forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and pans, of catching goats, and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious cannibals. This task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and vivacity. In his first discovery of a new art he shows the freshness so often conspicuous in first novels. The scenery was just that which had peculiar charms for his fancy; it was one of those half-true legends of which he had heard strange stories from seafaring men, and possibly from the acquaintances of his hero himself. He brings out the shrewd vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources with evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De Foe tells us himself that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his own fate. He had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his prison is represented in the book by confinement in an island; and even particular incidents, such as the fright he receives one night from something in his bed, "was word for word a history of what happened." In other words, this novel too, like many of the best ever written, has in it something of the autobiographical element which makes a man speak from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.

It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense marvellously like truth, is singularly wanting as a psychological study. Friday is no real savage, but a good English servant without plush. He says "muchee" and "speakee," but he becomes at once a civilized being, and in his first conversation puzzles Crusoe terribly by that awkward theological question, why God did not kill the devil-for characteristically enough Crusoe's first lesson includes a little instruction upon the enemy of mankind. He found, however, that it was " not so easy to imprint right notions in Friday's mind about the devil, as it was about the being of a God." This is comparatively a trifle; but Crusoe himself is all but impossible. Steele, indeed, gives an account of Selkirk from which he infers that, "this plain man's story is a memorable example that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities; " but the facts do not warrant this pet doctrine of an old-fashioned school. Selkirk's state of mind may be inferred from two or three facts. He had almost forgotten to talk; he had learnt to catch goats by running on foot; and he had acquired the exceedingly difficult art of making fire by rubbing two sticks. In other words, his whole mind was absorbed in providing a few physical necessities, and he was rapidly becoming a savage-for a man who can't speak and can make fire, is very near the Australian. We may infer, what is probable from other cases, that a man living fifteen years by himself, like Crusoe, would either go mad, or sink into that semi-savage state. De Foe really describes a man in prison, not in solitary confinement. We should not be so pedantic as to call for accuracy in such matters; but the difference between the fiction and what we believe would have been the reality is significant. De Foe, even in Robinson Crusoe, gives a very inadequate picture of the Lotal torments to which his hero is exposed. He is frightened by a parrot calling him by

name, and by the strangely picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as compared with the amazing power of describing facts, Robinson Crusoe is a book for boys rather than men, and, as Lamb says, for the kitchen rather than for higher circles. It falls short of any high intellectual interest. When we leave the striking situation and get to the second part, with the Spaniards and Will Atkins talking natural theology to his wife, it sinks to the level of the secondary stories. But for people who are not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement, Robinson Crusoe will always be one of the most charming of books. We have the romantic and adventurous incidents upon which the most unflinching realism can be set to work without danger of vulgarity. Here is precisely the story suited to De Foe's strength and weakness. He is forced to be artistic in spite of himself. He cannot lose the thread of the narrative and break it into disjointed fragments, for the limits of the island confine him as well as his hero. He cannot tire us with details, for all the details of such a story are interesting; it is made up of petty incidents, as much as the life of a prisoner reduced to taming flies, or making saws out of penknives. The island does as well as the Bastille for making trifles valuable to the sufferer and to us. The facts tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic power to press them home to us; and the efforts to give an air of authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes rather bore us, in other novels, are all to the purpose; for there is a real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments, will always be more impressive than the more gorgeously coloured island of Enoch Arden. When we add that the whole book shows the freshness of a writer employed on his first novelthough at the mature age of fifty-eight; seeing in it an allegory of his own experience embodied in the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some reasons why Robinson Crusoe should hold a distinct rank by itself amongst his works. As De Foe was a man of very powerful, but very limited, imagination-able to see certain aspects of things with extraordinary distinctness, but little able to rise above them-even his greatest book shows his weakness, and scarcely satisfies a grown-up man with a taste for high art. In revenge, it ought, according to Rousseau, to be for a time the whole library of a boy, chiefly, it seems, to teach him that the stock of an ironmonger is better than that of an iron shop. We may agree in the conclusion without caring about the reason; and to have pleased all thes in Europe for near a hundred and fifty years is, after all, a remarkable feat.

Roe-Shooting in the Black Forest.

RISING to dress by candle-light, peering out into the darkness to discern the state of the weather, snatching a hurried and imperfect breakfast, driving in a cramped conveyance along a dull white road between long and silent stretches of forest, with the damp grey night-mist still dragging slowly over the firs, and with the cold barrels of a gun numbing one's fingers--such are the ordinary preliminaries to a day's shooting common alike to many parts of England and Germany. But with the break of day all further resemblance ceases. When the hot strong sun of the south gathers up these mist-clouds and sends them rolling away westward, when the hills along the horizon begin to show themselves of a gloomy green instead of that thin blue which surrounds an English landscape, when a clearance in the great forest around you shows you a large, manywindowed, projecting-roofed wooden châlet, as ruddy in its deep brown hues as any hut of the Swiss valleys, you are led to expect something entirely different from the steady, business-like, and rather tame pursuit of partridges which generally follows the drive to cover in England. A hen capercailzie, with her great brown wings outstretched, sails quickly overhead; a fox stands quietly in an adjacent field and watches you drive past; a blue hare flashes across the road and disappears into the wood: no, this is clearly not England.

But the drive over, what then? Another of those great wooden châlets comes into view, the strong sunlight making its rich brown gables almost red, and there are people walking about, and vehicles in front of the door, and over the window a noble painting bearing the legend “Zum weiszen Adler." Those boys outside have borrowed a holiday from the national school, which they must attend, to form a corps of beaters; and they are already receiving jerked and half-grumbling instructions from one of the Prince's keepers-the ancient, phlegmatic, morose, and picturesque Schaller. Imagine a little man dressed wholly in grey and green, with a large slouched hat adorned with jay's feathers, with a thin brownish-white face, a large nose, a large black moustache and small deep-set eyes, with a horn slung round his neck, a gun pendent from one shoulder, and a cartridge-bag of roe-skin hanging from the other. He looks as if he had been the companion of Robin Hood and Little John, and had gone on smoking that big pipe ever since, until he had so steeped himself in nicotine that Time had become afraid to touch him. He is one of the oldest and most experienced of the Prince's keepers-the Prince von Fürstenberg, who owns as much of the Black Forest as would make an

English county and it is his proud boast that of all his companions he is the only one whom the Prince addresses as "Du." The other keepers are inside, in the spacious, low-roofed, eight-windowed room which is the chief glory of each small hostelry: and through the haze of badly-smelling tobacco-smoke we can dimly discern their short, brawny figures clad in the same picturesque dress which Schaller wears, though for the most part they have bushy brown beards and moustaches on their sun-tanned faces.

In a little while our party is mustered on the road outside. E, the Prince's overseer for this district, a splendid fellow with immense shoulders and arms, leads the way, attended by the two or three sportsmen who have responded to his invitation. There is K, the landlord of the inn at Hubertshofen; there is a young Bavarian whose sporting costume-his gaiters, hat, jacket, horn, pouch, and killing knife-is perfect; there is a small, thin doctor, with spectacles, who is always asking questions about the wind; and with myself there comes Sa gentle English youth, whose eyes somehow will wander backward in the direction of the Hubertshofen inn, where she of the flaxen curls and azure eyes remains to mope in the hopeless dulness of feminine companionship until we send for her in the afternoon.

"Vorwärts, alle, in Gottes Namen!" shouts out E-, as he slings his gun (every gun has a green strap affixed) over his big shoulder, and strides forth.

The slight wind now blowing blows in the direction whither we are going it is necessary, therefore, to go to the extreme end of the ground to be traversed and work backward. There are few animals which have so intensely keen a scent as the roe; and the greatest caution has to be exercised in order to keep to leeward of them. In some districts where the roe lie in small covers and are apt to be scared away altogether if driven much and hard by dogs, it is deemed sufficient to send in a few beaters who do not even make the peculiar rattling noise with which they ordinarily arouse the deer. The mere scent of the beaters is enough to send the roe on lightly towards the sportsman, who in such a case generally gets an easy shot. But on this morning we were plentifully provided with dogs-about the most ludicrous-looking animals of which one can conceive. These beagles, having heads of the usual beagle size, seem to have little body and no legs. The latter are merely squat stumps, exceedingly thick and muscular, with large, soft, out-turning paws, which make the animal walk like a turtle. The dogs possess the advantage of running slowly and steadily, and never tire; while they make their way through the mossy swamps, the blackberry-bushes and brackens of the forest much more easily than one would imagine. E-, however, had with him a huge black hound, a brute of evil aspect, but of immense power, which was supposed to be invaluable for tracking wounded deer. How Hector displayed his peculiar idiosyncrasies shall be described hereafter.

"Gentlemen," says E, in that fine, broad, Bavarian German which is so different from the horrible patois of the Black Foresters, "whosoever shoots an old hare shall be fined thirty-five kreutzers, to be exacted from him on the spot. Young hares you may shoot as you please."

This being a Black Forest joke, everybody laughs; though it is already understood among us that not only are we forbidden to shoot does, but that capercailzie and foxes, being the pet shooting of the Prince himself, are also to be spared. Let it shock no one's feelings to hear of foxes being considered good shooting. Here they are never hunted; and as they are most destructive vermin, killing the young roe in considerable numbers, and even attacking their mothers when snow is on the ground, the sportsman is accounted fortunate who comes home singing "Der Fuchs läszt mir sein Kleid."

Suddenly the whole party come to a halt. The keepers clustering around E, and watching the pointing of his hand with those grave, keen, sunburnt faces of theirs, receive each his appointed place and directions. Schaller draws off his troop of men, boys, and dogs; and disappears in the forest. E-, having specified all our posts, gives another but more subdued "Vorwärts!" and we too enter the forest by a neighbouring path.

Here there is no underwood. Down between the lichen-grey stems of the magnificent pines and firs, the sun-light falls in great shafts, and lights up the soft, spungy green moss into a brilliant orange and gold. Occasionally we cross a deep glade, which runs down into an unseen valley; and in one of these glades the underwood begins. Our posts are given us. In all beats there are one or two stations which are known by long experience to be the best; the preferable of these two, called the "Haupt-platz,” being generally marked with a bit of stick which has a red F upon it to denote that here the Prince himself stands. S and I distinctly heard E tell the keepers that in every beat these two best places were to be given to the two Englishmen, the "Haupt-platz" to be given to each alternately.

"Bleiben Sie da," says one of the keepers to S- (pronouncing the words "blaybe Sie daw "), and my friend found himself posted behind a lurge pine, about twenty yards from the underwood of larch and birch, and almost opposite two deer-tracks which converged to one point. He had the "Haupt-platz."

I had the next position, about fifty yards further on; but I was placed on an incline from which I could easily look down on the movements of my

friend. So soon as all the posts have been occupied, each man must hold up his hand and convey to his next neighbour an intimation of his exact position; a duty which no one who has had a charge of No. 2 shot pass by his ear will ever neglect. Presently we heard a long low blast from the horn of the keeper who was at the extreme end of the guns—a message to the venerable Schaller telling him to begin the driving. This