This is a feeling which is probably most common in youth or old age, when the ties to life are fewer than they are in its prime, and when the past or the future may well look almost intolerably long to the wearied imagination. It may be that in the miserable experience of some sufferers this deep weariness of life may not exclude the fear of death; but so terrible a combination can scarcely be either common or lasting. Probably the normal state of things is that in which some degree of fear, or at least of reluctance, exists as a pure instinct; rising and falling with physical causes, ready to give force to the terrors of conscience and the cravings of affection, but held in check by various considerations and controlled by the will, if not utterly subdued by trustful hope. In people of active energetic temperament, with keen susceptibility to sensuous impressions, one may sometimes observe that no amount either of religious hope for another life, or of painful experience of this, will overcome the constitutional shrinking from the antici pated rending asunder of body and soul. They carry the same feeling through sympathy into their thoughts of the death of others, which appears to be almost physically shocking to them, however obviously acceptable to the person chiefly concerned. Such a state of feeling is to those who do not share it as unaccountable as it is evident. Looking at death calmly, as one of the very few circumstances of quite universal experience, any vehement disinclination to it would seem to be inappropriate as well as futile. But disinclination to some of its accidental cir cumstances is but too easily intelligible. This is probably another reason why the shrinking from it often seems to increase as youth is left behind. The very young cannot know how terrible a thing sickness is; those who have watched many deathbeds can scarcely forget the awful possibilities of physical suffering. And yet it seems probable that many of the worst appearances are more or less delusive. A very moderate experience of sick rooms suffices to show that actual suffering bears no exact proportion to its outward manifestations. Be this as it may, physical suffering is clearly no necessary accompaniment of death, and the dread of pain which makes us shrink from the prospect of mortal illness is quite a different thing from the real instinctive dread of death: it should indeed, and often does, act powerfully in reconciling us to the prospect of death. În like manner the unwillingness to be taken away from life in its fulness, to be cut off from the enjoyment of bright prospects, and debarred from the satisfaction of that ever-deepening curiosity with which every active mind must behold the mysterious drama going on around us-this unwillingness is quite a distinct feeling from the shrinking of the flesh and spirit from dissolution. It is a feeling which should in reason belong in its full force only to those who look upon death as the end of all things, and for whom, therefore, it should at least have no terrors. Is it some mysteriously intense appetite, or an inveterate confusion of thought, which hinders most people from perceiving that not to exist can not possibly be in the slightest degree painful or even unpleasant? If, on the other hand, we regard death merely as a transition from one state of existence to another (and of an existence possibly of infinite duration), we open the door to all extremes of glorious or fearful expectation, and the event itself shrinks into insignificance. From this point of view, as well as from the last, though for such different reasons, the important question is not when we die, but how we live. Religion and philosophy on different grounds combine to impress upon us the continuity and mutual dependence of successive "dispensations " or " developments." We cannot conceive of, much less really believe in, any state of existence in which we can have any interest wholly disconnected from our interest in this life. The laws which regulate the world we know must be in some degree the laws of any world in which we can conceive of ourselves as existing and retaining our identity, and it is hard to understand how any rational being can find a fancied safety in the mere delay of an inevitable crisis. Of course the theological origin of such a fancy is familiar enough; but the result is, I think, as unworthy of its own religious basis as it is of our human dignity. To suppose that we can have any reasonable ground of confidence for this life either in or apart from an Almighty Being whom we cannot trust with our destiny in the next, is certainly not more foolish than it is faithless. Our hopes for this world and for the next must rest upon one foundation,-our faith must be equally prepared for trials in respect of both. Either death leads to nothing at all, and to fear it is unmeaning; or it is a mere parenthesis, and to fear it is unworthy of those who believe in a righteous order. Still, while life is sweet, we must needs shrink more or less from what at least looks like its untimely termination. If it were not for the conventional association of sorrow with death already referred to, few, perhaps, would be selfish enough to wish to detain the aged from their rest, and to themselves the prospect is rarely unwelcome; but for the young in their springtime, or the middle-aged in their vigour, death necessarily involves a loss which is not the less real and need not be the less keenly felt because it may be regarded as overbalanced by the gain. Let our anticipations of life beyond the grave be as bright as they will, there can be no use in denying the preciousness of those which lie on this side of it; and the most ardently hopeful must still feel that, if the choice lay with themselves, it would be wisest not to hurry over the preliminary phase. But the truth is brought home to us again and again, that we have not light enough to choose by. In the dimness we can faintly discern that life has other kinds of completeness besides length of days: It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere. A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night, It was the plant and flower of light. As the years go on, there gathers a special radiance of eternal youth around some of the figures from whom all our hopes in this world have been most sharply severed. There are lives so rounded and crowned by their completed deeds of love, that Death seems to have appeared in the fulness of their prime only to consecrate them for ever; others stand apart from human ties in a solitude which makes time seem of little consequence, and the grave a not unfamiliar country. In all these cases we may even now see a fitness in what, according to mere reckoning of time, would be called unseasonable. And if we can catch glimpses of these things from without, there are no doubt many inward dramas which refuse to square themselves with the external framework of human life. We do not know to what unfathomable necessities the times and seasons of life and death may correspond, and as little do we know, in looking at each other's lives, what may be unfolding or what may be concluded, as seen from within. That which seems to others a cutting short of activity, may be to ourselves the laying down of arms no longer needed; our eyes may see the haven, where our friends can see only the storm; or if we cannot see a fitness in the time of our death, is that a strange thing in such a life as this? C. E. S. Regnard. A WRITER of a monograph is always liable to err on the side of exaggeration. His interest in the subject of his studies naturally leads him to claim an undue importance for the men who from time to time engage his attention, and to bestow his praise with a too lavish hand. This defect, however, is not perhaps without its advantages, and after all there may be more readers ready to excuse than to accuse. At any rate the student who contents himself with modest excursions in unknown or insufficiently known paths in the field of literature or of history may flatter himself with the thought that he is tacitly protesting against the ticketing and labelling process to which all branches of knowledge are inevitably subjected in an age of specialism and examinations. Moreover, nowadays we are no longer satisfied with the dry facts contained in dusty folios and mouldering archives. The nineteenth century is athirst for humanity. So strong indeed is this tendency that of late years we have seen the rise of a school of art and literature which prefers life to art, and one of whose most powerful literary representatives, M. Emile Zola, does not hesitate to say that "a masterpiece frozen by the lapse of ages is, after all, nothing but a beautiful corpse." Such sentiments are of course only an extreme manifestation of the spirit which really actuates modern historical inquiry. We are no longer content with dates and battles; we want to witness rather the spectacle of the combats of intellect and of its conquests from age to age. We want to see the interior life of the men of times gone by, their sufferings, their thoughts, their struggles, and their triumphs. It has well been said that history must not merely reproduce, it must create. In its infancy history resuscitated legendary figures whose very names are unknown to us. What should it not do for the men whose ashes are hardly cold, and whom we find living at this hour in their works? It is in this spirit that Houssaye, the brothers De Goncourt, Desnoireterres, Fournier, D'Heylli, and a number of other writers, have laboured on that inexhaustible period which begins with Louis XIV. and ends with Bonaparte. And it is in this spirit, with all modesty, that the present article has been written. Regnard falls between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and combines many qualities of the two periods. Although he is not perhaps much known in England, he is scarcely a writer whom one would look for in the bye-paths of literature. Both as a man and as an author he stands à part. He was a great traveller in days when travel still made a man an object of public curiosity. He was an epicurean before epicureanism became the fashion. His earliest poetical essays were insipid imitations of Boileau, and the works of his ripe and enforced genius were the comedies of Le Joueur, Le Légataire universel, and Les Folies amoureuses. Jean-François Regnard was born at Paris under the pillars of the Halles, only a few yards distant from the house in which Molière first saw the light thirty-three years earlier. He was baptized on the 8th of February, 1655. His parents were very well-to-do people, who held a leading position in the salt business. Regnard lost his father in early infancy, and was brought up by his mother and her two elder sisters. His education appears to have been very complete, and, as he himself tells us, the "demon of verse" possessed him very early in life; indeed, "before twelve winters had passed over his head he was already wandering on the slopes of Helicon." After the exercises of the Academy which completed the education of young men of family by teaching them not only mathematics and the classics, but also riding, dancing, and music, Regnard began to travel, starting apparently about the year 1671 or 1672; that is to say, in his seventeenth year. His first journey took him as far as Constantinople. He traversed Italy twice, on his way out and on his way home, and was absent in all about two years. During this time his passion for play declared itself, and, according to the traveller Misson, his winnings were so considerable, that after the expenses of his journey were paid, he still had a balance of some ten thousand crowns. The fortune left him by his father was anything but contemptible, and, to dismiss the question of money once for all, it may be said that Regnard always had a more than ample income. The curious difference between the destinies of the two men, who at a distance of only a few years were born in almost neighbouring houses, will not fail to strike the reader. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the son of a poor tapissier, was destined to stroll through the provinces, to write the Misanthrope, and to go down to posterity as the first comic poet of France; while Regnard enjoyed all the pleasures that wealth could buy in a dissolute and thoughtless age; he entertained kings and princes; and in his middle age, having exhausted the cup of enjoyment, and satisfied to the full his errant curiosity, he settled down en cynique mitigé, and wrote for his amusement those works which have won him a place in the temple of Comedy, second to Molière. Not much is known about his life. After remaining only a very short time at Paris on his return from Constantinople, Regnard again started in 1676, in company with a gentleman of Picardy, M. de Fercourt, for Italy, in which country be spent about two years at Bologna; and again, at Naples, he met a certain M. de Prade and his wife, an Arlesienne, who became the heroine of his only novel, La Provinciale. Regnard and Fercourt thought of passing on to the Levant, and while waiting for a favourable occasion they resolved to make an excursion to Marseilles, embarked on board |