volent man. A gentleman also, and a man of the world; holding his own and wielding considerable authority in a society where the Protestant rector of the parish is regarded by himself and everybody else as a fitting mate for the waiting-woman. Father Holt's loving kindness to the desolate little boy, a stranger in the house of his own father, shows him in a very favourable light, although the said goodness proceeds from natural kindness of heart rather than principle, seeing that he is ready to use his secret knowledge of the boy's position in whatever way it will best serve the interests of the cause he has at heart; uninfluenced by any consideration either of abstract justice, or of the welfare of his protégé. Be it remembered, however, that his plots are no vulgar ones for the aggrandisement of his Order, or even of the Church, but for a cause considered by many of his compatriots a noble and legitimate one, the restoration of the exiled Stuarts to their hereditary throne. KATHARINE ROCHE. MOTHER BORGIA'S GOLDEN JUBILEE BENEATH the Southern Cross full many a heart Fond memories of a time long passed away. And joyous throngs whose sunlit world is young In joyful tones thy Golden Jubilee. Inscribed in loving hearts, a glowing page Reflects afar fair beams of holy light. These deathless hours which mock the flight of time To make the dawning of thy Golden Prime NEW JERSEY, U.S.A. J. M'AULIFFE. ON LETTER-WRITING THE Sunday Magazine for 1871 has somehow come into my hands. There seems to be very little in it that I could read with sympathy; but I have glanced over three papers under the heading of the present paper. The writer is the Rev. A. W. Thorold, who died Bishop of Winchester, in 1895, leaving his only son a Catholic behind him. I thought of extracting from this worthy man's essay sundry shrewd remarks about the various kinds of letters; but even this lazy way of creating "copy" would be too troublesome just at present, and I have put the Sunday Magazine out of my way for ever, after transscribing this "Winged Word": "To say No pleasantly gives less pain sometimes than to say Yes roughly." I do not know the name of the periodical from which I procured, a year or two ago, a manuscript copy of an essay on The Lost Art of Letter-writing," by Miss May Wynne. My impression is that the periodical was of such a nature that this little essay may be almost considered to be still unpublished. At any rate it is so for my readers, some of whom will turn to it with keener interest when allowed to know that the writer is a sister of the unforgotten Frances Wynne, author of Whisper.* WE over. * E have only to review in our minds the letters we receive from our friends and acquaintances to be forced to acknowledge that the days of letter-writing as an art are Affectionate, amusing, characteristic, these letters may be, the spontaneous outcome of the writer's mood; but where are the careful diction, the neatly "rounded" sentences of old? Is not the object, generally, to put as much news into as small a space as possible? To get a letter to so-and-so "off one's conscience" by scribbling it in the last available second before post-time? Alas! there is often more art required to decipher letters than has been expended in writing them! Letter-writing still exists as a business. It sometimes threatens to become the main business of life, whether one likes it or not. It exists as the greatest pleasure between friend and friend, as a dreadful bore in some of its branches, and a great convenience in others; but as an art, it has gone the way of the harp, and the spinet, and the embroidery-frame and other elegancies of a hundred years ago. And yet are these things *This exquisite little book of verse has just been issued by Elkin Mathews, Vigo Street, London, price one shilling. really dead? Does not the spinet, indeed, enjoy a wider life as the modern piano? It is only developed beyond recognition. In the same way the art of letter-writing is rather altered than lost. The letter-writing remains as letter-writing; the art which graced it has taken on new shapes and new names. It has developed into essays, into magazines articles, into collections of short stories, into the thousand and one forms of more or less mediocre writing which threaten to submerge us nowa-days. For we read in these literary efforts the thoughts and feelings and emotions which a hundred years ago would have gone to make up letters to friends, but now are published for the perusal of all who care to read, only they are expressed as generalities instead of personalities. We have become at once more reserved and more open. We express our thoughts more publicly than of old, yet we take cover by expressing them in such a form that they need not necessarily be stamped as our own; they may be just thoughts in general voiced by us. Herein lies the temptation to that modern frenzy for "rushing into print." Only the chosen few, in most cases, are privileged to know what is felt "in the deep heart's core," and they learn in letters where diction and grammar have been thrown to the winds; not from the careful composition which appeared in print. This change applies chiefly to women, who a hundred years ago would have been considered to transgress all the laws of delicacy and good breeding by publishing their poor little imaginings. Our thoughts must find expression somewhere, and our great grandmothers, who had not the lighter publications of the present day wherein to air their opinions, had no recourse but to commit them by letter to their friends, clothed in befitting language. How quaintly they read now, these old letters, with their long periods, full of effusive feeling, written in the fine handwriting of the time, on the thinnest of paper, and containing volumes in three closely filled sides of a sheet, the fourth being left blank for the purposes which the envelope now fulfils. And, indeed, when the delivery of a letter cost some five or six shillings, there was good reason for making it worth preserving. The cheapness of the penny post has divested letters of their importance (though at the same time we have a feeling of very real disappointment when the post brings nothing for us), and this, combined with the facilities for having even average work accepted and published, has gone far to exterminate the art of letter-writing. Some there are whose letters, like their conversation, must always have a charm; but that is because they start with inherent talent, not from art. Those who do not possess the same natural ability have ceased to cultivate any style in letterwriting. Even the letters of authors, that we expect to find delightful, fall far short of our expectations, since for them, too, duties multiply, and the calls upon their time and attention become daily more numerous and various. If the hurry of modern life invades even the retreat of poets, how shall the ordinary man or woman escape? Our rate of life gets quicker year by year, to the destruction of an art which requires leisure and peace, and a quiet mood if it is to grow. The quantity of letter-writing which modern life imposes upon us leaves little room for the development of quality. MAY WYNNE. WANTING YOU SUMMER has come again, dear heart, The woodbine clusters in the hedge, A blackbird whistles down the lane, But since their songs you may not hear, Oh! many a year has come and gone Have power to heal my heart forlorn NORA TYNAN O'MAHONY. THE enemy was approaching. The people kept pouring in, frantic with terror, crouching into the corners which Miss Madge assigned to them. Wailing children, fainting mothers, mourning old men, and weeping girls. The windows were barricaded, except just where the guns protruded. Sir Archie, with his few assistants, stood ready at their posts. After a horrible spell of suspense the soldiers could be heard mustering without, more and more arriving, trampling of hundreds of feet, prancing and floundering and terrible jingling of cavalry, shouting of fierce orders, oaths and triumphant menaces, and hideous mirth; and, finally, the opening roar of the guns. Sir Archie replied gallantly to the salute. A hurried glance below smote his heart with the forlornness of his hope. Yet his courage did not fail. How were the soldiery to know that but a crowd of helpless people and a handful of strong men were all the force that opposed them from those windows? If but the fire could be kept up! Every morsel of lead about the castle was seized upon as treasure, and Hester and Miss Madge got a lesson in making bullets. A crippled old soldier, who had fought bravely for England in his youth, taught them and helped them. And so the night wore on. A piteous crowd half dead with fear, and so, happily, dumb; half-a-dozen grim desperate men feeding their guns; two screaming women, mad with terror, shut up in their several rooms with their attendants; two other women, pallid faces soiled with smoke, low steady voices, hearts braced up with courage for the emergency, swift steps and blackened hands, toiling over a fire in the kitchen making bullets; nimblefooted boys, who were the making of brave men, running swiftly up and down, carrying fragments of new-found lead, bearing the newly-fashioned slugs up to the gunners; barricaded windows, darkness, deadly silence, smothered shrieks, muttered prayers, groans, and again silence, with over all the sickening, maddening roar of the assault, with the pressing, and the trampling, and the threatening of the assailants. These things were known within the castle. A glimpse of the scene without was |
