affairs of the Prince has been rather in the appearance than in the reality. He retained at middle age a zest in social matters scarcely consistent with a very fast life. No one who observed him could have failed to notice the freshness of his appetite for fun. When he was considerably past forty I used to see him at a Continental watering-place down at the springs at half-past six every morning, rushing about with the girls and taking an eager interest in the fun which you would expect of a youth of twenty.

While it may not be possible to tell very precisely the kind of king Edward VII. will be until he has been for some years upon the throne, still, from what we know of him and from the nature of the preparation he has been receiving for his new office we may draw a favourable augury for the future. We do not know much of his real thoughts and feelings regarding the questions of the day. If we did, we should not be able to form a much more satisfactory idea of the sort. of king he will be than we can now do. We all know politicians, with whose minds we have been familiar for years, and who in careers that did not call for executive ability, in legislation, for instance, have been very able men, who, nevertheless, when entrusted with executive office, have been dismal failures. No doubt, the King has been an interested observer of public affairs and has had decided views of his own regarding them. The only time he ever spoke of such subjects in my hearing I was surprised by the frankness with which he expressed himself. But I am sure he has the good

sense to be aware that these views, when they are not those of the country, must be kept in the background, and to recognise the limitations of the influence of an English sovereign on public affairs. The great requirements of an English king are tact, self-restraint and a sense of the proprieties and the decencies of his position. All of these he has. There will be no scandals to bring the institution of the crown into public disfavour. His wild oats-in so far as they have been wildhave been sown. Tact, that most important gift, he has to a high degree. He has been learning it all his life, and he was born with a good deal of it. It is one of the many clever words we owe the French; from tango, to touch-to know by the feeling of it, almost by the smell of it, what to do and especially what not to do. It is a combination of good nature and intelligence, the will to do and say the right thing and the intelligence to know what the right thing is, with, over and above these, a certain native faculty. Good nature the King has, and it is impossible to meet him without being impressed with his possessing intelligence and excellent natural abilities. We feel confident, therefore, that he will be equal to his new duties. Regarding the old ones, it will be interesting to know what part the King's gifts for splendour and pleasure will play in the new reign. Will advancing years and the sobering effect of his responsibilities leave him indisposed for the indulgence of these tastes? It may be so, but habit is strong in men, and if the King has good health, I fancy that his court will be brilliant.

A brief despatch from St. Petersburg recently announced that Gorki, the celebrated tramp novelist, had destroyed the last chapters of his new work, The Moujiks, on which he has been engaged, and that it is believed he has gone back to his old life of vagrancy.

Maximilian Gorki is a curious literary phenomenon, who appeared in the Russian world of letters about seven years ago. A common tramp by profession and instincts, Gorki suddenly came forward as the author of books which, for their human interest and power of character drawing, have not been equalled by any Russian writer since the first romances of Tolstoy. The critics, while marvelling at the prodigy, acknowledged the absolute freshness and novelty of the writer's work, which has met with tremendous popular success, and has to a certain extent revolutionised Russian literature.

According to Ivan Strannik, who introduces his remarkable compatriot to foreign readers in a long article in the Revue de Paris, Gorki was born of very humble parents in Nizhni-Novgorod, a government of middle Russia, in 1868 or 1869 Gorki himself is not quite sure which and became an orphan when still a child. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but, disliking the sedentary life, he ran away. He likewise deserted from an engraver's office, after which he entered the studio of a painter of religious pictures. Next he was a scullery boy and then assistant to a gardener. He tried all these modes of life, and was content with none of them. When he was fifteen he could barely read, although his grandfather took some pains to make him spell out words from an old family Bible. These early studies, however, only filled him with disgust for learning until the day when, assistant cook on board a steamboat, he was initiated by the chief cook into the joys of French romance, which fired his imagination and filled him with a ferocious desire to educate himself.

He went to Kazan and tried to obtain free tuition in one of the schools, but this he found impossible. Disillusionised, he took a situation as baker's boy at the wages of three roubles a month, but soon tiring of this and longing for the fresh

air of the open country, he deserted the bakery and became a common country tramp, fraternising with every ragged vagrant he met on the road, but always reading and neglecting no opportunity to educate himself. A few months later he was back in the city, acting as watchman, and afterward he peddled kvass, a kind of sour beverage, in the streets. Then came the opportunity that was to give him his first foothold in the path of literature. Chance brought him into relations with an advocate, who took interest in him and helped him in his education. Then, just as this new life seemed to be developing his genius, his natural restlessness again asserted itself and once more led him to resume his nomadic existence. He tramped all over Russia on foot, exercising every possible calling to eke out an existence, including henceforth that of a man of letters.

He made his literary début with a short story called "Makar Tchoudra," which was published in a country paper. The story was more remarkable for what it promised for the future than for what it gave, the style being as yet unformed and smacking somewhat of the romantic school. The scene is laid in a gypsy camp, and the characters at times lack naturalness. Nevertheless, in this narrative can be seen already Gorki's most marked characteristics-his passion for outdoor life and his inordinate love of music and

nature.

Gorki's real début dates from 1893. He made about that time the acquaintance of Korolenko, the writer, and with his assistance published another story, entitled Tchelkache, the success of which was tremendous. From then on Gorki threw aside every convention and strove to give frank and direct expression to his own views of life. As until then his life had been spent in the company of vagrants and he was himself a vagrant, he decided to devote his Muse to singing the "Song of the Tramp."

His favourite form is the short story. During the last seven years he has written thirty, which by their expressive brevity sometimes recall the methods of Guy de Maupassant. The plan of these stories is extremely simple. Often there are not more than two characters

an old beggar and his grandson, or a couple of workmen, or a tramp and a Jew, two companions in misery. The interest of these stories is not in the development of a complicated plot. They are rather fragments of life or bits of biography from one date to another. Here is the plot of one story:

A young peasant leaves his village to find work. In a seaport town he meets a ne'er-do-well, who persuades him to commit a crime. This entails a mysterious night expedition, which has for its object the robbing of one of the vessels in the harbour. The two men have to run the gauntlet of the coast guards during the terrors of night-time. After escaping a thousand dangers the booty is secured and is soon transformed into gold. So much wealth dazzles the peasant. Pictures of an idle, luxurious life surge through his obscure mind and disturb and tempt him. Dissatisfied at the share his comrade gives him, the peasant attempts to assassinate him and steals his purse. Then, tormented by remorse and fearing that the bloodshed and robbery may bring him bad luck, he returns to the man whom he has almost killed and, humbling himself, offers to return the stolen money. But the wounded man despises him, throws the coveted money in his face and, as a supreme insult, ends by forgiving him.

The plot is made entirely subsidiary to the character drawing. The style, despite its imperfections, is marvellously well adapted to the subject, being vigorous and facile and varying according to the needs of the story, now expressing all the abruptness and coarseness necessary; at other times coloured and poetic, until it reaches almost lyric heights. Gorki is very uneven, according to his moods, and he delights in fantastic pictures. His work lacks premeditation, each chapter representing his mood at the moment of penning it.

All that Gorki relates he has seen. All the scenes on land and sea that he describes, says M. Strannik, he has observed during the course of his adventurous career. Each detail of his mise-en-scène recalls to him some bitter or happy memory. The life of the vagrant he depicts has been his own life. The tramps have been his comrades. He has loved them or hated them. This explains the striking

fidelity of his characters to life. He does not idealise the tramp; the sympathy he has for their courage and love of liberty does not blind him. He does not seek to conceal their faults or condone their vices. He paints the reality, but without exaggerating its ugliness. He does not avoid painful or coarse scenes, but even in his most realistic passages he never shocks the reader, because one feels that he is striving only to present the truth as it is, and is not seeking to create a sensation by cheap methods. He merely states things as they are and insists that they cannot be changed, as they depend on immutable laws. Gorki sees in his characters only the spectacle of life. He sees passion convulse them as the wind raises the crests of the waves, and laughter pass over their souls as the sunlight pierces the cloud. He is, in the best acceptation of the word, a realist.

The introduction of the tramp into Russian literature is Gorki's great innovation. The earlier Russian writers were first interested in the cultured classes; later they went as low in the social scale as the moujik. The literature of the peasant, in fact, assumed great importance. It also had political significance and had much to do with the emancipation of the serfs. Yet a large class remained in the shadow-that big army of vagrants, obeying no laws, common to all countries, but larger, perhaps, in Russia than elsewhere. The Russian tramp, like his American brother, is recruited from all classes of society, and one finds among them, in spite of the complete bankruptcy of their past, picturesque signs of their origin, that remain with them to the time when they finally disappear into unknown graves. Old soldiers, former students, printers, nobles, schoolmasters, peasants, each has retained some distinctive mark of his profession. Among his tramps Gorki represents as being particularly debased and devoid of all moral sentiment those vagrants that once belonged to a higher social class. He argues that they have not become tramps in obedience to an instinct of liberty, but rather owing to their idleness and cowardice, which rendered them incapable of leading a wellconducted life. Gorki despises this kind of vagrant, and he never misses an opportunity in his stories to disassociate them from nature's true vagabonds.

It is the habit of the day to take a survey over the various fields of human interest and activity and note the changes that have occurred therein during the past century. The results make a brave showing for the human race. Great men have exerted a profound influence on life in its every phase, and enriched mankind. with material and intellectual fruits of a quality not to be matched by preceding centuries. Progress is written across the record on every page. To review the career of Giuseppe Verdi, whom a grim fatality has removed at the very dawn of a new era, comports with this general habit of thought; for his life-work is the epitome of operatic history during the greater portion of the nineteenth century. It is a tale of continuous development and progress.

As in the case of so many great musicians, Verdi was born amid the humblest surroundings. A cluster of laborers' huts some few miles from Parma constitutes the village of Roncole, and here Carlo Verdi and his wife Luigia, the parents of the composer, eked out their small existence as innkeepers. Young Verdi's musical aptitude manifested itself early in life. It is related how an itinerant organgrinder exercised a strange fascination over the boy. (The spell was broken, it is safe to say, when the composer himself began to furnish a repertoire for the instrument.) Apparently, the humble innkeeper had some inkling of his son's talent, for we find him at the age of seven already possessed of a small spinet and taking lessons from the village organist. Two years later he replaced his teacher as organist, and the first stage of his musical education was complete.

A rich patron of his father, living at Busseto, near by (where the youth went daily to school), threw in Verdi's way some opportunities for the exercise of his talents. With the encouragement of this musical Mæcenas, and with the natural instincts of his own genius, he improved every occasion. But the young musician quickly outgrew his local surroundings, and, aided by his generous friend, at the age of sixteen he went to Milan, then the centre of musical activity in Italy. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the director of the Conservatory to admit him-the

worthy man pronounced him wanting in musical gifts-Verdi persevered in his studies, finding an excellent teacher in Lavigna, a distinguished musician connected with La Scala Theatre. Here

he continued until twenty years of age, when the death of the director of the Philharmonic Society at Busseto called him to that post. He married the daughter of his friend and patron, and in 1838 again set out for Milan. His first opera, Oberto, was produced at the famous. theatre of La Scala the following year. Verdi was then twenty-six.

The year 1839 also saw the performance of Rossini's last work for the stage, William Tell, and thus was the continuity of Italian opera unbroken, the cloak of Rossini being caught up by young Verdi before it had fallen. Oberto was sufficiently well received by the public to induce the impresario of La Scala to enter into negotiations with the composer, who, accordingly, agreed to supply him with three operas in the two succeeding years. But domestic misfortunes (Verdi's wife and two children died within two months) interfered with these arrangements, and, completely disheartened, he resolved to give up music. He was, however, persuaded after a time to write once more; and Nabucco, produced in 1842, firmly established his reputation over all Italy. It is a significant circumstance in connection with the presentation of this work that the chorus was increased. The regular forces of the theatre had satisfied Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini; but Verdi demanded the change, and the manager yielded.

It is unnecessary to relate in detail the incidents connected with the career of the composer for whom the future thus brilliantly opened. I Lombardi followed Nabucco with even more pronounced success. In spite of their great vogue, Rossini and his school were already displaced by the newcomer, and his works were widely sought. From Venice, Rome, Naples, Paris, Florence and London came orders for operas, and a number were produced in rapid succession under Verdi's personal direction. In 1849 he returned to Roncole and purchased the villa of S. Agata, which was to the last his favourite residence. It would be a