the first of these he seemed the better for the change. He always retained a strong interest in the country, and the news of the Phoenix Park massacre affected him very strongly. It had been his constant prayer that he might not survive his powers of work, without which, he says in the closing chapter"there can be no joy in this world." And it was at this time that he conceived the idea embodied in that curious story The Fixed Period,' which first saw light in the pages of 'Maga.' The law of his imaginary republic of Britannula was to provide that "men should arrange for their own departure, so as to fall into no senile weakness, no slippered selfishness, no ugly whinings of undefined want, before they shall go hence and be no more thought of." In their sixty-seventh year they were to be "deposited" in a kind of college, and after the interval of a twelvemonth be put to a painless death. When an intimate friend once ventured to refer to this Utopian euthanasia as a somewhat grim jest, he stopped suddenly in his walk, and grasping the speaker's arm in his energetic fashion, exclaimed: "It's all true —I mean every word of it." He was fond of quoting, in the way of preference of a speedy to a lingering death, Lady Macbeth's words "Stand not upon the order of your going,

But go at once."

The end came to him very much in the manner he had wished and prayed for, and at an age in singular accordance with his theory. Dining in London with his brotherin-law, Sir John Tilley, he suddenly after dinner showed slight symptoms of affection of the brain. He recovered sufficiently to be driven home to his temporary lodgings, but was found there, later in the

evening, in a state of partial paralyis and almost speechless. He lingered five weeks, without much suffering, but never recovering intelligible speech or sustained consciousness, though generally able to recognise the members of his family. He died on the 6th of December 1882, in his sixty-eighth year.

His mode of working was very methodical, and such as probably would not have been adopted by any other writer of fiction. For many years of his life an old servant had strict charge to call him every morning early enough for him to get seated at his writingtable by half-past five. With the help of a cup of coffee, he would write on, with his watch before him, for some four hours or so (though he considers three hours as much as a man ought to write), until he went to dress for a late breakfast. Then his work was over for the day. He required from himself 250 words every quarter of an hour; and, in his days of full activity, he "found that the 250 words were forthcoming as regularly as his watch went." This made ten printed pages of an ordinary novel the produce of the day. The daily tale of pages was entered in a diary, ruled for the purpose for as many days as he allowed for the completion of each new novel, and any casual idleness of one day was made up by a little additional work on the others. Thus he was always free from those anxieties which beset some popular writers as to the due supply of "copy." He had even contrived a portable tablet on which during long railway journeys he could write in pencil what could be afterwards copied out by another hand. Latterly, most of his novels were dictated throughout to an amanuensis, as he found that the continual use of

his pen threatened him with palsy of the hand.

One of his shorter stories-'Dr Wortle's School '-was written in a country rectory-house, which had been lent him by a friend for three weeks of the summer holidays. He is understood to have expressed a wish, which his son has duly respected, that his correspondence should not be published. But a few characteristic lines, written by him on this occasion, may be quoted without violating the spirit of his injunction.

"That I, who have belittled so many clergymen, should ever come to live in a parsonage! There will be a heaping of hot coals! You may be sure that I will endeavour to behave myself accordingly, so that no scandal shall fall upon the parish. If the bishop should come that way, I will treat him as well as e'er a parson in the diocese. Shall I be required to preach, as belonging to the rectory? I shall be quite disposed to give every one my blessing.

Ought I to affect dark garments? Say the word, and I will supply myself with a high waistcoat. Will it be right to be quite genial with the curate, or ought I to patronise a little? If there be dissenters, shall I frown on them, or smile blandly? If a tithe pig be brought, shall I eat him? If they take to address me as the Rural Anthony,' will it be all right?"

He loved his profession. "There is perhaps no career in life," he says, "so charming as that of a man of letters." He had little patience with the eccentricities of genius, or with any pretension on the part of an author to be free from the practical obligations which bind ordinary men. "I make no claim," he says, "to any literary excellence; but I do lay claim to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession." As a profession he regarded it; and he contends

that, like any other profession, those who enter upon it and follow it heartily, have a right to expect that success shall find its pecuniary reward. For himself he confesses that his "first object in taking to literature as a profession was to make an income on which he and those belonging to him might live in comfort." He knows well this will be counted heresy in the eyes of those who think that neither the author, nor the painter, nor the sculptor should entertain the money notion at all—that in so doing they "forget the high glories of their calling"; but he holds it to be no more disgraceful to them than to the barrister, the physician, or the clergyman,-to the actor or to the architect.

"It is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money. Few do so, and those few in doing so suffer a defeat. Who does not desire to be hospitable to his friends, generous to the poor, liberal to all, munificent to his children, and to be himself free from the carking fear which poverty creates ? And yet authors are told that they should disregard payment for their work, and be content to devote their unbought brains to the welfare of the public. Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much. Take away from English authors their copyright, and you would very soon take away from England her authors."

But of his calling as a writer of fiction he entertained, from another point, a far higher view than is commonly taken of it. He held that a large proportion of the teaching of these days comes, to the young especially, from the pages of the novelist; that the novelist is therefore, of necessity, a preacher of ethics, and that it behoves him to look well to it that his preaching be for good and not for evil.

"Such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one, by search through the works of the six great English novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest?

Let a woman be drawn clever, beautiful, attractive-so as to make men love her, and women almost envy her-and let her be made also heartless, unfeminine, and ambitious of evil grandeur, as was Beatrix,-what a danger is there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it, what peril of doing harm! But if at last it have been so handled

that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say, 'Oh, not like that! let me not be like that!' and that every youth shall say, 'Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom; anything rather than that!' then will not the novelist have preached his sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it?"

But the whole chapter "On Novels" is excellent, and will be read with interest even by those who may not fully accept his views.

It has been charged against his own novels that they are commonplace, that they never rise above the prosaic level of ordinary English life. Let us hear his own defence on this point,—or, rather, his justification. His deliberate aim was that in his pages his readers "might recognise human beings

like unto themselves, and not feel themselves carried away among gods or demons.”

"If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure, and sweet, and unselfish ; that a man will be honoured as he is true, and honest, and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. Such are the lessons I have striven to teach; and I have thought it might be best done by representing to my readers characters like themselvesor to which they might liken themselves."

No one can lay down these volumes without having been struck by their transparent honesty. If

the writer tells us too little about himself, it is not because he had anything to conceal, but because he was so entirely free from that conceit of authorship which believes that the details of an author's private life are matters of deep interest to the public. And whether young writers may be inclined or not to follow all his precepts,-to seat themselves at their work before six o'clock in the morning, and lay down rules for so many pages per diem, they will do well to take him for a model of singleness of heart and manliness of purpose, and to remember how he was in all things, in thought and deed, the high-minded English gentleman he delighted to portray.

ABOUT five miles from Safed, perched upon one of the flanks of Jebel Zebud, a mountain of the Jebel Jermuk range, is the celebrated shrine of Jewish pilgrimage called Meirôn,-whither I proceeded one afternoon, accompanied by a picturesque cavalcade of a dozen horsemen. There was a Sephardim Rabbi, in yellow flowing oriental robes; an Arab sheikh, in the wide-sleeved abaye; a couple of Britons, in the conventional pith helmet, shooting-coat, and gaiters; sundry European Jews, in gabardines and ear-curls; and a fellah or two on donkeys to wind up the procession. Our way led us down into one of the most fertile plains of northern Galilee, past the head of the gorge down which flows the brawling Leimuny into the Lake of Tiberias, and so through corn and olive groves, until we began to climb the hill on the slope of which is situated the large domecrowned building that was to be our resting-place for the night. This consisted of an oblong enclosure entered by a gateway through the massive wall- -on one side of which a flight of stone steps led to a terrace above, upon which opened a series of chambers surmounted by cupolas that marked the traditional resting-place of the various Rabbis celebrated in Jewish history who have been interred at Meirôn. It was probably this fact which contributed to invest the neighbouring town of Safed with its peculiar sanctity; and indeed this whole region is interesting to the student of Jewish history posterior to the time of Christ, as having been the birthplace, so to speak, of Talmudism, and as having been the home of the men who have

stamped with their impress the Judaism of the present day. Hence it is that each year Jews flock in thousands to their place of sepulture. As Monsieur Rénan says,-"The Judaism which one touches at this spot is the Talmudic Judaism which made the name of Tiberias so famous; and it was from the first to the third century after Christ that this part of Galilee was the centre of Judaic learning and aspiration." It is perhaps not to be wondered at that the interest of Christians in Jewish history should cease with the death of that most remarkable of all Jews who gave His name to their religion; but the fortunes of the race after the destruction of Jerusalem have a significance which lasts to the present day, when the localities to which they are especially attracted seem likely once more to be the centres of what may ultimately prove to be a national restoration. How little we know of the details of the revolution of Barcochba, and his bold and partially successful attempt to re-establish Jewish independence;_or of the history of those two Jewish communities which were organised before the close of the second century after Christ, one of which, under the Patriarch of Tiberias, comprehended all of Israelitish descent who inhabited the Roman Empire; and the other, under the Prince of the Captivity, to whom all the Eastern Jews paid their allegiance! It was in those days, so shortly following the destruction of Jerusalem, that Meirôn occupied a prominent place in Jewish history. It is noticed in the Talmud as a city of priests. The tomb of Rabbi Eleazar bar Khasma, for whose body the inhabitants of

Meiron and Giscala-the modern El Jish are reported to have fought, is said to have existed at Meirôn, as well as a school of Rabbi Simeon bar Jochai, in which, as he is the reputed author of that most mystical and remarkable of all the cabalistic books, the Sohar, we may conclude that the secrets of the cabala were taught. Both he and the Rabbi Eleazar are buried here; and when we remember that they were among those named by Judah, son of Bavah, secretly, before he was slain by the Romans, to re-establish the Sanhedrim under Simon, son of Gamaliel, we cannot wonder that in the eyes of the Jews their burialplaces possess an especial interest. Besides these, there lie here the remains of the famous Rabbis Jochanan, Sandelar, and Shammai; but, more interesting than all, of the Rabbi Hillel and his thirty-six pupils. Of all Jewish reformers and moral teachers, none has left a more enduring mark than the Rabbi Hillel. Indeed it is maintained by Jews that the Christian morality, so far as the purely ethical side of it is concerned, is all to be found in the teachings of the Rabbi Hillel, which at the time of Christ had enlisted the sympathies of all the most devout and aspiring souls of the nation, and was therefore well calculated to impress itself upon his ardent and intense nature.

There is no object of greater interest at Meirôn than the cave which contains the tomb of this celebrated teacher and his thirty-six pupils. It is situated on the steep slope of a hill, at the bottom of which, fifty yards below, tumbles a mountain torrent- an uncommon sight in Palestine-with water enough to turn a flour-mill. It rises in the Ain el Jin, or fountain of spirits, who are supposed to control the irregulari

ties of its flow, and is the principal source of the Leimuny. Here the gorge expands sufficiently to allow some orchards of figs, apricots, and pomegranates to be wedged between the steep rocky sides; and a large spreading weeping-willow close to the foaming stream, as it falls over the mill-wheel, gives a character to the scene at once novel and refreshing. All these gardens and the mill are the property of Jews, the greater portion belonging to the Rabbi who accompanied me. As we enter the first chamber of the cave, we find a recess on the right and on the left, each containing four sarcophagi in niches, with stone lids with raised corners. Passing through a doorway cut in the solid rock, we enter a cave about twenty-five feet by eighteen, with two recesses, each containing four sarcophagi on the right, and the same on the left; while facing us opposite the door is a recess about twenty feet long and eight wide at the entrance. Becoming wider at the extremity, and curved after the fashion of an apse, it contains four loculi; and on each side are other recesses with sarcophagi. All these sarcophagi are not provided with lids, and there is room for five more, there being only thirty-two; so that it would seem as if, though the loculi had been prepared for the whole of the thirty-six disciples, five had not been buried there. There were several other tombs in the neighbourhood, one of them about twenty feet square, containing ten sarcophagi, which I believe to have been the tomb of "Hillel the younger." Indeed there are many more Rabbis and celebrated persons than those whom I have enumerated buried here; and all the rocks in the neighbourhood are much cut in places into steps and olivepresses, tombs and cisterns. Be