move him, if you wish."

They may then get whom they will to dig the graves and do the work and pay them how they will, these new sort of vicars and these impudent parish councillors. His old friend Death has a kindly eye to the parish sexton,

"Elisabeth de Bavière," by Constantin Christomanos, is as revolting and sickening a book as hysterical and decadent literature has produced. This indelicate Greek cad, admitted as reader, travelling companion and teacher of Greek, to an intimacy as strange as it was inappropriate with the late Empress of Austria, shows his appreciation of that injudicious Royal lady's favor by the publication of a perfervid and maudlin volume, supposed to be the tale of their odd relations. When we read, towards the end of this hideous book, that the Empress said to him: "I can be influenced neither in good nor in evil, for I abandon everything to my interior voices and to my destiny. Have you not remarked that I know more about you than you yourself do? At a first glance I know what men are worth"-we sincerely wish the poor distraught woman, victim of so many unprecedented domestic disasters, had possessed in reality the gift she boasted of, in which case she would have shuddered away from such companionship as she deliberately chose in this maundering rascal.

The book is worthily translated and prefaced by two howling Nationalist humbugs. It is a singular fact that the Nationalists cannot possibly touch anything they do not lamentably soil, mar, or render ridiculous. I can only explain it by the supposition that Nationalism is a form of madness, and not a pleasing or interesting one at

that. A certain part of France went off its head recently, and has not yet recovered its mental or moral balance. And so a professor of France, M. Gabriel Syveton, disgraced publicly for his political frolics in the unterminated Affair, awaiting the joys of a general rising on a level with that of the Boxers of China, which he and his extraordinary party fondly aspire to, employs his leisure in translating into literary French the unhealthy ravings about an unfortunate sovereign lady of an hysterical Hellene. And M. Maurice Barrès, that apostle of literary blackguardism, gravely prefaces the treason in the high, unmelodious French of which he rejoices in the secret.

The woman is dead under tragic circumstances, and for this reason, if for none other, has a claim upon silence and respectful sympathy. Her life was not a happy one; her nature was not a happy one, and she was mistress of neither. Members of her family still live for whom she is a sacred and private memory. A whole nation has mourned her as empress; a smaller race has loved her as a queen. Are these things of no account to heartless outsiders? Must the woman and the sovereign be held, for the world at large, as mere matter for the self-advertisement of a blatant fool like Constantin Christomanos, as food for the vulgar and the indiscreet? We will admit-poor crowned eccentric, who could not wear her coronet of thorns

without public revolt-that she gave herself as a meal to the indiscreet, but is that a reason why the decent among us should not feel an ardent desire to kick and maul the poetical M. Christomanos? Even M. Barrès, with his famous cult of his "moi," and his wellknown indelicacy of pen, is obliged to head a quotation from the learned doctor's pages with this significant statement: "You will realize what faults and qualities are those of our guide only in reading this first page, charming in its love of beauty, and in which we recognize a distant brother, all impregnated with Orientalism, of our Julian Sorel." Now Julian Sorel, Stendhal's hero of "Rouge et Noir," is the sorriest, the most squalid and unspeakable cad of all French literature. In seeking a fit and base comparison, it would be difficult to sink into a lower depth of humanity. Here are extracts from what M. Barrès calls the self-revealing page. The Empress desires to learn Greek, and M. Christomanos, a young student at Vienna, having been recommended to her, a court carriage calls at his door to take him to the palace. He awaits the Empress by order in the Park:

I was filled with unutterable emotion. Around a bush trembling under the innumerable gold flowers of the mimosa, hives of bees hummed. All these little balls in flower shed with their intoxicating perfume a golden smile. In truth, they knew not that they were there as much for me as for the bees, that their glance, their embalmed breath should render for me the hour unforgetable as well as give honey to the bees. I still feel the ineffable poetry of that hour of waiting, which carried me far away from myself towards the distant infinite, which precipitated me in the abysm. So that, when I came back to myself, I was the prey of a strange sensation as if from greenish and crepuscular depths of the sea a powerful wave had cast me upon a land foreign and unknown to the land of life. And while I waited there my heart was more and more filled with The Academy.

the certitude that I was on the point of seeing appear what my life would hold most precious. Suddenly SHE was before me. I felt HER approach, and the sensation of her coming seemed to have sprung within me as long as if I had lived through it hours and years. SHE was before me, bent a little forward. Her head was detached upon a background of white parasol radiant with sunshine, whence started a kind of vaporous numbus round her forehead. In her left hand she held a black fan slightly inclined to her cheek. Her eyes of clear gold looked fixedly at me, scanning the features of my visage, animated with the desire of discovering something there. Did they find what they sought? Was it later that they smiled upon me, or from the first did they greet me with those smiling beams?

What

Poor Elizabeth of Bavaria! ever she may have sought in the visage of the modern Hellene, she assuredly could have found no trace of the gentleman. Now a poet, a romancer, may write this sort of stuff by the yard when it is a question of a lover and an anonymous mistress; but for an unhappy dead lady, but yesterday having won with her blood a niche in history, to be made the subject of this tasteless lyricism, is a revolting thought. Did she really pose as he makes her, printing "she" and "her" in capital letters, as travelling over an unappreciative universe in dual solitude with Dr. Christomanos? Wherever you

meet them-at Lainz, Schönnbrum, in Ionian waters, in the paradise of Corfu-it is never the Empress of Austria and her surroundings; it is eternally Elizabeth of Bavaria talking of her soul and her philosophy of life in the hushed twilight of dawn, in the glimmer of russet woods, upon a sunlit sea, along moonlit lawns and shadowy glens with the eloquent Dr. Christomanos.

Like Browning's Star, he would have us believe that she opened her heart to him, and we feel sorrier for Elizabeth of Bavaria than a little while ago.

H. L.