'Der Tod Abels.' There were at least five such editions, I learn, two of them in verse and yet all in prose, some bound in calf and beautifully tooled with gilt lyres, and adorned within by those exquisite copperplate engravings of the period that are so little thought of now; by one of the happy hazards so known to the Autolyci, I happed upon two of the editions reposing side by side on the same shilling shelf. So listen again; this is from Gessner's 'Idyllen,' a work of elephantine fancy, better known in its heyday than' Werther' or 'Manfred' was; I copy a page from the London edition of 1802, which was ornamented by Stothard, R.A. himself, the Grand Mogul and Gessner of book-illustration at the time; listen! all Europe rejoiced to consider this idyllic, a hundred and twenty years ago :—

THE WOODEN LEG.

A SWISS IDYL.

As once a young shepherd sat upon the mountain's brow, he perceived an old man slowly ascending its side. His tresses were silver-white; he walked feebly, and bent over his staff, for one of his legs were of wood. At length he reached the young shepherd and seated himself on the cliff beside him. The youth looked at him with astonishment, and gazed on his wooden leg as it lay stretched before him on the grass.

Child,' the old man said with a smile, ' perhaps thou thinkest that with such a leg as this I might as well have remained in the valley? Yet I ascend this mountain once a year.'

Only a fragment of an idyl, I know; but one judges the Parthenon from a fragment of a frieze. And I know of only one morsel of an idyl to compare with that; it is the first draft of a verse by Lewis Carroll, whom I once met.

'You are old, Father William,' the young man said,

The few locks that are left you are grey,

And yet you continually stand on your head,
Now tell me the reason, I pray?'

Bishop Warburton said of 'Or ere I go' in Lear' that it is not English; neither is 'One of his legs were of wood,' but that is the translator's error. In the original itself, however, all is stiltedness-the idyls are all wooden leg. Yet, John Bull, you bought the book by the myriad, and wept over it in your 'Man of Feeling' days; so did Sandy and Pat, Jean and Hans, Piero and Pedro. And there was no Lewis Carroll to satirise it then. In the dons' common-room at Christ Church the night I met Lewis Carroll the talk turned on public speaking and the use of written notes. One of the dons, an authority on medals-on Wedgwood medallions

also, for aught I know-cited Dickens; for Dickens, the most brilliant after-dinner speaker of his day, never used a written note. 'He used to construct a mental image, of a wheel, with the heads of his speech to form the spokes, and the illustrations for each to form the tyre. As he went on speaking you could see him with a raised finger knock each used portion of his mental wheel away, and when he had knocked away all the spokes

'He had spoken,' said Lewis Carroll, in the only words he uttered all the evening. Had Gessner been as taciturn as that he might have been wittier, for, if brevity be the soul of wit, silence is its mother. But Gessner was all words, spokes, stilts, and wooden legs; and he was the most popular author of his time, John-forerunner of M. Ohnet in France, and of your own Mr. and the Misses and; his 'Abel' book and his 'Idyllen ' appeared in German, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Czech. Yes, Czech also, though there was nothing Bohemian about him; he never dwelt in 'the beautiful city of Prague.' He was all that is respectable and proper; bourgeois, bookseller, and burgomaster, or whatever the Swiss equivalent for burgomaster may be. The fame of this accomplished and virtuous magistrate of Zurich spread to the remotest parts of Europe' his biographer boasted. 'The Empress of Russia, Catherine II.'— accomplished and virtuous woman-sent him a gold medal as a mark of her esteem. His style was easy, pure, and perspicuous, and his life was the same.' He married, and this is the biographer's portrait of his pluterperfect spouse :

Mademoiselle Heidegger was a young lady endowed with rare accomplishments of mind. A tall and graceful person, an intelligent eye, and smiling lips armed with the unerring shafts of satire, announced her superiority to every female circle in which she appeared, and kept the empty coxcomb at a distance. Her character contained a rare mixture of dignified pride and condescending sweetness, of youthful impatience and mature deliberation, of exasperating severity and indulgent tenderness, of masculine energy and female delicacy; which rendered it difficult to decide whether she most deserved to be loved or admired.'

་་་་་་་

Greatly daring, Gessner married that paragon; enjoyed the society of a 'respected father-in-law'; was, I doubt not, on excellent terms with his belle-mère; and lived as merry as an undertaker at Michaelmas, when the funeral season is about to begin. I suppose we ought to envy and esteem him, John, but I remember his 'Death of Abel' and the Sunday sufferings which his irrational itch for writing caused me when a boy; and him

one would rather scarify than praise. Besides, he is so typical of the popular duffer as author, don't you think? I have faithfully read him again, to be sure and just about him, and I trust that in Peter's archives it has been counted to my credit as a penance. Justly I can say of him what Macaulay said of Miss Seward's writings, Was ever such pedantry found in company with such ignorance!' But one must temper invective with good manners nowadays, and to deal faithfully with the popular duffers of literature one needs a forty-Macaulay power of withering a Robert Montgomery. His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture' Macaulay thundered, you remember. ('As dumb-bells do to music' was Coleridge's phrase.) 'There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writings which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations, have made, and will again make, good poetry.' In vain a Macaulay thundered; popular Montgomeries and Gessners still produce. They produce the gramophone records of the bookstall; while demi-semi-literati stand adoringly listening around. FitzGerald planned a book to be called 'Half-hours with the Worst Authors,' but he discovered that all the shelving at Mudie's could not contain the volumes he would need to compile.

'Paints too, they tell me,' Whistler said of the English Bouguereau, and Gessner painted, too; that is why on one of my medallions the Muse of the palette and mahl-stick haloes his effigy with the wreath of Zeuxis and Parrhasius; the worst of being a popular duffer with the pen is, I suppose, that it makes one think one can achieve success in anything. Herr Salomon Gessner even published instructions to real artists. 'A select collection of paintings in the possession of my respected father-in-law,' he informed the real painters of his time, ' awakened and renewed in me the passion for design, and towards my thirtieth year I attempted to obtain a proficiency in this delightful art. My natural inclination led me to landscapes.' Of course! Goethe visited him in 1775, and Goethe would appreciate his landscapes'; conventional and pseudoclassical prospects they would be, Poussin-and-water-small prim nymphs and wooden-legged shepherds in the low foreground, and over all the tinsel of a pinchbeck Golden Age. Yet, beshrew him, this amazingly successful Switzer gained the undiscriminating laurel as a painter too! But then, he was born on All Fools' Day, and that perhaps explains his luck. I fancy-indeed, I almost

hope that he was beshrewed, that the accomplished Mademoiselle Heidegger henpecked him properly; very likely she did, for in no sense was he an Apollo-I look at Stothard's portrait of him, and I wonder at the profile on the medallions. Stothard juvenated and beautified his subjects as a rule, but Stothard shows Gessner as negroid and sixty. Is this the Apollo-Apelles of Zurich, this Cal vinistic white Sambo in a peruke? Yet ineffable self-satisfaction beams in his grin, and Cupids garland the page.

When he died, in 1788, keen old Josiah Wedgwood saw what he thought a chance for a good stroke of business; he would mint a thousand medallions of the lamented Gessner, and from a sorrowing universal Europe scoop in four times as many francs and marks. Remembering that Sunday book again, I meanly rejoice to know that Josiah's hopes were disappointed, wholesale. Retail sale there was next to none-my pair of medallions are rare, almost unique, there is but one of the two in the British Museum. The thrifty Swiss would not buy, the sentimental French were blundering into Revolution, and so the Gessner medallions fell flat, as some and the Misses and day memorials of Mr. will do ; that is the revenge and justice of posterity on popular duffers who live long. Who remembers Gessner now, who reads his Miltonand-pumpwater, his Theocritus wooden-legged? Personne. Then why do I rake his books and memory out of dust and ashes? To console a multitudinous disgust I do it, John, the uncomprehending dismay and wrath of the righteous at present-day green bay tree flourishing, and the sight of Mr. —- and the Missesand posed high upon piles of many-editioned duffing books and attitudinising galore. Yes, the most successful of Swiss authors, never a real lion, is now as dead as Fido; and although he produced a thing he called 'Lied eines Schweizers,' he was the least Swiss and Alpine of authors who ever wrote on Switzerland or in Switzerland at all. There is no evidence that he ever really admired the great chain of peaks which lay in view from his windows. And pas d'argent, pas de Suisse-one would have to bribe a Switzer to read the great Gessner now. Piles of many-editioned duffing books bring notoriety and argent for a time, but crumble into oblivion very quickly. And if all his life the popular duffer knows that he is a duffer, a mere quack of literature, why-poor beggar, he!

Let us twitch our mantle blue; let us approach the Alps, real nature, a true idyl, and pathos unfeigned; let us hie to Soleure.

VOL. XXV.-NO. 147, N.S.

26

I sit writing this codicil at Besançon, the autumn crocus shimmering on my table. In the lush dank eastward meadows, on towards the Jura, the autumn crocus, colchicum alpinum, lifts itself multitudinously out of the grass; slim, slight, soon drooping, delicately lilac, the very flower for a melancholy poet, an Amiel; or rather, because it is toxicous, let us say for a Baudelaire. Gessner never sang the colchicum alpinum, except generically as one of Flora's gems'; Rousseau and Goethe were the only authors of that time who ever browsed near Nature, botanising. Now, for a delightful September holiday, to foot one's way through the Juras, climb into Switzerland by the gradual lift of upward-shelving plateaux, dip by brief escarpments down to the Lake of Bienne-' white transient sails and glittering blue expanse '-and so come dusty into Soleure, is a delightful September holiday indeed. I confess that I prefer the lower slopes of Helvetia-the foothills, so to speak; I am no mad mountaineer of a fellow. I sympathise with a certain John Bull who remarked of the High Alps that he 'preferred his Nature with the chill off'; that is why the Bavarian Tyrol is the more comfortable and endurable to me. Too mighty to bear seem the High Alps, even to-day, when every green wrinkle in them is animated or humanised by pastures, people, hotels, châlets, clearings, kine, and dairies. But what must those too august and super-Egyptian pyramids have meant to nervous travellers two centuries ago? Terror; almost the horror that Livy and Vergil felt at sight of them; they would appear at the very best an ill-engineered and badly organised Gemmi; with something inhumanely repugnant about them, that railways and funiculars and Palais-H tels hardly screen completely from ourselves. Elia said of Cambridgeshire that you cannot proceed a mile without starting a steeple,' and 'Bless the little churches, how pretty they are!' said Mary Elia on the coach-top by his side. Bless the little churches!' I too incline to say when in Switzerland; for even the tawdriest spire, tower, dome, or wayside calvary speaks of something mortal, of a human Saviour, amidst the awe and the danger and cold inhumane peaks which surround. That awe and that cold super-humanity made many an Eighteenthcentury wanderer pause at Berne, and hark back to the rich meadow and orchard region around Soleure ; as did, indeed, a certain young English Milord in the year 1786, carrying Franz Nikolaus König off with him in his berline.

You have never heard of Franz Nikolaus König before, I'll warrant, John; though König was a better artist than Gessner, as I have