for his opinions, and was awaiting judgment, Pericles is alleged to have come forward and challenged accusation against him respecting his course of life-an interesting example of discrimination between freedom of thought and licence of life. Anaxagoras is said to have been the first to read the Homeric poems, not as the literal accounts of heroes which they seem to be, but as allegoric pictures, not only of virtue and justice, but of the processes and vestiges of order in nature. When he was dying, the governors of the city asked him what he would like to have done for him, and he replied begging the favour that they would keep the anniversary of his death as a play day for children. This happy suggestion was followed, and the Anaxagoria were held as a festival of recreation. Something of his doctrines we may gather from fragments. He regarded plants as possessed of soul or intelligence after their kind, as beings endowed with life. Sleep, he taught, was an affection, not of the soul, but of the body. "Everything but mind contains parts of universal matter; mind itself is infinite and its own master, and is combined with nothing, but alone is itself of itself." What are left of his are mostly physical speculations: we turn therefore to such suggestive sayings of his as that uttered when he saw the prodigious tomb of Mausolus, "A costly tomb is an image of a petrified estate." 66 When death in a foreign land was spoken of, as a matter of grief, he made comfort of the fact that, "The road to the other side of the grave is the same from every place.' The same thought is given in the Anthology, as of uncertain authorship: "The road down to Hades is straight, whether you go from Athens or depart from Meroë, a corpse. Let it not vex you that you have died at a distance from your country. There is one wind that carries you from everywhere to Hades." There is a not very dissimilar epigram attributed to Plato, referring to the position of the underworld. Xenophanes, a philosophic writer in hexametric verse and elegiac couplets, who lived about the close of the sixth century before our era, was iconoclastic, a great protestant against the popular religion, defaced as no doubt it was by polytheistic corruptions. His objections to accepting the Olympian deities as perfect divine ideals are reasonable and true: "Sad things are ascribed to the gods by Homer and Hesiod, such as would be shame and disgrace among men; adulteries, deceits, thefts, and iniquities." His own ideal is a higher one, holding "One God, among gods and man supreme, neither in body nor spirit like mortals." His protest thus extends against anthropomorphism. His concepception of deity is rather one of a stirless principle of physical life than a spiritual source of love. A sort of blue infinite vault was God, a spherical form, remaining in the same state, requiring never to move from place to place, moving all things without effort of mind. This universal being could see and hear, but was without the very symbol of life, respiration; and was in all its parts intellect and wisdom. and eternity. But Xenophanes said, 'Surely never hath been, nor will be, a mortal well knowing such matters I treat, of the gods and the all. Though by chance he may utter the true and the perfect, it is not of knowledge; opinion presides over all things.' 66 The argument against taking the finite human form as a representation of deity is cogently put, as follows: "Mortals opine that gods are created like unto themselves, and endowed with perception, voice, and form like their own. If oxen or lions had hands, whereby they could depict and do works like men, horses would pourtray forms of gods like horses, oxen like oxen, each making representations of bodies just like their own." Perhaps the criticisms of Xenophanes were rather cold; a lover of the poetic genius of the rainbow might not greatly love to be told he must believe only the scientific fact: passed away when this quotation was made from his work on philosophy-gives a rather enthusiastic account of Xenophanes : "He wandered over Sicily as a rhapsodist. He lived poor, and died poor. But he could dispense with riches, having within him treasures inexhaustible: his soul was absorbed in the contemplation of grand ideas, and his vocation was the poetical expression of those ideas. He had no pity for the idle and luxurious superstitions of his time; he had no tolerance for the legends of Homer, defaced as they were by the errors of polytheism. He, a poet, was fierce in the combat he perpetually waged with the first of poets-not from petty envy, not from petty ignorance, but from the deep sincerity and enthusiasm of reverence. He who believed in one God, supreme in power, goodness, and intelligence, could not witness without pain the degradation of the Divine in the common religion. Alive to the poetic beauty of the Homeric fables, he was also keenly alive to their religious falsehood." (To be continued.) That which men call Iris, it is but a cloud, In purple and crimson, and pallor of green. Xenophanes possessed a spice of humour; when Empedokles said to him that the wise man was undiscoverable, he replied, "Very likely, for it takes a wise man to discover a wise man." G. H. Lewes who had not My husband and I determined to spend our honeymoon in Brittany. We had been there in the days before we were engaged, and we had an idea that it would be sweet to go back to the dear old place; for there both of us had suffered, had quarrelled and sulked, and misunderstood each other many times, and there one August night, when the moon was shining down large and lovely on the river Rance, making A double flight of moons by night, it all came right. Our expectations of delight in being back in the old place were quite realised; but we had only taken our house in Dinan for a month, and when that was over we made up our minds to go on to Pornic. It was a long distance from Dinan, and there were many difficulties in the way; but we were young and ardent and happy, and so we started one grey dawn, at five o'clock in the morning, and after two days' hard travelling, found ourselves in the little grapecovered courtyard of the only hotel in the place where happy families were laughing and drinking their café noir at the small tables that were dotted about under the vines. We remained at the hotel one day, and the thing that astonished me more than all the peculiarities and beauties of the place, more even than the characteristics of the people, was the utter absence of English. Not one word of our own language did we hear. I don't know why English people so triumph in getting clear of each other, but they certainly do so, and we were no exceptions to the rule. A lovely little place Pornic seems to me even now, when I see it through a vista of years. It must be long ago, for tall girls and sturdy boys are growing up around me, and my hair is no longer brown; still I shall always see it as I saw it then on that first evening a little peaceful town with rocks and a lovely sea, a long narrow Grande Rue with quaint shops, a little church whose tall spire you saw wherever you went, and which seemed always in the act of blessing the little place. On the morning after our arrival, we went out to see if we could not discover a house to let, for we liked being by ourselves; besides, the one hotel knew very well how to charge! *The author of "La Demoiselle Anglaise," Cicely Narney Marston, was the second daughter of Dr. Westland Marston, and the sister of Philip Bourke Marston, author of Song-Tide" and " All-in-All." The present tale, and a children's story, published in an American magazine, were her only completed literary work, though, had she lived, there were many plans and purposes for work in her mind. Her sudden death-the 28th of July, 1878-deprived the world of much that it might have enjoyed, while it bereaved a circle of loving friends of one of the truest and sweetest souls ever dear to friendship. We were almost in despair, however; for, the place being very full, we could find no "Maison meublée à louer." At last we lighted on a small shop, in the windows of which were displayed boots, toys, groceries, butter, and almost everything one could require for housekeeping, except meat. To our surprise, on entering, we found a pretty little salon that opened on a terrasse covered with a grape-vine; it had a lovely view of the sea, and a ship was sailing so lazily by that it looked almost As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean. in The bedrooms all had the same beautiful view, and I was raptures; but the old woman who seemed to be the proprietress of the house asked I don't know how many hundred francs for the month. I was quite in despair, for I had taken such a fancy to the place; there was something more even than the beauty of the view which attracted me; there seemed to be an air of peace about that little salon, and it appeared to me the very place for two people who were as happy as we were. Still the price the old woman asked was enormous, and we were just going to depart, very much disappointed for not only was this the very place of all others we should have desired, but it was also the only house to be let in the town, and I saw a vision of our having to pack up our things and be off when suddenly another woman, who was neither young nor old, came into the room. I noticed even in that first moment what a good sweet face she had. It was a face which told you she had suffered; there was no hope in it; her expression seemed to indicate that she had had a great grief, and now she was waiting patiently for Still all things that might come. I can hardly tell why at first sight I liked her so much. "Ah maman!" she exclaimed, regarding us with great interest, "they are English! She said it very sadly; and her voice was much softer than the old woman's. Then she added something to her mother which I could not quite understand; only every now and then I caught the word "Anglais in their half inaudible conversation. I looked at the old woman again, wondering whether our nationality was for us or against us. Her face had visibly softened; and I could hardly believe it was the same harsh voice that had demanded such an exorbitant price from us a few minutes since. Her question still more surprised us; she said, pointing to my husband, "Is he your brother?" And I answered proudly, "No, he is my husband." Then they sighed, and the middle-aged woman said sadly, "The only English we ever had here were a brother and a sister." "Ah!" I said, know something people?" 66 then you do of English But they hardly answered, and both of them seemed as if they did not wish to discuss the subject. Then they talked a little more to each other, and finally, I could not imagine why, they agreed to let us have the house for two hundred francs less than had been first asked. The next morning when we arrived to take possession, the sun was streaming brightly into the little salon, and we ran in and out the vine covered terrasse, delighted with our new quarters. The people of the house were most kind and attentive; they found us a femme de ménage on the lowest on 'Ah, madame talks well-better than-" and there she stopped, and went quickly out of the room. I think she did more for us than our femme de ménage. Almost every day we found fresh flowers in our room; we always knew who had put them there; but when I thanked her, a look of extreme pain would come over her face, and gradually pass away into a sort of sad contentment. One day, when she put an unusually beautiful bouquet on our table, I said, "I hardly know how to thank you;' she answered very quietly, "There are no thanks needed, madame; 'tis all I can do!" and with something like a sob she left the room. As the days of that beautiful August wore away, we lived such a peaceful, happy existence that I began to feel it would be the saddest day since our marriage when we were forced to say goodbye to Pornic and to the "Middleaged." The necessity of changing a large note (there being no money-changers at Pornic) took my husband one day to Nantes. I had intended to accompany him, but feeling very far from well that morning I could not do so; and with a kiss and a laugh, and a fond injunction to me to take care of myself, he left me. It was a still, sultry day, and the first time we had been parted since our marriage. I was low-spirited, and beset by all sorts of fears. It seemed to me that I could not bear the suspense until nine o'clock in the evening, when the diligence would come thundering down the narrow Grande Rue. Suppose that even then he should not be in it; suppose some accident should happen to him in Nantes ? How I wished I had not let him go alone! The dear" Middle-aged" was so good to me that day; she understood in a moment my anxiety, and said with such tact and sweetness, "Monsieur is all right, madame; the diligence will bring him safely home to-night. Madame will soon be happy again; but she is young! I do not wonder she does not like being separated, even for a few hours." Then she brought me soup, and tucked me on the sofa, and stroked my hair as tenderly almost as a mother might have done, and saying, "Now go to sleep; when madame wakes it will be time for monsieur's return!" she left me, and took her knitting out on to the little vine-covered terrasse. I was only dozing; and suddenly I heard her singing-oh, so sweetly and plaintively!-an old English hymn, to which I think the words |