dawn will show it grass-green and crystal clear, and in the full warmth and light of the sun it will take on such colors as were on the sea in the image of the world before the Creation, as it lay in the mind of God. The dumb giant, the great, strong, inarticulate common man, struggles through the ice-cold flood, carrying and saving for us all the precious burden of justice. and freedom and peace. So, at least, we are told, and we try to believe it. We hope it is so. But it is still night, and we need the hermit's lantern.

It is less a question of how to read biography, than what to read and in what order, for at present there is no guide through the mazes of the subject. Biographical literature is a maze without a plan. The art is in its infancy. There is no philosophy of undressing in public as yet, and the whole idea of mental déshabille was nil before Sterne. A great number of people want to know the expected, their imagination wants help in realizing the external trappings and stages of a career. It is the career they are enamored of. They want the details of the bill-of-fare of a successful life, with something in the nature of a second-hand experience of la vie publique. They are the public for the abiographic life, or the life that is no life, the two volumes of platitudes published by permission of the family council, undertaken at their request by the recognized man of letters, who collects the material for each chapter into a separate envelope, gives the whole thing a vigorous shake, diffuses an air of rosy benevolence over the countenance, and leaves most of the subsidiary parts of the picture - the hair, the lace, the boots, the periwig to the 'prentice hands of his secretary or amanuensis.

But there are readers who seek the unexpected. They want to know the secrets that the career invariably hides, and from St. Augustine downwards there have been self-revealers to respond to these cravings. Foremost among these for all time probably is Jean Jacques Rousseau. While Field

ing was endeavoring to present a graven image to be the exact semblance of the species Man, Jean Jacques determined to effect a similar purpose. But, he argued, the only typical man I know or can know is myself. He proposed, therefore, to turn himself inside out, and this he did with as much sincerity as is compatible with literary passion. By devious routes and with varying objectives, St. Simon, Montaigne, Pascal, Flaubert, Heine, Tolstoi, Anatole France, have sought to publish realities,' 'real life,' the subject-matter of the biographer. Nor have we lacked great articulates who have 'looked into their hearts and wrote.' Very thorough, very English, completely undogmatic, foremost stands Pepys. Pepys practised autobiography in secret like a hasheesh eater; but we have plenty of avowed confessors, such as Haydon, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Mark Pattison, Father Tyrrell, and the author of Father and Son; and there are implicit 'My own story' tellers in abundance, in the front rank among them George Borrow and George Gissing. In spite of the declared phlegm of the English, there seems to be more biographic tinder lying about for sparks to alight on in England than in any other country. Ours is a country of Nonconformists, and our Dictionary of National Biography is a monument to the ubiquity of the Nonconformist divine.

Before Queen Anne, biography was an unknown art. The vanity of men of letters (which is capable of most things) may be deemed to have begot