out of account in any attempt to co-ordinate the higher teaching facilities of London.

We should thus have a university with three centres in the North, West, and South of London, each of which might be made equivalent to a provincial university, but maintaining a certain community of aims and standards under the central governing body of the university. The fourth centre, that for the East of London, for which we must probably await some munificent donation, might in time be the most important of all. In this part of London there should be a great institute, richly endowed, teaching especially in the faculties of science and applied science, which should give a university training to the picked men coming to it from the technical and secondary schools, and supply trained men, experts in their subjects, to serve as directors and masters in the factories and works which extend eastwards along the banks of the Thames. The presence of the largest hospital in London in these parts would probably lead to the establishment of a faculty of medicine in this branch of the university, which would, therefore, serve as a centre for the study of the scientific portions of the medical curriculum.

From the slight sketch just given of a possible University for London, it will be seen that its foundation depends on the possibility of obtaining funds. The teaching of science cannot be made to pay, unless it be degenerated to a series of monster cram classes. The more valuable the teaching of science is to the community as a whole, the less will it be self-supporting: and the deficit becomes greater as we desire to extend scientific training among the people by diminishing the fees charged to the students. In the provinces this fact is beginning to be dimly recognised, and the universities are growing, and are nourished by gifts prompted by local patriotism, or extorted by pertinacious representatives from the Government. In London, with its enormously greater needs, it seems vain to appeal to local patriotism. Our representatives are more interested in the conduct of the Irish members than in the education of their constituents. If the Metropolitan members had any other idea of a university than as an introduction to polite society, they could prevail on even a Conservative Government to give an adequate grant in aid to the Imperial University of London. If our men of business could realise the absolute necessity of higher education and research for the industrial development of the country, they would not grudge a small portion of their wealth for the foundation and maintenance of laboratories, professorships, and scholarships.

ERNEST H. STARLING.

SOME REAL LOVE LETTERS1

LOVE affairs, though doubtless of supreme interest to most of us at one period of our lives, are often-perhaps generally—regarded after that period rather as 'curiosities of natural history' than as coming home to the business or the bosoms of mature men and women. Nous avons passé par là, no doubt, but we have left that region very far behind our weary footsteps of to-day; and we, the foot-sore travellers, cannot verily believe ourselves the same persons as they who once danced lightly on that enchanted ground. Or else, though we may recognise ourselves as still the same-since ''tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus '-we say that that ground of our consciousness was indeed enchanted; it was a dream, an illusion of the sense, upon which our youthful spirit moved and danced; it had no foundation in the solid facts of the world.

Such, I believe, is with very many persons the retrospect of after life upon their brief season of 'love-making.' But if this be the case it is certainly remarkable that the subject is of such perennial and wide interest as is indicated, for instance, by the demand and supply of the literary market. The huge and everincreasing flood of novels poured out year by year is mostly-to the chagrin of some of us-concerned with this same limited and monotonous theme; but the theme palls not upon the public ear. And recent excitements and enthusiasms in devouring the history of love affairs as unfolded in love letters, genuine or fictitious, bear a like witness even more impressively. For in most successful narrative novels a greater variety of fare is presented to the reader than a love tale in epistolary form, by the nature of the case, can furnish. Plot, development of various characters, dialogue witty or pathetic, scenic or picturesque description-many if not all of these must by turns relieve the palate, lest it be jaded by the flavour of honey, albeit culled from the sweetest flower that life produces. It is, then, the more noteworthy that, in the absence of all these reliefs, such a stir, such a depth of interest in the public as to recall that which followed upon the appearance of Adam Bede forty years ago, should be created by the reading of mere love letters.

Lettres de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Revues sur les éditions originales. Paris, 1876.

Criticism and even censure (as we all know) have not been lacking as, for example, in the case of the Browning and Keats letters-upon the discretion, or the want of it, manifest in the publication of any love letters whatever. Is it right, is it seemly, is it profitable, say objectors, to lay these things bare before a careless world? before a coarse world? a perverse and malicious? a stupid and misinterpreting, apt to wrest things that should be for its wealth into occasions of falling? To all these questions from Doubting Castle such publication lies open.

But let us elect to leave Doubting Castle and come out into the open. Let us profess a strong faith that there is virtue that goes out from revelations of exceptional and tragic passion, which arrest and enchain the attention even of those who condemn them. It is not in the stimulation or the satisfaction of any ignoble or prurient curiosity that lies their spell; let any such hint be far from us, for the honour of human nature! No; the spell is in that they fulfil the demand made upon tragedy of old, that it should purify the emotions by pity and terror;' that they illuminate the heights and depths, the glories and the powers of that humanity which is with most of us so 'cribb'd, cabin'd, and confin'd' that it can scarce recognise itself as the offspring of God; that they exhibit the passion which can drag men lowest, or raise them highest, 'purely purged of all its dross,' and attaining, through sorrow, to immortal fame which ennobles alike the hero and them that revere him.

For the rest, the heroic race in real life (as all know who are careful to observe them) are simple and outspoken as little children; their 'dignity' is the last thing with which they are consciously concerned, for they by instinct act upon the maxim, Never stand upon your dignity, but let your dignity stand upon you! They take the whole world into their confidence, and rely upon the sympathy of their fellow-creatures; and their trust is not mocked-any more than that of a little child that holds up a hurt hand to a kind stranger's face to be kissed well again.' Have we not known? Have we not seen? What so knit the affection of this country to our great Queen, lately dead, as her direct appeal in her sorrow to the sympathy of her people, telling them, as she might tell her own children, all the burthen on her heart-great matters and small, all set forth in truth and daylight'? Or can any strictures on 'indiscretion,' 'want of reticence,' and the like impair the nobility and simplicity of Carlyle's penance coram populo, for all the shortcomings and offences with which he had to charge himself toward his lost wife? There the old man stands-in his last appearance before his country, as he willed to make it-sorrowing, like Johnson in Uttoxeter market-place, for little petty unkindnesses and slights never to be undone, never to be atoned for to the object of them; and to how many must the admonition come home!

Yes! when heroes speak let us, who are not heroes, listen and perpend; and let there be no cavilling that the speaking is as a man speaketh unto his friend.

But to revert to my particular subject at present. In this matter of love letters comparisons naturally occur to us. Many will doubtless recall to mind the hapless Vanessa, whose story has had so singular a fascination for so many generations. But very few of Vanessa's letters remain to us; and those of her strange, redoubtable tutor-quasi-lover are occupied mainly in tearing away the garb of passion and romance with which she, poor lady, would persist in arraying the relation between them. We can imagine with what fierce and morbid indignation he would have prohibited the constant flight towards him of perfervid billets d'adoration, such as succeed one another in the pages I am about to cite. A certain amount of dalliance he permits, to her and to himself; but the limits are sternly drawn, in bizarre contrast with some phrases used; and the history of that cruelly pathetic passion which killed her has to be inferred from external facts, from hints in his journal to her rival, from the ambiguous verses which give his own account of the early days of their liaison, and from the never-to-be-forgotten scene of their last parting, which (if authentic) she must herself have told to some friendly ear for who could carry such a memory in complete silence?

But there is another story of the same kind, which is of deeper significance than Vanessa's (who, indeed, seems to have been noteworthy only in the force of her passionate love, and in the fact that it was lavished upon Swift). That other is the story of the remarkable woman whose letters are the subject of the present paper. It is, no doubt, well known to many who are familiar with French literature of the eighteenth century; but it is so strange and impressive a piece of human life that I may be pardoned, I trust, if, at the risk of wearying some persons by the repetition of a thrice-told tale, I hope to interest others by setting it forth.

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is unquestionably one of the most brilliant and interesting figures in that brilliant and interesting society, aux bords de l'abime, which was the last efflorescence of old France before the Revolution finally engulfed it. It was a society, doubtless, of very lax morality, mined by decay of all the old pieties and charities which had for centuries held Christendom together; yet these very letters, while bearing testimony to that, testify no less how hard it is to kill the divine seeds of righteousness and lovingkindness in men's hearts. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, in her own character, displays both sides of the picture. She had, in the sense in which Christian people understand the word, almost no personal morality' as a woman; yet she was generous, tenderhearted, veracious and high-minded; and in deploring her frailty

we must make the distinction, so earnestly insisted upon by Coleridge, that she was pure though not chaste.'

Julie Jeanne Eléonore de Lespinasse was born at Lyons in 1732. She had in reality no right to any noble nom de famille; the surname of Lespinasse, by which she was always known, appertaining to a branch of the family of the Comtes d'Albon, to which both her mother and her mother's husband belonged. M. and Madame d'Albon lived apart for many years, and the usual mystery attending the origin of illegitimate children encompasses the childhood and early youth of the poor girl, the offspring of an intrigue of her mother's, with whom is not known. Madame d'Albon, however, brought her up openly at her house in Lyons, giving, one must suppose, such plausible account of the child as she could (the baptismal register is of the daughter of respectable 'bourgeois de Lyon,' but the significant entry is, ' Le père n'a signé pour être absent'). She made no secret, moreover, of her tender love for her daughter; and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, for the first fifteen years of her life, received more affection, and a more careful education also, than many, perhaps most legitimate children of the noblesse de province of the day. But she lost her mother in 1747, and then her sorrows, which were to be lifelong, began.

She had to find a home, or rather a shelter, with her married half-sister, her mother's elder and legitimate daughter. This person and her husband, the Marquis de Vichy-Chamrond, together with the Comte d'Albon, her brother, appear to have been mainly concerned towards the poor illegitimate orphan, hardly more than a child, first to prevent her ever making réclamation d'état (the claim of legitimacy and consequent sharing in the family property), which, they feared, was possible, inasmuch as her mother and theirs was only separated, not divorced from her husband; next to get as much service out of her as they could, in return for the bare maintenance which they were practically obliged to give her. They could hardly have been blamed for mere resistance to a possible claim in law which every one knew was not justifiable in fact; but their methods were harsh and mean; and, what was more, their attitude ought in common fairness to have been modified in consideration of the generous simplicity of the poor young girl herself. For there is strong evidence that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (it is a characteristic trait), on inheriting, by express bequest under her mother's will, a sum of ready money so considerable as would have sufficed to secure her complete independence, surrendered it unconditionally to her half-brother, the Comte d'Albon, trusting that he (with whom she had been brought up) would prove to her a brother indeed.

The very reverse proved the case. Not only did her relations

2 Quoted by M. Eugène Asse in his Notice Biographique et Littéraire sur Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, p. vi. Paris, 1876.