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outburst before a room full of guests, in which she drops heavily unconscious into her husband's arms. During her fit, and to increase the sensational effect, her child dies in convulsions, and the interesting couple, with Lady Kitty now a complete wreck, withdraw to Venice, her friends doubtful whether she would ever recover the sudden and tragic death of her only child.

But Lady Kitty is, notwithstanding her frail body and stormy temperament, endowed with as many lives as a cat. She disregards a nervous collapse, pointing back to a long preceding period of overstrain and excitement, with suspicions of tubercular mischief, and is very soon in a fresh vortex of excitement, with her disreputable mother and cortége appearing on the scene, followed soon by Geoffrey Cliffe on the one hand and Mary Lyster and her father on the other. In spite of nervous collapse, complicated with impending tubercular mischief, she is projected again into the midst of all the storm and stress of emotion and passion with which those names were connected in her recent history. And over and above being enveloped in all the old entanglements, to escape from which she had presumably been withdrawn to Venice, at great inconvenience to her husband, who was still a Cabinet Minister, there was а new tragedy in her domestic relations with him ready to burst over her head, and en

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tirely of her own making. It appears that during her sequestration she had indulged her spite and animosity against many of his friends, including the Prime Minister and his wife, by writing an "atrocious' book, in which she glorified her husband, made caricatures of all the political friends of his whom she hated, describing the Prime Minister, Lord Parham, her recent guest, "with all sorts of details of the most intimate and offensive kind, mocking his speech, his manners, his little personal ways, charging him with being the corrupt tool tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not to be trusted, &c., &c." To make the episode still more outrageous, she had been counselled and assisted in the publication by a former friend of her husband's while staying under his roof, a Mr Darrell, whose endeavours to extract an appointment from Ashe after he had attained to Cabinet rank, and their failure, are duly chronicled. The spite thus induced was wreaked on the unfortunate man through his demented wife; and Ashe, at last stung to resistance, displays for the first time, somewhat late in the day, a little of that sæva indignatio which he was represented as being entirely wanting in. He resolved at once to leave her, go to England, and resign; and, in spite of passionate appeals from his wife, he carried his resolution into effect. The poor mad creature was

quite incapable apparently of understanding the mischief she had done, or of waiting patiently till her husband had encountered its results. No; she made up her mind with the egoism of insanity that she was now a dead creature: her husband had ceased to love her, for she had wrecked his career and destroyed her own happiness. His mother had long been alienated. Her own mother was nothing to her. Matters were ripe for the reappearance of Cliffe, to whom she told her wretched incoherent story, "of which the mere telling in such an ear meant new treachery to William and new ruin for herself." And then she is represented as following his unprincipled guidance, conscious of a magnetism and force against which she struggled in vain. She writes to her husband to tell him all about it, and that her will is like wax in his hands, but stipulating for £500 a-year if she is divorced. All, however, was not quite settled, though Lady Tranmore warns her son that his wife will either go with Cliffe to the fighting lines in Upper Bosnia, or return with her. Finally, in answer to an appeal from her husband, she decides to retire to Verona with her maid for two days of solitude and reflection to make up her mind. Mary Lyster learns the secret of her retreat from her mother-in-law, and, under every circumstance which can blacken treachery, forges a note from Kitty to Cliffe, inviting him to Verona. The plot culminates in this astounding piece

of impossible villainy, attributed to one of the most respectable characters in the book. It combines the sordid meanness of a procuress, the craft of a criminal, and the malice of a fiend.

The result is that we are in pandemonium from the beginning to the end of this unsatisfactory tale. It purports to be a picture of social relations amongst leading and influential people, comprising in their ranks leading statesmen and high dignitaries. It is a scene of the wildest extravagance, where social life is represented as being without aim or dignity or moderation, every one thirsting to be in the midst of a whirl of excitement which is unceasing and without limit. The upshot of it all is that the heroine dies at the age of twenty-four of remorse and physical and nervous exhaustion. Cliffe, of course, turns out to be a tyrant, and is eventually murdered in Venice at the instance of an Italian woman whom he has deserted for our heroine. Then follows Lady Kitty's desire of forgiveness from her husband, her meeting with her halfsister on terms of mutual repulsion, and a final meeting by accident between the husband and wife in a remote inn, where she dies in his presence after mutual explanations between the two. There is a certain tragic dignity about this scene, wild and improbable as it is, and ridiculous as it might easily have been made. They console themselves with

the reflection that they had both been the victims of a crime as hideous as any murder. Kitty had found out, in spite of her prostration, or got people in Venice to find out, who had sent the message which brought Cliffe to Verona; "and I know the man who took it. I suppose it would be pathetic if I sent her word that I had forgiven her. But I haven't." And so the tale is brought to an end. There is not a respectable character in it who is allowed to have the least influence or control over its course. The few who are credited with any virtues at all are quite subordinate in importance, and helpless in their insignificance. There is neither art nor common-sense in de

lineating social or matrimonial life without any ray of light which can relieve the sombre monotony of vicious extravagance and incessant excitement, untempered by any sense of personal dignity or selfcontrol. The whole thing is overdone as much overdone as the agonies of an agnostic parson in a former work by the same authoress. If it could be accepted as in any degree a faithful picture of life, the only inference would be that society has reached a low depth of degradation, that matrimony is an institution which all should avoid, and that the Divorce Act of 1857 is the most remedial and most beneficent legislation which the last half century has produced.

ON THE GENTLE ART OF BLAZON.

BY SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BART.

FEW domiciles could be more elaborately ornate and ostentatiously luxurious than the bedroom of a great railway hotel in which I was landed this morning before the sparrows began to twitter; yet no dwelling could be more heartless, or seem so utterly indifferent about the individuality of its inmate. Be you maid or matron, bachelor or benedict, "tenth transmitter of a feeble face" or self-made man, your identity is eclipsed from the moment you enter this room, and you become No. 32, just as hundreds have done before and hundreds more will do after you. It is hardly conceivable that a feeling of home could be achieved here by dint of residence, however protracted. One ought to be grateful for warmth, light, cleanliness, and a good breakfast. Well, so I am, but how am I to feel it? "Mine host" being being a limited liability company, relations with him are necessarily impersonal and mutually deficient in warmth. Instead of exchanging greeting with him, I yield to peevishness and fault-finding. Before me, as I write, hangs a print from a modern-very modern-picture, showing a young person with an empire waist sprawling in an arbour and smelling at a rose as if her life depended on it. She has taken the precaution of bringing with her a cushion covered with sprigged

silk; otherwise I warrant she would not stay long on that rectilinear garden-seat. There is no objection to her sprawling-it shows off her shapely figure, trim hose, and dainty slippers; but what does offend is that the artist, desiring, I suppose, to indicate the damsel's aristocratic connection, has introduced a stone gryphon beside the terrace steps, supporting a shield displaying wholly impossible bearings. There is a cross, as there might well be; only it is not a heraldic cross quartering the escutcheon, but a sepulchral cross, such as might adorn the outside of a church hymnal; and there is a bend surcharged upon the cross

-a bend sinister, too; that is, crossing the shield diagonally from the upper left corner (right as you look at it) to the right flank. Now the bend sinister is one of the rarest of all charges; not because it is, as commonly supposed, a mark of illegitimacy-that is to confuse it with the baton sinister, which is not an honourable "ordinary" like the bend-but an abatement of honour; it is rare simply because in ninetynine cases out of a hundred the bend dexter is displayed. Apart from that, anybody with the slightest knowledge of heraldry will perceive the impossibility of such arms as are here depicted. Heraldry is a Christian science-art-craft — call it

what you will: it originated in Christian society, and was codified for the exclusive use of Christian chivalry; wherefore the cross was ever esteemed the most honourable ordinary, and it would be an unpardonable solecism to surcharge it with an ordinary of inferior honour. The painter of this picture, then, has blundered badly in dabbling with a gentle craft whereof he has not mastered the rudiments. Heraldically, he does not know his right hand from his left, and has perpetrated an affront upon the figure of highest dignity in the art of blazon.

Now, why all this fuss, asks the reader, about a picture by an unknown artist ? Why can't you look at the pretty young lady and leave out the heraldry? This invites the retort, why could not the painter leave it out? We suffer fools gladly, so long as they have the tact not to thrust their folly under our noses. Painting, it is true, has this advantage over the sister art of Music, that nobody need look at a picture unless he choose, while the sensitive ear is always liable to outrage from discord or iteration. All the same, pictures invite inspection: they are only painted to be looked at; and offence by the painter who represents things falsely-who attempts to depict what he has never studied—is as direct to the eye and intelligence as that offered to the ear and temper by the pianist who fills the house (and perhaps the next house) with excruciating renderings of com

positions beyond his power. Nobody blames him who gives way to strong language under the affliction of a mangled sonata: may not a murmur be allowed to one who witnesses the desecration of the chivalrous science?

Oh, I know how I shall be set down. "Art for art!" cries the painter; "criticism of your kind is puerile. False heraldry well painted is finer art than the most accurate heraldry in a bad picture. Let the critic mell only with conception and execution." Very well; so be it. Set the marriage feast at Cana in Galilee with wine in glass bottles with corks; represent your knights with sword or lance in their left hands; pour the rays of the setting sun through the eastern apse at vespers; let the snows of Manchuria whiten the plain in your great picture of the surrender of De Wet and his Boers. Enforce "art for art" as the universal canon, and you sound the knell of historic painting and commemorative sculpture, thereby stripping the Muse of one of her noblest functions. But don't be surprised if plain folks say unkind things behind your back.

However, that is all outside my present theme, which is suggested by certain signs of reviving interest in British heraldry. Were the world too busy to take any note of that in which, three hundred years ago, any educated person would have felt ashamed not to be well versed, one might hesitate to stir the dust which has

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