are "valuable public servants," and if the country is to be served by snubbing its inventors and reformers, the praise is merited. The church and universities supply this article in plenty-a dense, inelastic, heavy compound of wood and wet blankets, warranted to damp any powder and corrode the hardest shot. In social life success depends upon the proper adjustment of Wads. Take dress, for example. How often do you see the effect of an expensive and otherwise tasty toilet marred by some slight defect or anachronism. Observe the meeting of two of those whom a vile rhymer in these pages has described as "Dear woman! who divides our joys, You will see each one sweep the other with a quick, pitiless glance from the hem of her robe to the topmost twig of her bonnet; and if that glance darts upon and fixes at some particular spot, be sure that there a misplaced wad has been detected! A little hole in a glove, an attempt to disguise last year's hat in this season's trimming, an interpolated breadth in a skirt, a glimpse of some mystery of underwear that is not quite as fresh as it might be; some speck upon the sun which is imperceptible to male vision stands revealed to woman's quicker sense, and up goes a little smile of triumph on the one face, and the other assumes an expression which sitting upon an ant's nest might produce. Do you not count amongst your acquaintance people who give you a very good dinner, and yet spoil it by bad service or inferior accessories? I have, at a pinch, drunk champagne out of a pomatum pot, but that is no reason why I should not have a bright, light, shapely glass when I am within the pale of civilisation. In the science of dining the wads are all-important. I can make a shrewd guess at the character of a house in this respect by an examination of the cruet-stand. If that give evidence of daily attention, be sure that you will be well, if plainly, treated. You will have the best within the means of your host; but if the mustard-pot be smeared in brown patches, if the Worcester sauce be mud, if there be no stopper (but a fly) in the oil-castor, and the anchovy sauce be caked round the neck of its flask, then, if you be wise, a previous engagement will deny you the pleasure of dining at that house. When that house gives a dinner it is a thing of flurry and confusion, of vanity and vexation of spirit. The first arrival will find a half-dressed child howling in the hall. The viands prepared at home will be alternately raw or overdone. The lid of the salt or pepper-box will have fallen off when the soup was being seasoned. The things from the confectioner's will be cold. The man from the greengrocer's and the natural male domestic will quarrel audibly. Your Château Margeau will be poured into a glass fluffy with the fibre of a cotton cloth, and you will be lucky if you are not served with a wiped knife when the game appears. Half of this vexation would be avoided by a similar reduction of the variety, and the rest by a careful attention to Wads. Let your servants see that a fuzzy glass and a wiped knife are good enough for you when you are alone, and how shall your guests escape ? Pages might be written upon the greatness of little things. How many times have you been helped to remember important events in the past by the repetition of trivial circumstances in some way connected with them-a name, an old joke, a dress, a tune-something which acts upon your memory as the rack-screw of a microscope acts upon its lenses, and brings the object clearly into focus? What is the attraction of a cat in comparison with that of the eminent tragedian, Mr. Boanerges Buskin? Yet let pussy run upon the scene when that gentleman is delivering Hamlet's soliloquy on death, and she will "take the stage." The crack in the vase, the stain on the garment, take the eye. A slip of the tongue or a foolish saying are remembered against us for years, and our success, of which we are so proud, is forgotten in a week! There is a bishop who lately, speaking without Wads, recommended ducking in the horsepond for certain of Her Majesty's lieges. When will that slip be forgiven? A ship, says the proverb, may be lost for want of a "pennurth" of tar; and just in the same way, a reputation may be sacrificed for want of a Wad. Maurice Bouchor. BY WALTER BESANT. THE new French Poet: the latest candidate for the post of national singer. Great is the ambition of him who aims at the rank and title of poet, because the value of the prize is incalculable. It is the affection of a people, perhaps of the world, for ever. Statesmen may confer greater benefits, but they are not necessarily loved therefor; gratitude is a cold feeling; the obligation conferred is divided among so many; he who will may repay by enthusiasm: and Belisarius is not the only great man whose reward has been neglect. But the poet is different he interprets thought, and suggests it. He gives words to feelings which would otherwise die away inarticulate; in showing a little more of the soul than others can see he seems to lay bare the whole; he detects new analogies between mind and matter; he is the true metaphysician, who teaches more in a couplet than all the philosophers with all their books; he pours sunshine upon the clouded and colourless life; he decks out joy in fitting words, and clothes sorrow in a garb that is beautiful as well as appropriate. A great work, indeed; but of this crown, above all others, it may be said that many there are who run and but one receiveth the prize. the If I were to train a boy expressly for the divine mystery of verse I should be careful to educate him through the senses. He should be able, like Solomon, to tell all the flowers of the field and every bird in the air. He should be admonished to notice what goes on round him, just as Robert Houdin trained his son in that special faculty of observation which seems only developed at present among entomologists, finders of old coins, and ladies who watch how other ladies dress. He should be taught that perfectly neglected art, the science of smell, so as to detect the delicate nuances of perfumes, how they may be classified, and brought to bear in proper order upon things of life :-fancy what an immense stride in civilisation it would be if we could persuade each other that the smell of roast meat in a house is really injurious to the finer perceptions! He should be taught the due gradations of colour: half the world, as was demonstrated by Liebig, are partially colour-blind, for want of early training. He should be taught to feel the influence of form; he should learn to paint and draw, so as to be humble at the feet of Nature; and he should be able to play at least one instrument, so as to appreciate the art which is to some a fuller poetry. Added to this, so much of science as to make him reverent before the Divine order; so much of literature as to make him respect the great men of old; and then, if we take care that he be healthy, strong, and active, the education of our poet would be complete. After all, he would most likely turn out to be no poet, while some young fellow with no education to speak of, or only the kind of thing you may pick up anywhere, writes the world a dozen ballads which make him a joy for ever. I believe that the late Lord Lytton was carefully trained in everything that a man has time to learn; he became a great novelist, but no one reads his poems. There is a new poet in France, as I first learned from M. Edmund About, in the Athenæum. He is young; so young as to make his volume a literary curiosity; he is original, in so far as he is unlike the versifiers who spring up as the flowers of the hedge, and are as short-lived and as like each other; he is full of spirits and gaiety, which would be remarkable in a young English poet, but is much more remarkable in a young Frenchman, and of the present unhappy time; and he has steeped his soul with Shakespeare, as well as with those glorious old French writers whom we in England are just beginning to read, and in France they are beginning to imitate. I feel much obliged, personally, to M. About for introducing me to the volume of M. Maurice Bouchor's verse, and I hope that I may be allowed to interest others in what has been to me an extremely interesting study-the first-fruits of a young man's mind. I know nothing at all about M. Bouchor save what M. About tells me, that he is only eighteen. Eighteen! At that age Clément Marot was beginning his career with a 'Ballade de soy mesmes;' at eighteen Keats, at Edmonton, was reading Spenser's Faery Queen;' at eighteen Byron had only begun the Hours of Idleness;' at eighteen poor Chatterton's work was ended; at eighteen most young men keep their verses in their desks, guarding them with a sacred jealousy; and at eighteen Maurice Bouchor presents himself a full-blown poet, asking with so confident an air to be heard, that we must needs stand and listen while grey-haired men await their turn. To me the book, as the work of a boy of eighteen, is little short of a literary phenomenon. It has ease, freedom, grace; it shows a large reading; it has command of language; and above all, it has the promise that only the presence of real poetic feeling can give. Can the author be really only eighteen? If so, when did he begin his work? For he manifests in this single volume three distinct and separate mental stages. He is as full of sentiment in one as the lover of Maud; in the second he plays on a rural oaten pipe, not unskilfully, variations on the lines that he borrows from Shakespeare; in the third he is carried in a divine rapture to that time-it is a time past, present, and future with the true Gaul-when all joys, all gaiety, wit, gladness, and joy of life seem granted to those who drink. This, his third stage, is apparently the latest, because it comes last and gives its name to the volume. He may, perhaps, be more than eighteen, but he is assuredly a very young man. The signs of youth lie thick on every page; you can see the beardless cheek and the lip just touched with down behind the mask in which he plays his sighing lover, his cold and hardened sceptic, and his jolly red-nosed toper. For if he loves, it is that abstraction of womanhood-beautiful, gentle, ethereal-whose features are ever shifting, whose eyes have no expression in their brightness, whose voice we hear not. She is Egeria, Chloe, anything you please; but she has no personality, and in sighing for her the poet proves at once his youth and his healthy manhood, in that he feels the yearning after the completion of life, and only dimly guesses in what manner it may be completed. He has not, again, unlike the poet of my scheme of education, learned yet to observe. He loves Nature as a poet should. The lilac's perfume, the sobbing of the brook, the lawn bordered with forget-me-nots, the swallow in its flight-all these things give life and inspiration to his thoughts; but as yet he feels them largely and generally, just as a youth. And then, as another proof of his youth, he has parted with his creed. Arms folded, resolute, sorrowful, he gives up the religion that he learned at his mother's knees. Many young men of great promise have done the same, dreaming that they have made great and original discoveries, at which the spirits of Berkeley, Whately, and the crowd of Christian advocates, back through all the centuries, will fly shrieking into Limbo. As the world still goes on its course undisturbed, and their challenge meets no opponent, they mostly subside into the ordinary channels of human faith, and are forgiven their rebellion. M. Bouchor first throws the stone and then drops his tear. I fancy the stone-throwing, with which he opens his volume, must have been written last. We find it in the Introduction, which seems to me singularly graceful in form and expression. I venture to put this, as well as most of the extracts which follow, into English rhymes of my own. Those who are discontented with them may blame the translator as much as they will, but are requested to reserve their judgment as regards the poet. I. The gods of Greece, like those who made Their names and laws, were stern and grim; Blithe lives they lived, great mirth they had. And so the bards in worship meet, And laughed, and harped their hymns divine, |