in 1778, it goes, to every one's satisfaction, into a new edition.

Before this time Madame d'Epinay's health, never robust, has begun to cause her friends great anxiety. She would seem, like many delicate people, to bear, and to have always borne, her physical sufferings very pluckily. The little Emilie is with her a great deal. Grimm, never impassioned, is yet always faithful. He has an extraordinary attachment for the grandchild, which, perhaps, brings him the more often to see Louise. In 1777 she hears of Francueil's marriage to a daughter of Marshal Saxe. (Of this marriage is born a son, Maurice Dupin, who is the father of Madame George Sand.) In 1778 Louise sees in Paris Voltaire, now near his death. Rousseau (whose "Confessions" have had so fatal an effect upon her good name) does not long survive him. It is Madame's part, though she is herself not an old woman, to watch the going of almost all the acquaintances of her youth. Her situation is very lonely. Her husband's death does not make it any lonelier, perhaps. Her son is wild-after such an upbringing and amid such examples how should he not be? Her daughter has her own life to lead. What must be the feelings of the woman with death in the near future and that wasted existence to look back at in the past?

It

Is it repentance, agony, remorse, terror, that she suffers in these lonely hours of sickness and solitude? would not seem to be so. After all, "one can be but what one is."

The dying woman faces the great mystery with, at least, something of that légèreté with which the coquette of La Chevrette faced life. A sinner? Well, perhaps. But not half such a great sinner as most of one's acquaintance! If one lives self-deceived one may well die so.

Madame is removed presently to a little house at Chaillot, and there from

her sick bed composes and sends to Grimm, with a lock of her hair, the verses which begin:

Les voilà, ces cheveux que le temps a blanchis:

D'une longue union ils sont pour nous le gage.

She has friends and relatives about her to the end. Her last correspondence is with that chief of all the Encyclopædists, d'Alembert. And then her “Conversations” attain the supreme honor of being crowned by the Académie Française. So that she dies smiling as she has lived.

Her "Memoirs," which are chiefly known to English people through Sydney Smith's brilliant critique, owe their great claim to fame in the vivid pictures they give of Rousseau, Duclos, Voltaire, and many other minor celebrities. They are written in a style very bright, easy and vivacious. They record not a few inimitable conversations (as in the two scenes at Mademoiselle Quinault's), and here and there a memorable axiom. They present strikingly the life and manners of the day. Further than this they are worth little.

These are the "Memoirs" of false names and suppressions. Madame invents a tutor to tell the story of the charming Emilie, and only tells the truth about her because she does not perceive how damning that truth is. When, indeed, the conduct of this heroine has been too obviously shameless even for her to think it virtuous, she appeals very prettily from the reader's judgment and moral sense to that much more gullible thing, his feelings. The whole book is full of very brightly written details of very dull intrigues; of sordid details of bankruptcy and creditors; of minute details of old quarrels; of loathesome details of sickness and sin. If one wants to keep intact a

It is common report that "The Maid of Sker," and not "Lorna Doone," was of all his novels the late Mr. Blackmore's favorite, and many have been puzzled by his preference. There was much, however, to account for it in the circumstances under which the novel was written, though perhaps it was more especially due to the pride which Mr. Blackmore felt in the drawing of one of the chief characters. To me it would seem that only those who are well acquainted with South Wales and its people can fully realize the genius which inspires the book. I have lived for several years past just two miles away from the "vast lonely house" of Sker and in the very parish of Newton Nottage, where Davy Llewellyn schemed and poached; and my love for the book, which began in the old novel room of the Oxford Union some twenty-five years ago, has of late been ever deepened and widened, till it is no longer to me a subject of wonder that Mr. Blackmore set "The Maid of Sker" on the highest pinnacle of his esteem.

The Maid herself is a delightful character, and as Mr. Blackmore drew the infantile ways and prattle of Bardie from a favorite niece, it was natural for him to regard her with a particular affection. But the masterpiece of the book is Davy Llewellyn. To say that he is a typical Welshman, would be an insult to Wales, which has far nobler types of character to boast of; yet, nowhere else than in Wales could exactly such a character be found, for he is as truly Welsh as Sir Hugh Evans, with whom he has several points in common. But, saving Shakespeare's reverence, Blackmore's picture is even better than his, and such as needed the combination of rare qualities of apprecia

tion in the artist. A Welshman might have understood Davy as well, but he would have been to him too familiar a type to deserve artistic treatment; whereas an ordinary Englishman would have sketched Davy as an unredeemable villain. Blackmore, with rare insight, saw him exactly as he was, and recognized his possibilities. About Newton Nottage people will tell you that Davy Llewellyn was a well-known Newton poacher, and will point out where his house, lately pulled down, once stood by the village-green and facing the ancient church. They will show you the inns that he frequented, the Jolly Sailors, and the Welcome to Town, next door to the chapel, which are unaltered. But they see nothing wonderful in the portrait of Davy; it is to them a mere transcript of fact, tricked out with some foolish embellishments. Blackmore did not even change the name of his original; he only transferred him to an earlier generation and introduced him to picturesque adventures. But in taking an ordinary and every day character from the real life of a Welsh village, he has, by the force of genius, invested it with a peculiar charm. "The humble but warm-hearted Cambrian," garrulous and conceited, proud of his ancestor, the bard, and of his Welsh nationality, but ever ready to serve his own interest and not overscrupulous as to the methods of doing so; skilful in selling fish with a gamesome odor; cautious and crafty and subtle as any Boer; submissive to his betters, but, when provoked, dangerous (take, for instance, "his righteous action" of burning Parson Chowne's ricks), an arrant poacher, and with a weakness for rum and water,is yet withal brave, upright according to his standards, a good Church and

State man, popular generally with his neighbors (except Sandy Macraw), kind to his Polly, and above all is one who loves little children and whom little children love. It was by no means easy to make so complex a character attractive, yet while we shake our heads at Davy's weaknesses, we love him the more for them. We, like Miss Carey, even rejoice at the wild justice of his revenge on Chowne, and chuckle with him over his forcible conquest of Brother Hezekiah Perkins; nay, so good-natured do we become to his failings, that we not only believe at last that he out-manoeuvred Chowne, but are not offended by his hint that his was the genius that won the battle of the Nile.

But there was probably another cause for Blackmore's partiality, besides his fondness for the characters of his favorite novel. The district of Newton Nottage was one in which he spent some of his happiest days, when he saw his youth before him and possessed the fullest and keenest capacity of enjoyment afforded by a nature that was always eminently sensitive to enjoyment. At Nottage Court he often spent his vacations when he was an undergraduate of Exeter College, Oxford, and there he began to write "The Maid of Sker." It was then owned by his uncle, the Reverend Henry Hey Knight, who was a scholar and antiquary of considerable repute, and it is at this day in the occupation of Mr. Blackmore's cousins. It is an old Elizabethan house with a chequered history, and at one time was owned by a certain Cradock Nowell, whose memorial tablet is still conspicuous on the wall of Newton Church, and whose name, at least, must be familiar to lovers of the novelist and to readers of old volumes of Macmillan's Magazine. Another name connected with the house is that of Lougher, from a branch of which family Blackmore himself was VOL. VIII. 413

LIVING AGE.

descended. Colonel Lougher will be remembered as the good squire of Candleston Court, whom Davy Llewellyn esteemed "one of the finest and noblest men" it was ever his hap to meet. The name of Candleston is taken from an old ruined castle not far away from Newton Church, and though there was no Colonel Lougher living at the time of the battle of the Nile, there was a somewhat notable descendant of the Lougher family then resident in the neighborhood, Colonel Knight of Tythegston Court. Tythegston Court is a fine mansion, still owned by relations of Blackmore, two miles from Newton on the other side of Danygraig Hill, or, as Davy Llewellyn calls it, "Newton Down, where the glow-worms are most soft and sweet."

Nottage Court is a veritable museum of curiosities, the most remarkable of which is some old tapestry brought from Tewkesbury Abbey. But lovers of Blackmore would look with even greater interest upon an antique oak bedstead, finely carved with figures of Joseph and his brethren, on which the novelist himself often slept, and on which his father died during sleep, and upon some chessmen which Blackmore himself turned, for chess was always a great hobby of his. Nor would they despise some relics of the old Dissenting divine, hymn-writer and epigrammatist, Dr. Doddridge, whose granddaughter was the grandmother of Richard Doddridge Blackmore. His chair and a copy of Hickes's "Devotions," with notes in his own handwriting, are among these. The book belonged to his daughter Mercy, and suggests curious reflections, for its contents are of a much higher type of churchmanship than would be usually acceptable in a Dissenting household.

Nottage Court stands at the eastern extremity of the quaint hamlet of Nottage, whose houses are huddled together like a brood of little chickens

crowding for protection beside their mother-hen. Nottage itself stands at the apex of a triangle, and at the angles of its base are the other two villages of Newton and Porthcawl, which, with Nottage, make up the parish of Newton Nottage. Porthcawl boasts a harbor, a railway station, a large hotel and other modern improvements, and has more than a local reputation for its exceedingly bracing air. But with all these advantages it is deplorably modern, and Newton and Nottage look down upon it from the dizzy height of their antiquity. Davy Llewellyn could not have lived at Porthcawl; it would not have suited a man of his ancient lineage, though it was good enough for Sandy Macraw, whom local tradition identifies with one McBride, whose relations still live and flourish there. As was in former times the difference between the Welsh bard and the envious Scotchman, such is still the difference between the autochthonous aristocracy of Newton and the democratic aliens and immigrants of its upstart rival. But perhaps we are more tolerant now than our predecessors. There was no love lost between Davy Llewellyn and Sandy Macraw; Sandy would not have been disinclined to get rid of his rival. One day when he, that is McBride, was attending a cousin of Blackmore's, who was shooting on the sandhills, they chanced to catch Davy poaching, and McBride "half in fun and half in malice," shouted to his companion to shoot him. We do not now meditate shooting Newton people.

I have mentioned Porthcawl, because it was the home of Sandy Macraw, and also, because apart from "The Maid of Sker," its name is more generally known than that of Newton Nottage. It lies on the Glamorganshire coast, some thirty miles west of Cardiff and twenty southeast of Swansea. Sker House is two miles westward, and its loneliness is now relieved by troops

of golf-players, for there are excellent links in its neighborhood. The name should be pronounced Scare. Blackmore took his title from a Welsh lovesong written in the last century by a harper of Newton concerning one of the daughters of the tenant of Sker House. When Delushy calls herself Y Ferch o'r Scer in answer to Sir Philip Bampfylde's inquiry, she uses the Welsh title of the song.

It is, however, with Newton, next to Nottage, that Blackmore himself was more particularly connected, for one of his uncles was rector of the parish and ministered in its old church, and in Newton churchyard his father lies buried. The inscription on the gravestone, written by Blackmore himself in that rhythmic, half metrical prose, which is characteristic of much of his work, is worth quoting.

I. H. S. After three-score years and four, spent, from infancy to age, in labor, faith, and piety, the Reverend John Blackmore, of Ashford in the County of Devon, was borne in his sleep to that repose which awaiteth the children of God. September 24th or 25th, 1858.

The grave stands in an exquisitely pretty spot; the old Norman church with its massive tower looks over the churchyard with its graves planted often with fragrant flowers, and over the green outside, where the geese gabble and the children play, even as Bardie and Bunny played of old. The well of St. John the Baptist, famed from ancient time for its curious ebb and flow, is hard by on the edge of the sandhills; but old Davy could not now sit there with his cronies and the children around him, nor can children go down the steps to draw water, for the well is fastened up, and the water is drawn from an ugly pump, outside. Eastward and southward stretch the brown wastes of the sandhills, grim