eried attendant, a list in his hand, came to them with the information that Mr. Wilson's case had been reached. "Who's the Chairman?" asked the angel almost on the threshold.

"Medwin-Jones, I think," whispered Mr. Worth. "I'm afraid he's rather a Tartar."

"I hope he's the one that drops his aitches!" exclaimed the angel gleefully. "An ideal Chairman for an education committee."

VII.

The case did not take many minutes -the list was long and the time short. The committee-room was large and well-lighted. At a very big table sat the Committee, the Chairman in the middle. Opposite him, at a little distance from the table, were two chairs -one for the angel, and one for the headmaster. Room was made at the table for the Rev. Mr. Cobbe, who bustled in late. A number of chairs at one end of the room accommodated quite a crowd of official-looking personages, among them Mr. Turton.

The Chairman, a clean-shaven, dark, hatchet-faced man, with pince-nez and the manner of one who is desperately driven but resolutely methodical, took up a printed paper and gave what he intended for a lightning-glance at the assistant teacher.

"Mr.-er-Wilson?" he asked.
The angel nodded amiably.

Mr. Medwin-Jones consulted some notes, then he said, speaking in a thin, tired voice:

"Well, Mr. Wilson, this is a very unhappy and unsatisfactory state of affairs.

These reports now-we don't want to be hard on you-we quite understand that you haven't had much experience, but there doesn't seem to be any improvement. What have you got to say, Mr. Worth, as to that?" he added, turning to the headmaster, who looked more miserable than ever.

"I'm afraid I can't say there has been much improvement," he answered. "Mr. Wilson's heart doesn't seem to be in his work. I'm sure he has plenty of ability, but it seems as if he can't, or doesn't care to, bring it to bear on teaching. His class is steadily deteriorating-order, attention, work. Many of the boys like him personally, but they are getting quite out of hand. and that, of course, affects the other classes."

"Yes, of course; quite so," said the Chairman, drumming with his fingers on the table. "Is it an exceptionally difficult class?" he asked.

"No, I should say not," answered Mr. Worth.

"I suppose you have talked things over together?"

"Oh yes; time after time."

While this little conversation was going on, the angel was looking round the room with quick, keen glances, acknowledging Mr. Turton with a nod and a smile, passing quickly from face to face, easy, alert, and apparently cheerful. His eyes came back to the Chairman as Mr. Medwin-Jones addressed him again.

"Well, Mr. Wilson, you see what our position is. We are ultimately responsible for the efficient working of the educational machine, and we can't allow the work of a school to be thrown out of gear because one wheel won't, or can't, run smoothly."

He paused for a moment, and the angel interposed with a delightful air of sweet reasonableness.

"No, indeed. That would be very hard on the other wheels."

The Chairman stared hard at this most unusual type of delinquent. If such a thing were not incredible, he could almost have thought he was making fun of the whole affair.

"I am glad you appreciate the seriousness of the situation," he said, with a distinct tightening of his lips. "The

"Absolutely," smiled the angel, leaning back in his chair, and once more studying the Committee.

"What's to be done, then?" exclaimed Mr. Medwin-Jones irritably.

"Ah, Sir," said the angel, with a graceful little bow; "I think it would be impertinent for me to make any suggestion,"

"Do you want to leave the profession, Mr. Wilson?" asked the Chairman abruptly.

"Well, to be quite candid," answered the angel, "I am rather tired of it."

"This, in fact, is a resignation," said the Chairman.

"And I needn't write a letter," added the angel, with an air of great relief. "You must settle that with the correspondent," answered the Chairman shortly. He could not rid himself of an uncomfortable feeling that he was being scored off by this imperturbable, smiling young man. Yet there was nothing to lay hold of. "It's been a very unfortunate business all along," he snapped, "but there's nothing more to say now. Next case."

The angel rose and bowed to the Committee.

"Good morning, gentlemen," he said with a courteous smile, and walked out of the room.

VIII.

Outside of the committee-room he was soon joined by the headmaster. "What made you do that?" asked

LIVING AGE VOL. LIX. 3128

Mr. Worth. "If you had taken a different line they would have let you have another try."

"But I didn't want it," answered Mr. Wilson. "I was going to resign a week ago, only I wanted to see what the Sub-committee was like. It was tremendously interesting. I'm very glad I waited."

"What are you going to do? Have you anything else to go to?"

The headmaster was as much mystified as the Chairman, but he had a liking for the young fellow, and was wondering whether he had been too hard on him. He certainly had plenty of pluck.

The angel opened his Telegraph and pointed to a long, large-print review. "It looks as if that's going to be my line," he said. "I've got a regular job on The Trumpet, besides."

Mr. Worth looked. "The Elementary School under the Microscope," it was headed, and at the foot of the page was the title of the book reviewed"Temperton Street-A Provided School," and the name of the author-"By A. W. Wilson." Then he glanced at the first lines of the review.

"Many of these sketches," it ran, "appeared in the columns of The Trumpet, where they excited a great deal of interest. Brought together, and grouped with a large amount of new material, they make an even stronger impression. Read singly, they might be classed as brilliant journalism; read together as an artistic unity, they are evidently literature. Mr. Wilson has an eye for significant detail and a vivid sense of broad humor that recall Dickens in his early days. There is no risk in prophesying success for such a book as this."

Mr. Worth looked up, a trifle dazed. "Do you mean to say it's you they're talking about?"

The young man opened a parcel he was carrying under his arm, and took

!

out two copies of what looked like a six-shilling novel.

"I hope you'll accept one," he said. "There isn't so very much Chignett Street in it. I don't think I've been spiteful-I oughtn't to be—you've beThe Cornhill Magazine.

haved splendidly to me. This other copy I meant for the managers. Would you mind giving it to them for me?" This was how they came to recognize that they had been entertaining an angel unawares.

B. Paul Neuman.

Macaulay once observed that any fool could say his Archbishops of Canterbury, backward or forward; but the obligation of the intelligent schoolboy in this respect where the laureates of England are concerned has never been precisely ascertained. There is undoubtedly a certain amount of obscurity as to the origin and succession of the office. That a Versificator Regis existed in England from Plantagenet times and that, like the Master of the Revels or the Court Jester, he enjoyed a prescriptive right to some kind of emolument in which the grant of a tierce of canary or a butt of sack from the Royal Cellar played a conspicuous part has never been expressly denied. A picture, such as the brush of a pre-Raphaelite delighted to feign, of Chaucer reading his poems aloud to the assembled court may have had its counterpart in "cold physical fact." Pope's "beastly Skelton," Edmund Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton are sometimes represented as "volunteer laureates"; some of them enjoyed pensions, but it will not do to inquire too closely into the mode of their election or the tenure of their appointment. Ben Jonson seems to have been the first regular occupant of the laureateship as a fixed and salaried post under letters patent, usually dated February 3, 1616. He was jostled a good deal, it appears, by rivals both at Court and in the City, and the payment of his pension was irregular; but henceforth the appointment be

came a regular incident of Court life and the Bays were recognized as "the learned shepherd's meed," and were handed on with traditional responsibilities, duties, rites, ceremonies, and emoluments first to Davenant and then to Dryden. These three laureates, and Rowe, Cibber, and Tennyson subsequently were buried in the Abbey.

After Dryden the laureateship declined sadly to the servitude of party politics and a strange dynasty; and, as whiggism is the negation of all principle, so the panegyrical exploits of the paid whig bards involved the negation of true poetry. Shadwell as "Og" had been unsparingly satirized by Dryden; his deviation into sense had been despaired of, and he certainly did little to falsify the prediction when he came to occupy the chair of his mighty predecessor. On Shadwell's death at Christmas, 1692, by the interest of the Chamberlain, Lord Dorset, Nahum Tate, the new Psalmist and botcher of King Lear, was appointed to occupy the vacant place. As the laureate of Queen Anne, Tate produced a notable panegyric on tea which he described, more probably as a concession to the reigning fashion than as a matter of personal conviction, as "Panacea." He is described as an honest, quiet man, with a downcast face, somewhat given to fuddling. Southey pronounced him the lowest of all laureates, with the possible exception of Shadwell. On the death of Queen Anne poor Tate encountered the

lot of Dryden; he lost his salary, his butt of sack, and the post of historiographer which often accompanied the laurels; and there was every reason to suppose that henceforth laureates would come in and go out with successive ministries. This was only prevented, we may be sure, by the long unbroken period of Whig ascendancy. For the time being the office gained considerably in credit by the accession of George I. and Nicholas Rowe, who was a stanch Whig, and who, if the well-known story be true, had certainly no strong inducement to put faith in the patronage of Tory ministers. Southey, always a loyal son of the Church, must have forgotten Eusden when he described Tate as lowest of the laureates. Notable as a sycophant even among the clerical chaplains to the nobility in that age, Eusden won the distinction on Rowe's death, in 1718, by the most unblushing flattery to the Duke of Newcastle and his relatives. He surpassed even Rowe in the regularity and unction of his birthday odes, but developed for the rest into the drunken parson much bemus'd with beer of the Dunciad. He figures less prominently, however, in Pope's Inferno than his successor the astute and dexterous Colley Cibber, who was at any rate a man of the world and whose odes Jonson characteristically preferred to those of his successors. When Cibber died the post was offered as a sinecure to Gray; but Gray, with his fastidious timidity, refused to have anything to do with the Bays, and William Whitehead, on his appointment in 1757, was called upon to exert his muse in the annual fashion which had now become consecrated by usage. The monotony and bathos thus laid bare to all elicited his "Pathetic Apology for all Laureates" and he obtained a contemptuous

In accordance with the advice usually tendered by heads of houses to poets in those days Whitehead attached himself to a person of quality and died in dignity for a laureate, as an inmate of Lord Jersey's family, in 1784. Beneath this stone a Poet Laureate lies,

Nor good, nor great, nor foolish, nor yet wise,

Not meanly humble, nor yet swell'd with pride,

He simply liv'd—and just as simplydied.

After Whitehead, upon Mason's refusal and the deafness of the authorities to Gibbon's suggestion that the office had become an anomaly and had better be abolished, the laureateship certainly acquired merit by the accession of Thomas Warton, who, if not a great poet, was a great connoisseur and historian of Poetry. When he died, in 1790, no rival was forthcoming to contest the appointment of Henry James Pye, a gentleman respectable, as Scott affirmed, in everything but his poetry. Pye was fitted to shine as a police magistrate, and he did in fact write a useful compendium of the duties of a justice of the peace. while still of tender years he could have been induced, like Blackstone, to utter a "Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse" we might have been spared many examples of the art of sinking in poetry. As a poet Pye sank below Whitehead and even Eusden. His reputed magnum opus was a lengthy epic called "Alfred." As lyrist and laureate he was sober, reliable, punctual, ornate, and patriotic. His birthday odes were distinguished by their unvarying allusions to vocal groves and feathered choirs, whence the familiar impromptu of the ribald George Ste

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