object of affection, hand or voice; it could | hour, a sick woman had seen one of the not be but that the latest look of the eyes, dead sitting beside her, come to call her before their final closing, would be strange- hence; and from the broken talk, evolved ly vivid; one would go with the hot tears, with much clearness the notion that not the cry, the touch of the wistful bystand all those dead people had really departed er, impressed how deeply on one! or to the churchyard, nor were quite so would it be, perhaps, a mere frail retiring motionless as they looked, but led a secret, of all things, great or little, away from one, half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite into a level distance? free by night though sometimes visible in For with this desire of physical beauty the day, dodging from room to room, with mingled itself early the fear of death no great good-will towards those who the fear of death intensified by the desire shared the place with them. All night the of beauty. Hitherto he had never gazed figure sat beside him in the reverie of his upon dead faces, as sometimes, afterwards, broken sleep, and was not quite gone in at the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair the morning-an odd, irreconcilable new cemetery at Munich, where all the dead member of the household, making the must go and lie in state before burial, be- sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and hind glass windows, among the flowers and suspect by its uncertain presence. He incense and holy candles — the aged clergy could have hated the dead he had pitied with their sacred ornaments, the young so, for being thus. Afterwards he came men in their dancing-shoes and spotless to think of those poor, home-returning white linen — after which visits, those ghosts, which all men have fancied to waxen, resistless faces would always live themselves—the revenants-pathetically, with him for many days, making the as crying, or beating with vain hands at broadest sunshine sickly. The child had the doors, as the wind came, their cries heard indeed of the death of his father, distinguishable in it as a wilder inner note. and how, in the Indian station, a fever had But, always making death more unfamiliar taken him, so that though not in action he still, that old experience would ever, from had yet died as a soldier; and hearing of time to time, return to him; even in the the "resurrection of the just," he could living he sometimes caught its likeness; think of him as still abroad in the world, at any time or place, in a moment, the somehow, for his protection-a grand, faint atmosphere of the chamber of death though perhaps rather terrible figure, in would be breathed around him, and the beautiful soldier's things, like the figure in image with the bound chin, the quaint the picture of Joshua's vision in the Bible smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself -and of that, round which the mourners across the air upon the bright carpet, moved so softly, and afterwards with such amid the gayest company, or happiest comsolemn singing, as but a worn-out garment muning with himself. left at a deserted lodging. So it was, until on a summer day he walked with his mother through a fair churchyard. In a bright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an open grave for a child a dark space on the brilliant grass the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing down the little jewelled branches of the dwarf rose-bushes in flower. And therewith came full-grown, never wholly to leave him, with the certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physical horror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. No benign, grave figure in beau iful soldier's things any longer abroad in the world for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above them possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. For sitting one day in the garden below an open window, he heard people talking, and could not but listen, how, in a sleepless

To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions like these attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested by religious books, which therefore they often regard with much secret distaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual thoughts as a too depressing element in life. To Florian such impressions, these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the years, of the relationship between life and death, had been suggested spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by actual circumstances; and religious sentiment, that system of biblical ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to him as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a lively hope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he yielded himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of mystical appetite for sacred things; the more as

acts and accidents of daily life borrowed a sacred color and significance; the very colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings, like the sacred stuffs of Moses' tabernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in the first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep effusive unction of the house of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for the reception of our everyday existence; and for a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe, generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent.

they came to him through a saintly person | der, each to its appointed rest. All the who loved him tenderly, and believed that this early preoccupation with them already marked the child out for a saint. He began to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards remained- a sacred history, indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking a mirror, towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and dulness, and see themselves therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacred transaction - a complementary strain or burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of some higher and more consistent harmony. A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacred personalities which are at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this region in his intellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend still further to realize and define. Some ideal, hieratic persons he would always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there. And he could hardly understand those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves quite happy without such heavenly companionship, and sacred double of their life, beside them.

Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place in his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm or beech-tree; mere passengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial errands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings; marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angels thereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asun

Sensibility the desire of physical beauty - a strange biblical awe, which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemn music these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the age of twelve years, he left the old house and was taken to live in another place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating much from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the days till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little careless about others, even, in his strong desire for it when Lewis fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer. At last the morning came, very fine; and all things-the very pavement with its dust at the roadside - seemed to have a white, pearl-like lustre in them. They were to travel by a favorite road on which he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of those two prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than ever before, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had started and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been left behind, and must even now- so it presented itself to him- have already all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart, of one left by others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as he passed in search of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in their denudation, and at last through that little, stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realization of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home-sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him, he

was driven quickly away, far into the rural | grown-up relatives happy and content. distance, so fondly speculated on, of that favorite country road.

But we must not defend youth through thick and thin. There is one peculiarity of the gentle tyranny now so cheerfully acquiesced in by every true and tenderhearted parent, which, we venture to assert, There is no need to be cynical or unfair, has never been approached in any species or to try to make out that lads are a whit of servitude hitherto known. Boys usurp worse at bottom than they were; perhaps the entire conversation, they peremptorily they are, in many respects, better. There determine what it shall be. As far as we are many extenuating circumstances con- know, no tyranny has ever imposed this nected with the form the mild form of condition on its helots. The Romans domestic slavery of which we speak. Boys, it must be owned, impose no harsh and degrading conditions on their elderly victims. They are, on the whole, indulgent masters. They like to see their

vanquished. Certainly as long as a Gaul | position of masters into that of slaves and or a Dacian spoke in Latin, he might "fags "when that age is past. To tell please himself as to what he talked about. how they have managed to attain their The negroes might sing their songs or present position of power, would be a long hymns, or preach their sermons, at will; story; it would be a useless inquiry, too, the tunes and texts were not given out by for their ascendancy is too firmly estab their masters, who were indifferent, so long lished to be disturbed by their weak elders. as the overseer was satisfied with their But what wonder is there if it exists? hoeing. But this is not so with us. Boys What Eastern despot had ever more flatdictate the subjects of conversation, per- terers? Do the nostrils of the Grand emptorily impose their own interests on all Lama or the sultan inhale more of the incomers, and resent ill-advised attempts to cense of adulation than the modern Enturn the talk into channels which concern glish schoolboy, who stands it all, we must their elders. The entrance of a public- say, in a truly surprising way. Newspa school lad into a drawing-room or railway- pers chronicle and comment on his sports carriage where conversation is going on and little victories as if they were events of necessitates a complete change of topic. great national interest. His teachers make When a friend had spoken to Balzac for his scholastic successes the theme of some time of a great domestic calamity, the speeches; and there is a great conspiracy impatient novelist cut him short by saying, to make out that he is the most important "Let us return to realities; let us talk of person in the scheme of existence. Any Eugénie Grandet.” And in some such one may see an illustration of the sense of spirit acts the amiable young tyrant who awe and importance with which all con finds himself among half-a-dozen men and cerned regard the modern schoolboy and women, middle-aged and elderly. The last his affairs, by turning to a very pleas novel or poem of merit, the debut of a new ant little book, excellently written, called singer at her Majesty's theatre, the posi- "Uppingham-by-the-Sea." (Macmillan and tion of the Eastern question, the corre- Co.) It is the history of the Uppingham spondence between Lord Beaconsfield and School while it was in quarantine at the Mr. Gladstone, or the price of "Turks" or remote Welsh village of Borth, and it is Egyptians," may be the theme that is up. impossible to read it without a feeling of But each one must pocket his special in- the huge proportions which an incident in terest or enthusiasm, when our young hero the history of a school may assume, in the proceeds to bring the conversation to reali-eyes of those who belong to it. It was, no ties, that is, to cricket, football, and our fellows." An ignoramus who has nothing to say about dribbling," and does not know all about the crack bowlers or the highest scores of the season, must sit in silence. The weak-minded person who chats for two or three minutes about juvenile things and then slides back into his old talk, under the delusion that he has done his duty and paid due homage, is soon given to understand that he is not to escape in that way, that he must toe the line, and that he must not thus trifle with his juniors.

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doubt, a plucky and useful thing to transplant the school, after scarlet-fever had twice shown itself at Uppingham, and the narrative of the migration is flowing and pleasant. But when we find chapters telling how the dinners were eaten at Borth and how the sudden strain on the laundry was met, all fortified with stately quotations from Shakespeare and the "Iliad " -when we find the narrative as solemn and highly-wrought as De Quincey's or Gibbon's we realize the overwhelming and even alarming importance of the modern schoolboy, and how he has come to be Cæsar to us all.

CYPRUS.

The truth is that youth, or rather boyhood, has become the most important time of life, and that boys now know and feel this. In other days, it was left to age to speak of the joys of youth. Its possessors, little conscious of their wealth, looked for- FOREIGN VIEWS OF OUR OCCUPATION OF From Public Opinion. ward with straining, longing eyes to manhood, its freedom and its strength. This has changed. Boys wish to be and remain boys as long as possible, and when grown to man's estate, they desire to be at least "old boys." They have learned to feel that the best things of life come before twenty, and that they will sink from the

JOURNAL DES DEBATS, Paris, July 22. THE first unpleasant impression produced in France by the news of the occupation of Cyprus is now calmed down, and it must be admitted that we contributed to the utmost of our power in producing this

are somewhat consoled by the thought that the local liberties will be peacefully developed under the shadow of that flag. a flock of sheep from under the dominion of the Porte to that of England; but the moral and material interests of the island have nothing to fear from the British protectorate. The inhabitants will not be the rajahs of England; they will be the.subjects of the queen, and, as such, will be entitled to all the liberties enjoyed in all parts of the world by English colonists to whom they will find themselves assimilated by their position.

desirable result. The language of the English press, Lord Beaconsfield's speech, and the diplomatic explanations given to us have tended in no small measure to pro-. . . The inhabitants of Cyprus pass like duce this result. The English have left nothing undone to spare French susceptibilities, and all their statesmen manifest a firm intention, not only of preserving, but of making closer the good relations which they have with us. We will assist them in this to the best of our power. But the English must not indulge in the illusion that they have nothing to reproach themselves with so far as France is concerned. The secrecy and mystery, the jealous and suspicious care with which England conducted the Cyprus negotiations, could not fail to wound us. Let England reply to the following question: If France in the days of her power had done what England has just accomplished, and if she had done it in the same manner, what would England have thought of us from Dover to Inverness? We need only allude to the manner in which our annexation of Savoy was received in England, to show how such matters have been regarded in the past. We do this with no desire of raising recriminations which are almost always useless, and would now be specially ill-timed. We merely wish that the English would not display such a pro

found and candid astonishment at the emo

tion excited in France by the news of the Occupation of Cyprus. If Englishmen will consent to reflect a little, they will admit that nothing could be more natural than our emotion, and that in our place they would have experienced feelings not less strong, and, perhaps, more lasting.

LE TELEGRAPHE, Athens. THE English at Cyprus. We need not discuss from a moral point of view the bargain of which the island of Cyprus is the price. England, which has every interest in defending Turkey against future attacks, has extorted payment for such protection by the cession of Cyprus, the fairest and richest of the islands of the Mediterranean. This is all profit, as England thus indemnifies herself for services which she renders in a manner to herself. We cannot conceal the fact that we heard of this occupation of a Greek island by a great Western power with a surprise mingled with bitterness. For it amounts to a postponement to an unknown, but assuredly distant period, of the union of Cyprus with the mother country. Yet when we reflect that it is the flag of free England that will henceforth float over Cyprus, we

VOCE DELLA VERITA, Rome. IN Asia, the occupation of the island of Cyprus is only the means to an end. The true scope of the Anglo-Turkish treaty is to establish in that island a powerful sta tion in which to reunite mighty forces, in order effectually to exercise a protectorate which shall oppose an insurmountable barrier to the encroachment of Russia. Henceforward at the least movement of Russia in those parts, she will find herself face to face, not with Turkey, but with England.

Bosnia and the Herzegovina on the part In Europe the occupation of of Austria will produce an effect similar to that of the Anglo-Turkish treaty in Asia. Already the officious organs of Vienna are speaking of the bases of the new administration (to be confided to General Philippovich), and these bases constitute an ab solute annexation to the Austrian empire. combination in Asia and in Europe is made .. Every one must perceive that this to the detriment of Russia, and the exclusive advantage of Austria and England. And whilst the Russian delegates believed themselves to have obtained the substance of the Treaty of Santo Stefano by giving entirely changed the aspect of things, and up the husk, a sudden coup de théâtre has Russia finds herself in a far worse condition than at the beginning of the war. The only advantages obtained by her are the city and port of Batoum, of which she may make another Sebastopol, and the

retrocession of Bessarabia. But to the greater ambitious views of Russia an insurmountable obstacle has opposed itself.

IL BERSAGLIERE, Rome. THE divine island has been sold by the eunuchs of Constantinople to the usurers of London. Poor Cyprus! assailed by so many forces, defended by so much vaior, bathed by so much Italian blood, who