that he was to be at Overton every day of the week.

He had been known to be going shooting, and to be going shooting near the Hall, quite close up to the house, in fact; and as such an arrangement infallibly meant that he must be asked, or ought to be asked in, or that he would come in without asking, Matilda, quick as thought, had taken occasion when the plans were being made, and when Whewell himself was standing at her elbow, to send a message to her daughter through Robert, the only other person present, to the effect that she would ride over to the cottage in the course of the afternoon. She had even done more she had added, somewhat emphatically, a playful codicil, announcing that her visit was to her grandson, and that she therefore hoped the grandson would be visible, and would be glad to see his dear grandmother. Alas! some one else had been also visible, and very glad to see the dear grandmother. Whewell had noted the riders pass, and had left his sport on the instant to fly at the higher game; and this from a sportsman was enough he could not more effectually have shown his hand.

He had meant to show it: it had seemed to him time to show it; for the bold barrister had done more than merely fall in love with Lady Matilda, enough as that might have seemed for a four days' acquaintance, he had fully made up his mind to become her suitor-and more, her husband. He had thought it all over; the birth and the jointure, as well as the beauty and the wit; and this was the result: he felt himself to be a lucky man—a very lucky man.

It would have been well for him

to have looked into his luck a little more closely; it would have saved him much disappointment, a little pain, and a lifelong bitterness,

and it would have saved Lotta a week's heavy house-books. For, with so fair a prize to win, and so much depending on the use he made of his present opportunity, it was not to be expected that Whewell should be in a hurry to go, even though the entreaties of host and hostess waned in urgency, and though the courses at dinner were perceptibly curtailed as the week went by.

What cared he for courses, his head running on Matilda? He wanted nothing of Endhill, nothing but bare house-room-and not even that, would Lord Overton only have been a little less obtuse. Had he had his will, he would have been at one place, one all-engrossing place, from morning till night; and, indeed, so confident was he that it only needed a few decisive strokes to carry the day, that he could scarcely understand how it came about that no chance of giving these seemed forthcoming. He thought the Overton brothers needed a jog on the elbow; and accordingly one afternoon, when matters were thus at a stand-still, he made his way over early, but not too early-not early enough to be put off with luncheon by the innocent Teddy, nor to place in an awkward predicament his sister. By arriving shortly after four on an ungenial day, he could spin out the time till a hope that he would stop dinner should drop out naturally; then a messenger could fetch his portmanteau in a trice, and all would be happily arranged. If Lord Overton or any one else should suggest, "Take a bed here,' very well; there would be no need for saying "No." He had been prepared for anything, would agree to everything, and confidently hoped

the best.

But the visit went on, and there was no word about sending for the portmanteau, and at length he was

fain to jump up, watch in hand, and be amazed at the lateness of the hour, and vow he must fly like the wind to be in time for Mrs Hanwell's very, unfortunately, primitive dinner-hour. He declared he had forgotten dinner altogether. Did Lady Matilda think he could possibly walk over in three-quarters of an hour, and would her daughter be terribly severe were he a little late? He was really terrified, he would not stop a single second longer.

"I'll see you back in my Tcart," announced Teddy, with a very fair show of obligingness, considering that he was inwardly raging against his sovereign lady, who had bound him over to do so sorely against his will, and, as he had told her, against his conscience also, "For you know the lies I shall have to tell if I do," he had said; "and it's too bad of you to make me tell lies when there's no need for them." But she had been inexorable: he was to drive Mr Whewell back, and it was all nonsense about the lies; he was simply to do it there was no lie in that; whether he liked doing it or not, was his own affair.

The argument had not closed when Whewell himself had appeared on the scene, and he now interposed eagerly, for he thought he saw daylight somewhere: "No, really; I could not think of your troubling yourself."

"Oh, no trouble; I should enjoy it of all things," said Teddy, with a look of dreadful exultation at his sister. "There is nothing I like more than a drive in the wet." Another look. "And hark to the rain now! It's pouring cats and dogs!"

Here Whewell stole a glance at Matilda also. "Oh, if you like it," he responded dolefully; "there is no accounting for tastes. But I

confess I am not a fish or a duck. However, it is my own fault for not being off sooner.

"No hurry. I'll tool you over in twenty minutes or so. The Tcart, Charles," to the footman. "Tell them to look sharp. I let them know it would be wanted some little time ago." Then, in answer to a warning expression on his sister's brow, "I should have gone out anyway, Whewell," he concluded, thus in his own mind serving Matilda right. She had now made him tell three lies, if not four, and he had thus shown her that he was the one who knew best, and that the thing could not have been done without.

But even with the ordering of the T-cart, and the bustle of getting ready for it, had come no opening to Whewell for a quiet word with his hostess. Teddy had not been allowed to leave the room even to put on his coat and get his gloves and hat, without showing the visitor out first; and even in pressing the lady's hand as his adieux were being made, he had been unable to convey any sentiments, since she had chosen the moment, the very moment, when his fingers touched hers, to give directions about posting a letter. Her "Good-bye" to him, and her "Don't forget" to her brother, had been spoken in a breath.

Then Friday's attempt had been still more of a failure. Lady Matilda had not only been out, but had remained out, and he had not seen her at all; and although he could not, of course, be sure that it had been done on purpose to avoid him, and though he had refused to feel hurt and annoyed, or to take the matter as having any serious aspect, yet he had been unable to forget that he had distinctly promised he would himself bring over from Endhill some ex

pected documents for Challoner, and had named the time at which he would appear. On Friday night he had begun to think that he should not have quite so easy a path to tread as he had at first anticipated.

Lady Matilda, on her part, hoped that she had shown the man his place.

She had desired to do it gently. She still liked Whewell, and liked to be liked by him; and would he now go, would he only vanish from the scene while there was still peace and goodwill between them, and while no words had passed which could cause regret or unpleasantness in the future, he should be at once reinstated in her good graces, and all presumption should be condoned and forgotten. Oh, if he would only go; if anything she could say or do would make him understand; if Robert would but exert himself to shake off his friend; if Overton, of his own accord and without being prompted, would but withhold the shooting! Oh, if they would but see, tiresome ignorant stupids that they were! They had not an eye among them.

All this she said to herself twenty times a-day, and she had no one else to say it to. No one helped her, no one comforted her; and accordingly it was with a somewhat sombre brow, and a little droop at the corners of her mouth, that Lady Matilda sat in her little room, deserted even by her faithful Teddy, ruefully wondering what was to happen next-whether she must actually quarrel with Whewell, and, to pry still more closely into the secrets of her foolish heart, it must be owned that there lurked down in its depths all a woman's unquenchable desire to stand well with a lover to the last,-whether she must throw him off in the end,

VOL. CXXXIV.-NO. DCCCXVIII.

and say, "Mr Whewell," in the most awe-administering tones she could muster, or whether

The door opened, and she started to her feet, with difficulty suppressing a cry.

It was only Challoner, and the parted lips melted into a smile. Only Challoner! And who and what was he? It mattered little what he was he was not Whewell, and that was enough.

The relief was such, that the warmest of welcomes was scarcely warm enough to the speaker's mind. She could almost have kissed the rough hand she held, in gratitude for its owner's being merely himself and no one else. With him, all at once, she felt she had no fault to find: he stood before her in his integrity, and nothing could be laid to his charge; no languishing gleam from his eye had ever had to be avoided-no forward, too forward movement to be repressed; with him she was safe-on him she could still dare to shine. It was a dangerous rebound.

And undoubtedly it caused surprise in the minds of the ignorant pair.

Teddy, indeed, had had his own ideas as to the reception his friend was likely to meet with, and he had looked deprecatingly into Matilda's face, and had hidden behind Challoner's broad back as the door opened; while Challoner himself, if the truth were told, hung his head like a child, and slouched like a criminal. By common consent both had stolen along the passage without opening their lips, and they had striven to turn the door-handle noiselessly and advance inoffensively, and thenwhat was this? Instead of being met by majesty in arms, an angel beamed forgiveness !

It was not an angel that whispered in Jem Challoner's ear at that moment.

3 E

BIOGRAPHY is a very ancient branch of literature. Long before Plutarch's time, the most eminent Egyptians had their lives written in minute detail; and probably, after the manner of our own day, the record was revised by the subject of it. But in the subsequent disposal of it, a great difference is apparent between their practice and ours; for, on the death of the hero of the tale, his biography was wrapped round his mummy, and buried with him-never more to be seen of man, except by accident, some thousand years later. many persons, the readers of Mr Low's former production among the number, this Egyptian mode of dealing with biography will appear well worthy of consideration.

To

Why Mr Low, who seems to belong to the Indian navy, should constitute himself the biographer of military commanders, and the chronicler of, and commentator on, military operations, does not appear; for neither professionally nor otherwise does he seem to possess any qualification for the task,-the determination he displays to cover his subject with fulsome and foolish adulation being scarcely to be counted an advantage. We should imagine that the acceptance by Sir Frederick Roberts of such a chronicler must be due to the fact that the General is serving in India, and that Mr Low's previous works have not penetrated into that remote dependency-for his Life of Lord Wolseley might well serve as a warning.

In that patient chronicle every operation in which " our hero (as Mr Low,

with some dim reminiscence of the manner of old novelists, styles him) was concerned, no matter in how subordinate a position, is described at length and with full

details. Everything that he did, everything that he left undone, and everything that he would, under other circumstances, have done, is made matter for some of that ridiculous glorification which trickles from Mr Low in a perennial stream, and at once creates a prejudice in the reader who compares the achievements with the panegyric. The memoir begins with the inevitable pedigree, and the almost equally inevitable attempt to prove that its subject had been an infant prodigy. "When a mere child," we are told, "he had read all the chief works on military history;" so that he must have been almost, though not quite, as extraordinary an infant as that follower of his whom he affirms, in one of his recent despatches, to have been born a cavalry leader, and might naturally be expected to grow into the character which Mr Low subsequently thus portrays: "He is facile princeps, not only as a soldier and administrator, but as an author, artist, and surveyor." Then we are informed, as a noteworthy fact, that in his first voyage "the sea, with all its terrors and fascinations, was novel to him." The occasion when he "first smelt powder in earnest " is made the subject of the following profound reflection :

"In his life had arrived that most critical and anxious time for which every soldier yearns - -the hour had struck in which he was to receive his

baptism of fire.' Every man who has worn a sword knows full well how many gallant hearts there are in both services who have prayed for this most honourable opportunity, but have been denied the distinction they would have earned had a hard fate been more propitious. In his incomparable "Elegy," Gray sings how 'Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed'

are bent only on the plough in the painful struggle, continued day by day, to gain a bare subsistence. So, in some remote country town, or cheap watering-place, may be seen gallant gentlemen on the half-pay or retired list, who drag out their remaining years in obscurity unhonoured' as far as medals and decorations go, and 'unsung' by the Muse of History [Mr Low himself], but who, had they been born under a luckier star, would have been immortalised in history as the possessors of qualities that we recognise in a Napoleon, a Wellington, and a Lee."

Like the voyage out, "the voyage home was performed without any noteworthy incident," and the aid of poetry was therefore required to wind up the chapter impressively. "Though his absence from his native land had been brief," says this devoted biographer and remorseless twaddler, "it had been eventful; and on being released. from a long period of confinement and suffering, and treading once more the turf of Old England, his feelings were not inaptly described by Wordsworth's lines

""Tis joy enough and pride For one hour's perfect bliss, to tread the grass

Of England once again!"

The operations in Burmah, more than thirty years ago, are described as minutely as if for the newspapers of to-day, because Mr Low's hero was an ensign in the operating force; and the dates on which he, like many hundreds of officers, was on duty in the trenches before Sebastopol, are recorded as carefully as if they were to be festivals of the Church. He was also, Mr Low has ascertained, specially under the care of Providence on one occasion, "a merciful Providence bore him through that terrible fire to increase his renown on many battle - fields;" and on another, when he was on board a waterlogged ship in a gale,

"Providence destined the gallant hearts on board the Transit to fight their country's battles in a great crisis, and the gale moderated." In another passage, Mr Low laments that he is not Homer, and compares Captain Wolseley to Achilles. "Failing the pen of 'the blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle' [he cannot even quote correctly], we will in homely prose depict an event in the life of our hero, who, like Achilles in his ardour for the fight, was impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer!" Later on, while celebrating his hero's not uncommon desire for

common

"The

active employment, Mr Low, in rising to the height of his subject, tramples not only on sense, but on grammar. soldier-diplomatist ruling in Cyprus at this time was 'a statesman if you will, but a soldier above all,' and was anxious to be in the thick of the fray; his eager, heroic nature, to whom war, with all its turmoil and excitement and soul

stirring incidents, was as a second nature, panted to exchange the labours of the administrator for the risks and responsibilities of the General."

Though happily not common, it is, we suppose, not difficult to manufacture such stuff, and call it biography; and in this way Mr Low contrived, in 1878, to put together a couple of volumes. In these labours, if we may really accept his own account, he had not trusted to his own inspirations alone; for the preface says that he applied to Sir Garnet for assistance, "who consented to give me all the information in his power. Thus, at numerous interviews, whenever he had a spare hour from his duties at the War Office, as head of the Auxiliary Forces, he told me " (here follow a couple of quotations from "Othello," with which we need not trouble. our readers).