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picnic fields, all ball-rooms, and the like resorts. They shall not apprehend one old coquette for every ten old dandies. Dear me! I was a dancing-man myself once, and in crowded sets have trodden on many a grandfather's toes, not on a single grandmother's, that I can call to mind. Though I must own, in honesty, how my fine old Countess of Desmond's chronicler sets forth that "his"torians confidently assert she had passed "her hundredth year before she left off "dancing and mixing in the gayest cir"cles." Chroniclers have a terrible turn for gossip. Very likely 'twas but an occasional "saraband" in which her ladyship indulged, on some such rare solemnity as the presentation of some fair great-grand-daughter débutante at the Vice-regal court. People will exaggerate. Granny is not often caught at untimely diversions. And, be it noted, that her standing up in brocade and point-lace at Christmas-time, to lead off "Sir Roger de Coverly," shall not be debited against, but credited to her, as a condescending act of festive inauguration, and a symbolical linking of oldworld joys with new. I do but skim by card-tables, not as reproving the good old lady's stately rubber at seasons, but as remarking how wisely chary, now-adays, is granny of her own harmless recreation, lest the third generation misinterpret her to sanction sitting at green baize tables, to their harm. Cicero's old men ask, however, for "talos et tesseras," "draughts and backgammon." Granny, therefore, has classical warrant for sit ting down to these.

But space begins to fail me ; my penpoint, also, shrinks, even from kindliest pleasantry, when it must touch the last topic of the philosophical old essayist.

"Remaineth a fourth cause, which "seemeth most to keep in anguish and "foreboding this age of ours-death's "approach!"

Ah, noble-hearted elders of the twilight hours before the day-dawn that "brought life and immortality to light!"

Who reads, unmoved, your reasonings? What brave, ingenious, almost desperate, arguments were yours, to rob death of its sting, and to deny the grave a final victory! Not therefore in despite of you, but yet in humble, thankful, exultation, consistent with the tenderest sympathy, we contrast with your gropings after it our dear old granny's grasp of Life Eternal.

We will go see her die. Not under fretted roof of a patrician palace, but where the smoky rafters of a cottar's home bend close over the death-bed. By that bed-side is a three-legged table, no Delphic tripod, yet upon it lies a source of inspiration no pythonissa knew. A dog's-eared book, a battered pair of spectacles left in to mark the page, on which is stamped a story, which, "to the Greeks, was foolishness." It is a Book of Covenants, Old and New. This dying "grandmother Loïs" has known their Scriptures "from a child," and studied them with an "unfeigned faith." She has read in their clauses a title to "an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled," such as philosophers and sages have often longed in vain to read on any scroll of truthful warrant.

How calm she faces death! "Mother Eunice" and the bairns that "greet for grannie" are shamed almost out of their tears. What great emotion shakes her? Some quiver of dread, thrilling her at last? Nay; for she scorns the propping pillows now, to sit upright as Deborah, beneath her palm-tree, judging Israel, by Bethel, in Mount Ephraim. See! she stretches out the wrinkled hands to bless two generations of her own offspring kneeling by. Then she clasps them, and the dim eyes look up; but the worn frame falls back.

"Gone!" cries Mother Eunice.
"Grannie! grannie!" sob the little

ones.

Gone! where "there is neither male nor female," where both are found "equal with the angels, being the chil"dren of the Resurrection."

R. S. C. C.

AN APPLE-GATHERING.

I PLUCKED pink blossoms from mine apple-tree,
And wore them all that evening in my hair;
Then, in due season, when I went to see,
I found no apples there.

With dangling basket all along the grass,
As I had come, I went the selfsame track;
My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass
So empty-handed back.

Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by ;
Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer;
Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky;
Their mother's home was near.

Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full;
A stronger hand than hers helped it along;
A voice talked with her thro' the shadows cool
More sweet to me than song.

Ah! Willie, Willie, was my love less worth
Than apples with their green leaves piled above?
I counted rosiest apples on the earth

Of far less worth than love.

So once it was with me you stooped to talk,
Laughing and listening in this very lane:
To think that by this way we used to walk
We shall not walk again!

I let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos
And groups the latest said the night grew chill,
And hastened; but I loitered; while the dews
Fell fast, I loitered still.

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.

TO MR. COBDEN AND OTHER PUBLIC MEN IN SEARCH OF WORK.

BY THE AUTHOR OF TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS,"

66 TOM BROWN AT OXFORD," ETC.

MR. COBDEN has been complaining of late that there are no great questions stirring in England into which a public man of any calibre can throw himself. Since the triumph of free trade, all politics have been getting mean and flat, till there is no party question left worth fighting for. The peace agitation was a failure; people wouldn't answer the whip. The would-be reform agitation doesn't seem likely to turn out much better. What can a statesman find to do?

It is not Mr. Cobden alone who takes this view of home-politics. One hears a good deal of the same kind from men very different from him in all respects. The difficulty of finding some line worth taking, some subject which will really lay hold of them, in politics, seems to weigh down many of our younger public men. And really, when one comes to think over the questions which have chiefly occupied Parliament of late, one cannot help acknowledging that they have some excuse for carrying on their

representative duties in a listless and perfunctory manner, or dropping down into mere partisans. When Churchrates, the Galway Contract, or the claims and grievances of the reformed borough of Wakefield, or such so-called privileges of Parliament as have been debated this session, are the home questions on which they are invited by their leaders to fix their attention and expend their energies, one cannot wonder at the spread of a belief amongst public men that they are fallen on a day of little things. Such a belief with ambitious men must end in a compromise with themselves, and a quiet falling in to the Indian-file of their own party, which course they reasonably enough hope will bring them at last, as leaders drop off, to the front places. Those who are not ambitious will turn their attention to other matters-to literature, to farming, to sporting-satisfied that the country is fairly prosperous, and is likely to go on reasonably well without any active help from them.

I am now speaking specially of home politics. In foreign and colonial affairs, the struggle of the continental nations for freedom, the crisis in Turkey, the great cause which is being tried in America, the future of India and Australia, are big enough and serious enough matters to satisfy any man, and are, no doubt, intimately connected with the well-being and well-doing of England. But we can only treat them as onlookers; and for one Englishman who has the bent or the opportunity for studying or taking any action in these matters, there are a hundred who would apply themselves to home questions. Foreign questions, however great, do not deeply move us as a nation. It would be well if they moved us more deeply; but there is the simple fact-they do not.

And so politics are getting for many of us less and less interesting every day. We Englishmen, the most intensely political, take us all through, of any nation on the face of the earth, are wearying of Parliamentary debates, and actually, at times, find ourselves

almost questioning whether that august assembly is not a much over-rated institution. I have no doubts on the point myself, and believe that the House of Commons has a good stroke of work yet to do in the world. But, to go back to the point from which we started: Is it true that there is no great home-question which is forcing itself up, and asking to be solved in our time, and proving itself more and more inexorable every day-a question which cannot any longer be put aside, but must be met with all the wisdom we are masters of? If we insist on looking through Parliamentary or press spectacles, we may answer, No, and congratulate ourselves that there is nothing to be done at home but to keep the Volunteers up to the mark, to go on steadily with a little tinkering at education and lawreform, and then to enjoy and make the most of the wonderful accumulation of intellectual and physical wealth which is piling itself up on every side of us. In order to do this as it should be done, we must enter into the spirit of selfjubilation which meets us so often in the leading journals: we must be able to thank God that we are not as other nations, even as these Italians or Americans, and, looking serenely and condescendingly out of our remarkable little islands, to sing :

"On safety's rock I sits and sees

The shipwreck of mine enemies." But, even limiting ourselves thus, we shall not wholly succeed in keeping out a sort of uncomfortable consciousness that there is a screw loose down somewhere below the water-line. Even persons in office will allude to something not quite right down below, in a parenthetical kind of way; as for instanceMr. Lowe, in his speech on education (July 11), when he says, "I really think "that the schoolmaster should be taught

some political economy in these days "of strikes, so that the person who is "looked up to next to the clergyman in "his village should be able to give some "sensible opinion on those melancholy " contests about wages." The very para

graphs in our daily and weekly oracles, which have been, for months, week after week, telling us "that all the great builders' workshops will be full of first-rate men by Saturday night next at latest"-"that the lazy demagogues who have been working on simple men for their own selfish purposes are losing the confidence of their constituents". will not let us quite enjoy the good of all our labour which we take under the sun all the days of our life. And, if we will use our own eyes and ears, we shall certainly not get easier.

I have somehow rushed clean into the middle of my subject before I meant to do so. But it is better as it is: and I will now ask Mr. Cobden (at least I would if I had the chance), and I do ask every man who reads this, whether this open state of war-almost chronic now-between the employers of labour and the men, is not a big-enough question for every English statesman and every English man to spend his whole force upon. It is of no use trying to shut our eyes any longer. We have shirked facing this difficulty too long already, and, as usual, it has only been getting worse to meet. There is no set of words which makes us more angry and impatient than "strike," "trades"union," and their kindred. The ideas they call up are simply annoying. Have we not heard enough of them? Shall we never have done with these miserable. squabbles?

No, most assuredly never, until some just method of settlement has been found-until we have not only found, but are resolutely holding on to and following the thread which is to lead us out of the labyrinth. Jonah, in old times, when he was set to a work for which he had no stomach, turned away from it, and tried to get out of going through with it, just as men and nations have been doing ever since-as we are now doing by this strike question. He found it all no good at last, and went to Nineveh and did his work. And so all men and nations must do. As to us English of this day, the hook will be put in our noses, and the bridle in our

lips, and we shall be brought round, and up, again and again, to this "strike question," and "relations of capital and labour," till we have fairly taken off our coats, and set to work upon it in real earnest.

We have here, then, in the heart of England, and spreading away into remote districts, a civil war raging—a civil war as certainly as there is now civil war in the United States, though, thank God, the weapons are not the same. This is the first fact which we should do well to get thoroughly worked into our understandings. The second. important fact is, that this war is getting every year, ay, every day, more determined, more wide-spread, more dangerous. I can remember the time, not many years back, when it was in its guerilla stage. Then strikes were almost always local matters, fought out in a short time, in a small ring. Now a strike in London, Lancashire, Yorkshire, or elsewhere, is felt over the whole kingdom, and in the colonies. The masters are organized, and the men are organized, and those organizations are ever extending and perfecting themselves. whole of the masters in some trades are in union; several of the men's unions have branches in almost every great town of the United Kingdom, and in Australia and Canada. And these two great hosts under arms are here, at our doors, amongst ourselves—always in the quiet districts keenly watching one another; always in action at some point.

The

Mr. Cobden is a thorough-going peace man. Surely he might find full exercise for all his powers of making peace here. And he is perhaps in all the kingdom the man who could do most in this way. He has the unbounded confidence of the masters, and he has been a master himself, so that he must thoroughly know their side of the case. He is a master no longer, so that he has no present material interests involved; and he would be more likely than any other man of his weight with the masters to be accepted by the men as an umpire. But there is room for fifty such men as Mr. Cobden. Every one

of us may have a chance of doing something; at any rate every one of us should take the trouble for himself to get at something like the rights of the case. No man with the least pretension to statesmanship can neglect it any longer. Of that I am very sure. Yet so little is done or thought about the matter yet, that, whilst the war is actually raging round us who live in London, the masons and the bricklayers are on strike, and I believe that not one man in one thousand really knows what they are fighting for.

Before trying to answer this question myself, I must just call the reader's attention for a few moments to the contemplation of an eminently popular philanthropic association.

If we may judge by the annual printed reports which our innumerable societies of one kind or another for the regeneration of the world put forth, there is no one of the younger of them more vigorous in these days than the "Early Closing Association." In the report for 1861 there is a list of donations and subscriptions since 1852 of twenty-seven pages in length; and yet it boldly acknowledges a debt of 5007., and appeals for special subscriptions to liquidate the same. Its patrons are three well-known noblemen, and four bishops. The names of its vice-presidents (many of them those of well-known men who would certainly disagree amongst themselves on most questions) fill two long columns. There are no less than twenty-one eminent physicians and surgeons on its medical staff. What their duties may be cannot be gathered from the report; but we have a right to assume that from a sanitary point of view they approve the objects of the Association. The great ladies of London have given in their adhesion to its principles. Four duchesses, thirteen marchionesses, forty-three countesses, ten viscountesses, and other ladies, titled and untitled, so numerous that motives of economy prevent the Association from publishing the list, have publicly and voluntarily pledged themselves to abstain from shopping after two o'clock on Saturdays.

The Association lays about on all sides, holds crowded meetings of fashionable folk, of West End tradesmen, City tradesmen, and of tradesmen in all parts of the suburbs; appeals confidently to the press and the pulpit for help, and gets it; is all things to all men, and works indiscriminately with Sabbatarians, Volunteers, Peace Society men, Christian young men, and many who would, I fear, scarcely claim that name. In short, as above stated, it is a most vigorous and prosperous society, and one of those whose principles and objects have been almost universally accepted and commended.

Those objects, as stated on the first page of the report in large type, are

I. The abridgment of the hours of labour in all departments of industrial life, where necessary, especially on Saturday nights.

II. The adoption of a Saturday halfholiday, where practicable.

III. The early payment of wages. IV. The rescue of shopkeepers and their assistants from the drudgery of Sunday trading.

The objects of this fashionable and popular association are just those of another association, the doings of which are at present much in men's mouths, but which is neither fashionable nor popular. The committee of this latter association sits daily at the Sun, in Mason Street-a queer little thoroughfare, running out of the Westminster Road, at the back of Astley's Amphitheatre. There are no ladies in this association, or lords either; nor does the name of a single bishop, or other great person, appear anywhere in connexion with it, or with the committee which represents it and sits in Mason Street-except, by the way, that of the Duke of Buccleugh; and he, far from approving or helping forward the views of the association, is bent on quite another course. The association, in short, is the Society of Masons of the United Kingdom, who are working an early closing movement in their way-in doing which, according to their lights, they have disagreed, amongst others, with

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