time; and it may also fairly be said that, with the exception of a bad school that seemed lately to threaten us with its predominance, novel-writing has answered the demand well, and arrived at a high state of perfection. But it seems to be forgotten that the serial novel is a specific kind under a larger genus. Here we want the Attic taste and fine sense of diversity which makes the French admirable critics as well as good cooks and dressmakers. Just as an ordinary English lady thinks that "any thing will do" for a side-dish or an entremet, and that nothing more is required to make a dress than so many yards of silk or merino, so we find an idea dominant in some quarters that any ordinary novel cut into slices will make a good serial. A slice, we suppose a good cook would say, is simply a fragment imperfect in itself, and very unbecoming as a feature on a dinner-table: a cutlet is a whole, with its own character and its own individuality: More attention might profitably be devoted to the "dressing" of the separate portions of a serial as they appear in a magazine; they ought to have the same kind of balance of parts and individual completeness as the successive acts of a good play. Then, again, to return to a different point-not every kind of novel is acceptable in this form. Think of one of Mr. G. P. R. James's historical productions coming out in successive issues of the Cornhill or Temple Bar! As we have elsewhere said, Mr. Trollope is the king of this kind of fiction; though we should be wrong altogether to exclude the more historical, or, again, the more romantic school. But something like the brilliancy of dialogue and the accurate drawing of character for which this writer is famous should be essential requisites in a serial, which we should be able to welcome as a pleasant entertaining companion for half an hour every month, and then to look forward to meeting it again after a few weeks, without being on tenterhooks all the time with the thought of some half-told catastrophe which is to turn out next month to be nothing at all. Some of our serial writers-and not the worst of them-are too fond of this unworthy trick. Some months ago we read of a lady who was left looking over her husband's shoulder at a letter he was reading, with the usual formidable array of asterisks at the end of the chapter; and when the four weeks came round, there was no catastrophe after all. Last year a prominent character was arrested for debt at the end of a chapter, with every appearance of treachery and inevitable ruin; when the monthly part came round again, it turned out to have been simply a device of the author to keep up a pleasurable excitement in the minds of her readers. These tricks remind us of the Princess Scheherezade; and the writers who perpetrate them, if they are not deficient altogether in the qualities which we admire in Mr.

Trollope, were at all events, in the novels to which we allude, too lazy to exert them. And as all these novels are reprinted afterwards in a complete form, those who have never read them as serials are naturally perplexed to understand what the authors can have been at.

Another fault which might profitably be corrected in the serial system is the great prolixity which is entailed upon writers, not exactly by the fact that they issue their novels piecemeal, but by the other concomitant fact that the novels thus issued are destined also to appear in the usual regular three volumes post octavo. Pollok, in his Course of Time, makes some celestial interlocutor in the next world say

"a novel was a book

Three-volumed, and once read."

Now, it may be only "once read," but it is certainly twice published; and that in two very different forms. Few traditions have been, in a certain sense, more convenient for publishers and authors than that which requires that a novel should as a matter of rule consist of three volumes; but the rule was made before the days of serials. Unless the magazines in which novels appear can afford to give them a large proportion of their available space every month, the threevolume condition in the second and more dignified phase of existence can only be secured by a great extension of the period of their gradual development in the pages of a periodical. Some novels of this sort last half as long as the American war; ministries and dynasties succeed one another, and their tale is yet untold; and, of course, it sometimes happens that our interest in them is gone before the last chapter is at length given to us. What conceivable reason is there why we should take nearly two years to read an ordinary story? At all events, the characters which remain before us for so long a time ought to be interesting in themselves and exquisitely drawn; there ought to be nothing slovenly or commonplace about a work every portion of which is to be considered and judged of by itself. The Fates have decreed that we must have serials; let them be good, carefully written, with a view to their particular mode of appearance, and-unless they are first-rate-let them not be too long.

Our periodical literature has attained its present grand proportions by the operation of causes which will probably continue to act, and so may carry it on to a still more brilliant future. It is becoming the favourite kind of reading in a language which, as time rolls on, is becoming more and more universal; and it is more and more drawing into its service the most cultivated minds among those by whom that language is spoken. It has therefore before it a prospect of ever-increasing usefulness and importance. It takes its tone and

modifies its form instinctively, according to the taste and genius of the people for whom it is written; but it may still consult foreign examples with advantage, and aim at taking its part in the formation and guidance of opinion and thought, without laying aside its gracefulness or its mirth.

Inquictus.

We put him in a golden cage

With crystal troughs: but still he pined
For tracts of royal foliage,

And broad blue skies and merry wind.

We gave him water cool and clear;

All round his golden wires we twined

Fresh leaves and blossoms bright, to cheer
His restless heart: but still he pined.

We whistled and we chirped; but he
Trilled never more his liquid falls,
But ever yearned for liberty,

And dashed against his golden walls.

Again, again, in wild despair,

He strove to burst his bars aside;

At last, beneath his pinion fair,

He hid his drooping head and died!

And so against the golden bars

Life's golden bars-our poor souls smite,

Pining for tracts beyond the stars,

Freedom and Beauty, Truth and Light.

Those bars a Father's hands adorn

With leaves and flowers-earth's loveliest things

With crystal draughts: but still we mourn
With thirsting for the "living springs."

Nor crystal draughts, nor leaves and flowers,
The exiled heart can satisfy:

We shake the bars; and some few hours
We droop and pine, and then we die,

We die! But O, the prison-bars

Are shatter'd then: then far away,
We pass beyond the sky, the stars-

Beyond the change of night and day!

Reynolds and his Studio.

cess.

THE name and family of Albemarle must have always been gratefully associated in Reynolds's mind with the history of his own sucNot only was it to the kindness of Commodore Keppel that he was indebted for his Italian tour, but it was by a portrait of the same young officer, taken soon after his own return to London, that he achieved his maiden fame. Keppel was younger by a few years than Reynolds, and though the second son of an earl, in an age when rank was far more certain to procure promotion than it is at present, he might have fairly boasted that he did not owe his high rank in the service to fortune or the favour of the great. At ten he was in the navy; at eighteen he had gone round the world with Anson, who, struck by his gallantry during an unsuccessful engagement with the Spaniards, made him a lieutenant on the spot; at twenty he was appointed to the Maidstone, a fifty-gun frigate, and, meeting the enemy soon afterwards in French waters, he chased them so far towards the land, in the eagerness of pursuit, that his vessel struck. She was a wreck in a moment; but the energy and prudence by which he saved his crew more than atoned in the eyes of his country for the noble daring by which their lives had been endangered, and he was honourably acquitted by the court-martial which on his return to England tried him for the loss of the vessel. The year 1762 was a glorious one for him and his two brothers. They were all concerned in the conquest of the Havannah. Lord Albemarle commanded the land forces. General Keppel, the second brother, directed the siege of the Moro. The commodore shared with Pocock and Harvey the glory of the naval service. Later on, Keppel was on the court-martial which tried Byng, and exerted himself warmly, though unavailingly, in his favour-a fact which he must have remembered with especial satisfaction when, towards the close of his own career, he himself was brought, by private malice, before a tribunal of the same kind. Accused by Sir Hugh Palliser of negligence in a partial action of the Channel fleet with the French off Ushant, he was tried at Portsmouth, and honourably acquitted. Never was a more dramatic court-martial in the annals of our naval service. The very admirals who tried him could scarce preserve the impassive coldness due to their position as

his judges. The witnesses on his side gave their evidence with a fervour which carried all before it. Old Admiral Montague, questioned by Keppel himself as to the charge of negligence, burst into tears; and when his sword was returned to the prisoner, the pent-up feelings of the crowd, in court and out of court, found vent in a cheer for "little Keppel," as his sailors fondly called him, in which all, from the duke of royal blood to the lowest Jack-tar in the navy, joined with a right good-will. A signal-gun flashed the news to Spithead, and the ships responded with a glad salute. From its anchorage off Mother Bank the Indian fleet took up the note, and fired broadside after broadside in honour of the acquittal. Portsmouth was illuminated; and Keppel, surrounded by his friends, all wearing light-blue ribbons and a golden "Keppel" in their hats, was carried back in triumph to his lodgings. From Portsmouth the verdict flew to London, and London caught up the enthusiasm. Houses and public offices were lighted up, and a mob, which Pitt and Rogers and the Duke of Ancaster were not too proud to join, patrolled the streets. The house of his cowardly accuser was gutted, and its contents blazed that night as a bonfire in St. James's Square. Lords North and Bute, heads of the adverse ministry, had their windows broken; and it is said that Pitt had a share in the misdeed. The houses of Lords Sandwich, Mulgrave, and Lisburne fared no better, and the Admiralty gates were torn off their hinges. From one end of the land to the other "Keppel and Virtue" became the war-cry of the people. The hero, in fact, was no longer a hero, but an idol. Ladies wore caps "à la Keppel." Houses of general resort put down their old emblems to hoist his likeness. All the "Admiral Keppels" of public-houses date from this period; and the very spoons and tablecloths of the day, stamped with his name and motto, bear as sure witness to the general feeling in his favour as the "Long live Queen Caroline!" of cottage crockery in the reign of the fourth George prove the sympathy of England with his illtreated wife.

True and loyal-hearted as Reynolds ever was, he no doubt shared to the full in the anxieties of Keppel's friends during the trial, and their joy at its happy termination. In his loving letter of congratulation to the commodore, he tells him that, calculating on the popularity of persecution, he had, without even waiting for permission, sent his picture to the engraver. The picture to which he alludes is doubtless the one he took of Keppel after his return from Italy, and which proved, as we have already mentioned, the foundation of his own artistic fame. In it Keppel is represented on a rocky beach; breakers are rolling in heavily from sea, and he is stepping from